Three Houses (5 page)

At the top of the long rise a clear expanse of country was open before us. Roedean School was still in its cradle in Sussex Square and there was nothing to break the long lovely lines of the downs. Brighton lay behind us, the gasometers were passed, and the only signs of man’s handiwork that we could see ahead were the black windmill and, between us
and the sea, the tall chimney that was a ventilation shaft for Brighton’s main sewer, a gaunt ugly piece of utilitarianism, very different from the shaft at the other side of Rottingdean which was disguised as an enchanting little cottage, white with green shutters. Only on some days did a wind blowing from its direction across the downs betray what the house was meant to hide. All the rest of the way the old road ran green and deserted between us and the cliffs. In places it was quite broken away, but much of it was untouched, with a little strip of grass still left between the further bank and the sea. Only if you went near the edge you could see ominous cracks, and the beach below was strewn with huge fragments of chalk that had crashed down in the winter when alternate frost and thaw were doing their destructive work. Here and there a few houses stood roofless and derelict, abandoned as the cliff crumbled and fell, used as a resting-place by tramps. Presently a long valley opened on our left and we stopped to set down a passenger for Ovingdean which lay half a mile or so away among trees at the end of a white road. Here my mother would take
advantage of this stop to turn us out and make us walk up the last hill. This time we felt less resentful, for Nanny was safely inside the bus with our baby sister and with her eye removed we could scramble up the steep bank of the chalk cutting, clutching at scabious and yellow horned poppy as we climbed, and walk along the top of the ridge looking down on to the bus. Now we came to Greenways, the only house facing the old Dover Road that was still inhabited. Behind it were pigsties and we could hang over the wall watching and smelling those agreeable animals till the bus caught us up.

Then the drag was put on, leaving those shiny smooth marks on the surface of the road, and we skidded down hill into the village while Charlie the conductor blew his long coaching horn. Charlie was one of the village wits, a tremendous favourite with all the maids. When he stood at the back of the bus, swaying to its motion as it turned down to the right to the White Horse, the archangel Gabriel would have compared poorly with him in our eyes. The White Horse was the official terminus of the omnibus, but after delivering some parcels
it would go round the village putting passengers down at their doors. The White Horse was a real seaside inn then, facing the sea across a strip of grass known, from the name of its proprietor, as ‘Welfare’s Green’. The older inhabitants of the village remembered when the Dover Coach Road ran between Welfare’s Green and the sea, but in our time it had all crumbled away and only a fragment of the inner bank was left, which would fall in the next frosts. West of the green was a large ugly house, vaguely Gothic in style, what my grandfather used to call ‘battlemented, castellated, Blue-beard Bosh’. Its garden wall was perilously on the edge of the cliffs and summer after summer we would see how more of the garden had slipped into the sea till at last the house itself began to fall piecemeal and its remains were carted away. In the far corner of the green was a little summer-house of trellis, ‘erected’, in the words of Dickens, ‘by humane men for the accommodation of spiders’, where, in the season, a photographer took up his daily abode. His whole stock in trade was half a dozen of those delightful triumphs of the scene-painter’s art which represent
a lady and gentleman in bathing dress, or riding like Templars two at once on a donkey, with holes to put your face through. We would have given a week’s pocket money to be immortalised in one of these enviable positions, but Nanny would never hear of it; and what made it the more unfair was that we had seen photographs of Nanny and our grandmother’s maids taken in these very backgrounds. Curious dark pictures they were, rather like daguerreotypes and taken, if I remember rightly, on tin, while for sixpence extra you could get a richly chased gold frame.

