Three Houses (6 page)

It may be imagined after this description that to the nursery, as to his friends, Uncle Phil was an incalculable quantity. His coming was always a
fearful joy as it might mean a jaunt to Brighton with pennies to put into every machine on the pier and lunch at the Metropole, or we might find ourselves for some unknown reason in dire disgrace and be quickly shepherded from the room by a parent or grandparent anxious to avoid a scene. Not the least offence was to use Uncle Phil’s bedroom as a short cut from one house to the other. Not that he minded being discovered in bed or shaving, for these were treats to which we might be invited when our luck was in, but the mere fact of our dashing through his bedroom was an implicit slight on him, showing that his existence had for the moment been forgotten by the nursery contingent.

So leaving Uncle Phil’s room undisturbed we will go down the last flight of the brown staircase, the flight over which my brother once leant too far and fell over on to his head with no evil results. At the bottom of the stairs was a choice of interests. We could stop and bang the barometer which hung by the dining-room door on the left, hoping somehow to influence the weather for the good. Or we could go straight out by what had been the front door of
the brown-staircase house into the garden. Or we could visit the dining-room and possibly be invited to have a peach or fig. Or we might go down the lowest and uncarpeted flight of stairs to the cellar where the furnace for the hot-water pipes lived and Ernest dealt with the knives and boots. Or, and this was our choice at the moment, we could visit the pretty parlourmaid Annie at her work. Her pantry was to the right, below our parents’ bedroom and, according to the peculiar arrangement of the house, was also the only means of getting to the smoking-room unless one went out into the garden by the brown staircase door, or the blue staircase door, or the back door of the hall passage and round by the hole where the garden roller and the hose were kept and in again by the garden door. So that if the servants were having tea in the pantry and it happened to be wet, the master of the house and his friends had to put on raincoats and go round in procession.

I have so many recollections of frenzied dashes through the rain from one door to another. If, for instance, one was in the Bower and urgently required a toy which had been left in the drawing-room, there
were the following routes to be considered. You might go up the brown staircase, through the nursery, and down the blue staircase, but if Nanny happened to be bathing our baby sister at the time it was almost impossible to get past without an accusation of making a draught by leaving one door open and being called back in an awful voice which could not be disobeyed because you shut the other door so loudly, not to speak of the terrible prospect of being caught by Nanny and kept there for good on some pretext or another. It was better to avoid the nursery at bath time. Then there was the quickest route through Uncle Phil’s bedroom, down the steps into the studio, out at the other door, and so down the blue staircase. But the dangers of using Uncle Phil’s room as a passage have already been pointed out and if one intruded upon the studio uninvited, though my grandfather was always glad to see me, Nanny was sure to get to know of it somehow and there would be a scolding in store. A third route was to go down the brown staircase, turn to the left through the dining-room, down the steps into the hall, up the steps again into the blue-staircase house and so to the drawing-room.
But if the grown-ups happened to be having a meal they had a curious prejudice against a child banging in at the door, careering through the room and hurling itself down the steps, leaving the heavy curtain that hung over the arched doorway half drawn. So that on the whole the simplest plan was to make a dash across the garden from door to door, leaving a print of wet muddy feet in the hall of the blue house and then return by the same way, leaving this time wet muddy footprints in the hall of the brown house.

Luckily for us the pantry – provided that Nanny was safely in the nursery – was always glad to see us. It possessed two objects of rare interest, namely a filter and a stuffed animal in a case. The filter was merely a conventional sign, a sacrifice as it were to some forgotten god of Victorian hygiene and was certainly never used by us. Mysterious and interesting though it was, no one who rushed in from the garden to get a drink of water was going to waste precious minutes in holding a glass under the filter’s slow drip. Our more direct method was to seize a tumbler with cut glass stars on it from the shelf, hold it under the tap of the pantry sink,
turn the tap violently so that water splashed up into the air and over one’s frock, gulp the water and rush out again. But all the same the filter, both at Rottingdean and in London, gave, one felt, immense prestige and respectability to the house. As for the stuffed animal I can’t even remember what it was – a gull I vaguely think – but in any case the most incongruous ornament possible in a house none of whose members knew anything about bird or beast life, or had ever handled rod or gun.