All these delights we had to look at with envious eyes while the bus waited outside the White Horse and then Charlie blew his horn and we turned the corner, leaving the sea behind us, and drove up the village street. One needed eyes on both sides of one’s head to see all the friendly shops and houses and faces that we passed. First there was the convent, ‘Star of the Sea’, peopled by nuns who had been driven from France. They did beautiful needlework and took boarders and my grandmother and I were once invited to a display by their pupils, during which
three young ladies in white muslin sat side by side at one upright piano and played an arrangement of the
Estudiantina
waltz for six hands, a performance which did more credit to their power of controlling their elbows than it did to the musical qualifications of the kind-faced nuns who taught them. Then, crossing the Newhaven Road (an easier matter when there were hardly any motors to swoop down and kill one at the cross roads), we came to Stenning the baker whose buns perfumed the air, Mrs Mockford at the little fruit and chocolate shop which always smelt of ripe pears, Mr and Mrs Champion in the Post Office where you also bought spades and buckets, Read’s Stores with the red-headed assistant. A glimpse up the hill on to the downs and we had reached the turning that went up past the forge to the Vicarage and then came the butcher’s house and shop standing a little back from the road where Mr Hilder home-killed South Down mutton twice a week – meat of such juicy close-grained excellence that my brother was moved to describe the Sunday joint with tears in his eyes as ‘sainted mutton’. Then the long flint wall of The Dene garden with its
overshadowing elms, and on our left the field with the newly erected Drill Hall which Rudyard Kipling had imperially given to the village, beyond it the entrance to the racing stables, and finally North End House and our grandmother’s face at the window.

When I woke up in the morning at North End House the first thing I saw was an angel, pulling away the curtain of darkness to let the daylight in. It was painted on the whitewashed wall at the foot of my bed in our little attic night-nursery by my adoring grandfather. How it survived the stormy life of a night-nursery where soap and sponges are freely thrown about and to scribble in pencil on the wall is the obvious duty of any spirited child, I can’t imagine, but survive it did for some twenty-five years. After my grandmother’s death the house was bought by another artist, William Nicholson, who removed the angel piecemeal from the wall and gave
the fragments to Frances Horner. Her father, William Graham, had been one of my grandfather’s earliest patrons, and much of Burne-Jones’s best work went straight to him from the studio. Pictures, drawings, illuminated books, designs for embroidery, a piano whose case he designed and covered inside and out with lovely forms and flowers, these were among the many fruits of his mind and heart which Frances Horner possesses. She had the angel mended and framed and it now looks down on her in her home in Somerset where the artist would like it to be.

To us the two houses were known by the colour of their stair carpets as ‘the blue staircase’ and ‘the brown staircase’. The night-nursery was at the top of the brown staircase which was carpeted with the strongest and most prickly coconut matting, so painful to bare feet that we always preferred to make the longer descent via the day-nursery and the blue staircase. The landing at the top of the stairs between the two nurseries was deeply romantic to us because there was a fixed ladder that led up to a trap-door. Mounting the ladder, one pushed the trap-door open with one’s head and emerged into a
loft full of useless lumber, cobwebs, and dust, but none the less fascinating to us, especially as Nanny had included it in her list of forbidden places. Across the landing was our day-nursery, also an attic room with a sloping wall on the outer side. On this sloping wall my grandfather had painted a picture for my pleasure, a water-mill with its large wheel, reflected in a smooth mill pond. Like all the backgrounds of his pictures it was of no real place and the evening light was the light of Avalon. There was no story about it, but a child could invent an infinite number of stories for itself and wonder what happened round the furthest corner of the picture and what monster might be lurking in the dark archway under the mill. Opposite the mill was another painting. All the walls in North End House were whitewashed and as amateur fresco painters ourselves, though in the humbler medium of the nursery chalks or a pencil, we could understand what fun it was for my grandfather to be allowed to paint on a wall unchecked. On this wall he had painted a peacock, perched on a tree, with its long tail hanging down. 

Beyond the peacock was a cupboard sunk in the narrow recess between the fireplace and the wall. On the upper shelves the nursery crockery was kept and the bottom shelf was full of our larger toys, or, when emptied of toys, was a good, if uncomfortable, hiding-place for a child who didn’t mind sitting like a whiting with its feet in its mouth. On the other side of the fireplace was another small recess. This was the fatal corner into which I was put when I had offended against any of Nanny’s rules. It was a good corner where a rebellious child could be fenced in with a chair and left to repentance. One afternoon my grandfather came up to visit us in the nursery after tea and found me, face to the wall, expiating some sin. The sight so rent him that the very next day he took his paint box into my corner and painted a cat, a kitten playing with its mother’s tail, and a flight of birds, so that I might never be unhappy or without company in my corner again. I don’t know what Nanny thought of it.

In the summer we were not much in the nursery, but in winter it was a very pleasant place with a
bright fire shining on the white walls. It was all the snugger for its smallness and the sloping walls which shut us in and shut the night out. It had a little bow window, rather high up, into which one could climb, and it was romantic to sit there behind the blue curtains looking out at the cold night, knowing that at any moment one could slip down on to the floor again and be in the warmth and light. Nursery bath time was delicious. The little house never had a bath-room, so we used to have our bath in front of the nursery fire, a joy that the child in the modern house has to miss. The big tin bath was brought in from the brown staircase-landing and Nanny hung towels on the fender to warm while she went downstairs to fetch a huge can of hot water from the pantry boiler. Then one of us was dispatched to the night-nursery to get the big white earthenware jug of cold water from the washing-stand and Nanny mingled the two. It was so comfortable to sit in the high-backed bath, one’s feet dangling out in front, with the hot water surging up round one, and then to get out on the flannel rug in front of the blazing fire and be wrapped in a delightfully scorching
towel. After being thrust into our night-gowns, red felt slippers, and red flannel dressing-gowns we were sat up at the nursery table to partake of a light refection of milk and biscuits, usually Marie or Petit Beurre. Then a scurry across the cold landing and a plunge into bed.

Down the next flight of the brown staircase and underneath our night-nursery was the bedroom which always belonged to our father and mother when they were at Rottingdean. The window looked south, straight into the branches of an ilex and was framed with jasmine from which earwigs and other people with far too many legs came on exploring expeditions into the house. It was such a little room that it held no more than two wooden bedsteads painted red, two rush-bottomed chairs, and an oak washing-stand, but it had one great advantage from our point of view. If you climbed on to the head of one of the beds you could, if you dared, drop down into a cupboard whose only opening was some three or four feet from the ground while every one else hunted you all over the house. But it wasn’t often that one felt brave enough to do this, for it
was just on the cards that one might be unable to climb out again and then one’s shrieks would be unheard and one would probably perish miserably and be found many years later like the lady in ‘The Mistletoe Bough’ whose fate was familiar to us from the Christmas mummers – of whom there will be more to say later. So on the whole we preferred to go down the three steps which led to the dressing-room, known always as The Bower, a low-roofed room which had two windows, both excellent for playing in. The one facing south was wide and arched and had a high broad window-sill in which two or three children could sit. Flies and bees died very freely in this window in summer and we used to collect their corpses and throw them into the garden while we waited in the hope of seeing the race-horses next door go out in prancing procession for their daily exercise. As the ivy and the white fig-tree on the wall opposite grew and spread the horses were hidden from us, but in earlier years we could see their hooded heads, their eyes looking very alarming and showing a great deal of white through the round holes, reminding us of terrifying pictures
we had seen of Brothers of Pity. The other window might really have belonged to a princess’s bower in a Grimm fairy tale. It was built out over the garden and had many small panes and was brushed by the branches of a pear-tree. By opening one of the little panes one could pull a russet pear off the tree in defiance of the witch who lurked below, and birds sat on the top boughs to look impertinently in at one and ruffle their spotted breasts or preen their dark feathers with a golden beak. Any one of them might have been the enchanted guardian of magic fruit and if a blackbird had suddenly talked to one with a human voice it would hardly have been surprising.

Curtains and chintzes in The Bower were all of Morris stuffs, a bright pattern of yellow birds and red roses. The low sofa and the oak table were designed by one or other pre-Raphaelite friend of the house, or made to my grandfather’s orders by the village carpenter. As I look back on the furniture of my grandparents’ two houses I marvel chiefly at the entire lack of comfort which the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood succeeded in creating for itself. It was not, I think, so much that they actively despised
comfort, as that the word conveyed absolutely nothing to them whatever. I can truthfully say that neither at North End Road nor at North End House was there a single chair that invited to repose, and the only piece of comfortable furniture that my grandparents ever possessed was their drawing-room sofa in London, a perfectly ordinary large sofa with good springs, only disguised by Morris chintzes. The sofas at Rottingdean were simply long low tables with a little balustrade round two, or sometimes three sides, made of plain oak or some inferior wood painted white. There was a slight concession to human frailty in the addition of rigidly hard squabs covered with chintz or blue linen and when to these my grandmother had added a small bolster apparently made of concrete and two or three thin unyielding cushions, she almost blamed herself for wallowing in undeserved luxury. The best sofa in the house was a massive wooden affair painted shiny black. It was too short to lie on and you could only sit on it in an upright position, as if you tried to lean you hit your head against the high back. It was upholstered in yellow-brown
velvet of such rich and excellent quality that it stuck to one’s clothes, making it impossible to move about, and the unyielding cushions and rigid bolsters took up more room than the unlucky users. Each bedroom was provided with an oak washing-stand of massive proportions and a towel-horse conceived on aesthetic lines but sadly wanting in stability and far too apt to fall heavily forward on to a small child, smothering it in bath towels. As for pre-Raphaelite beds, it can only have been the physical vigour and perfect health of their original designers that made them believe their work was fit to sleep in. It is true that the spring mattress was then in an embryonic stage and there were no spiral springs to prevent a bed from taking the shape of a drinking-trough after a few weeks’ use, but even this does not excuse the use of wooden slats running lengthways as an aid to refreshing slumber. Luckily children never know when they are uncomfortable and the pre-Raphaelites had in many essentials the childlike mind.

Opposite our parents’ room was Uncle Phil’s room. It was one of the passage rooms between
the two houses. You entered it from the brown staircase and found a window on your right and another door immediately opposite, a trap to the unwary as it opened directly on to three steep steps leading down to the studio in the other part of the house. The long window looking on to the grassy courtyard where the ilex grew was another of the minor discomforts of pre-Raphaelite architecture. The not unpleasing original sash window had been removed and a number of what were apparently casement windows substituted, but instead of opening outwards or inwards they moved sideways in grooves and invariably stuck. You know how a badly made drawer will open in jerks, first at one side and then at the other till it sticks in a crooked position and wall neither open nor shut. So it was with these windows, except that the crooked opening was from top to bottom. On a sweltering August day one had to wrestle with a window that would not open more than three inches at the bottom, or two at the top, or at Christmas when one wanted to keep out the south-west gale, the window would refuse to budge and a piercing shaft of cold and wet
would devastate the room as one madly pushed the unyielding frame.

Uncle Phil, my grandparents’ only son, my mother’s elder brother, had many gifts and great depths of affection, but he was a very unhappy man. He could have been a distinguished painter and would have been one under a luckier star, but two things told fatally against him. He never needed to work, and he was cursed with a sense of diffidence and a feeling that whatever he did would be contrasted unfavourably with his father’s work. If he had had to depend on himself and had worked in his own way, I do not believe that what he feared would have happened. He had a genuine gift for landscapes and had made a style of portrait painting which was peculiarly his own, using canvases about 30 inches by 20 and painting his sitter in three-quarter length. The portrait of his father which is now in the National Portrait Gallery is the best possible example of his gift for these little likenesses. My grandfather is standing in his white studio coat working at a large canvas with the look of patient concentration that came
upon him when he was creating. The likeness is perfect and the whole atmosphere of the painter is reproduced with loving mastery. If Uncle Phil had never done more than this one portrait he could claim his place among those who have truly loved and followed art. His kindness of heart was unbounded and yet he could wound most cruelly and deliberately. There was on his mother’s side, coming from her mother’s family, a strain of deep melancholy and self-distrust which in some of the family was almost a disease. Uncle Phil must have suffered under this all his life and could not control it enough to keep himself from making others suffer with him. He was quick to suspect an imagined slight or insult and would say or write something which would bring the unsuspecting offender to bewildered tears. Then he would fall into depths of repentance and self-accusation that shattered every one concerned. With it all his kindness was infinite and his generosity without stint. His was one of those unhappy dispositions that can rarely be at their best with their own family, and maddening self-consciousness made him say an unkind thing
through sheer nervousness, or hold back, through a misplaced pride, from saying the kind word that would have made all the difference.

When the gloomy mood was not upon him he was the most witty and amusing companion possible and reduced one to the unquenchable and painful laughter that makes the whole body ache so that one longs for death to relieve one’s agony. He was a creature of impulse and if he wanted to be kind it had to be at his own time and in his own way and sometimes it was difficult to express an adequate gratitude for something one hadn’t really wanted. Then his sensitive nature would feel slighted and out would come some cruel stinging word that annihilated one. But his friends – and they were very many and of all classes – cared very deeply for him and their affection outlasted all the trials that his unhappy disposition put upon it. That is why, over his ashes, the words are written
Quoniam dilexit multum.