After exhausting the charms of the pantry we could lift the latch of the narrow door in the opposite wall and fall down two steps into the smoking-room. It was the old kitchen of the brown-staircase house and was always known as the Mermaid. My grandfather had hung over the open fire-place a painted bas-relief of a mermaid with flying hair playing with fishes in a billowy sea, so the room was called by her name. The floor was brick and so was the fire-place which was re-coloured with ruddle – the red whitewash, if one may so describe it, common in some of the southern counties – whenever it got dirty with smoke. Most of the fire-places in both houses were
ruddled on occasion, and it was great fun to watch the housemaid of the moment with a little pail of the luscious compound painting it on to the bricks, an occupation in which we should have loved, but were never allowed, to participate. The fire-place in the Mermaid was not ruddled very often, for only wood was burnt there and the room was always permeated by the stinging delicious smell of wood-smoke. Wherever I smell wood-smoke I am in the Mermaid again for a moment, watching my grandfather playing draughts on the old oak table whose deep polish reflects the candles; for in those days my grandparents had only lamps and candles at Rottingdean, lamps in the drawing-room and candles everywhere else. The Mermaid was furnished like the kitchen of some delightful Dickensish inn, with a big oak settle, a solid oak table, a few massive and extremely uncomfortable oak chairs, a large oak dresser, all of them dark with age and shining with the polish of years. The dresser was hung with gay German earthenware sent from the Fair at Mannheim by a sister of Lady Lewis, my grandparents’ devoted friend. At that time it had been almost impossible to get good common pottery
in England and these enchanting pots and jugs of beautiful shape and colour could be got for a few pence in any market-place in Germany. The windows and half-glazed door were curtained with bright red Turkey twill through which the fire and candlelight shone at night with the authentic Dickens touch.

Here my grandfather would come with his men friends to smoke and play draughts; games that seemed to go on for hours and hours, my grandfather sitting with intent face, pondering on a move for the length of time that a cigar would take to accumulate a long grey ash. The candlelight shone on the dresser and on the pewter jugs on the great oak cupboard behind the settle and glimmered back from the table; and a child, sitting on the bench which ran along the wall under the low windows, waited for the ash to be flicked away into the fire when a decision had been reached, or to fall unheeded if the game still needed consideration. I never saw cards played in my grandparents’ house, but draughts and backgammon and dominoes were often played, mostly between tea and dinner. My grandfather rarely sought any further relaxation than a change of work. When the light
was no longer good enough to work in oils he would take up a pencil, or if he had finished with his pencil he would draw in coloured chalks or water-colour. His hand and mind were never idle and these games were a rest to him in that they were a different form of absorption.

In summer the garden door of the Mermaid stood open and the draught players looked across the orchard and sweetbriar of the garden to the lovely line of the downs high above. To the left of the fire-place there was a recess with a little window of stained glass, a figure of a lute-player surrounded by bull’s eyes. This was an addition not approved by the nursery, because it replaced a casement window by which one could climb in and out, a far more adventurous way than using the ever-open door. In wet weather the window was also a short cut to the cloisters. Short cut is, of course, not a good description, but to us any way that was not the ordinary and easy way of getting from one place to another was known as a short cut, so I keep the name. And coming to the cloisters, we found ourselves at the starting-point for all the adventures of the garden. 

Gothic House next door was a boarding-house and North End House had all the garden of both houses. A high flint wall ran right across the back of Gothic House and its little paved brick courtyard, dividing it from our garden, and against this wall was a high penthouse roof of red tiles, known as the Cloisters, supported on plain wooden pillars set in a low brick wall. The space below the roof had a wooden floor, making a pleasantly echoing place for our wet-weather playground in summer. It contained a couple of large beehive chairs made of creaking basket-work like the ‘sulkies’ in the garden at Earlham. Grown-ups could sit facing each other in them and talk, or could turn
them back to back and read or meditate, undisturbed by the sight of each other. Children could turn them over on to their backs and use them as cradles, or pirate ships, or Spanish galleons, or an Argo, or the Ark. Or they could pull one over on to its face and crouch beneath it in hiding from the world in general and Nanny in particular. Here also were deck chairs and a few rush-bottomed chairs, stained with paint, discarded from the studio, and in one corner a heap of outdoor toys; spades and buckets for the beach, a spotted wooden horse on wheels and the little wooden go-cart which our parents brought from Germany, christened by Jeanne, the French maid, ‘
le
petit chariot
’. It was the kind of low four-wheeled cart that dogs draw in some parts of the Continent, or children drag about in Ludwig Richter’s pictures, and we used it to drag our baby sister and each other about the garden. There were moments when the axles bent or a wheel came off and then we had the pleasure of dragging it round by the village pond to the blacksmith and having real repairs done while we waited. The forge was at the far end of the pond, opposite the Plough Inn, just where the road called
Whiteway went up to East Hill. Rottingdean was rich in public-houses; five to a village of about a thousand inhabitants. The White Horse and Royal Oak were houses of some size and pretension, the Plough Inn was more frequented by farmers’ men and labourers who brought horses in to be shod, or wagons to have new metal tyres to their wheels, and there were still the Black Horse and the Queen Victoria – hardly more than ale houses – to supply the needs of the public.

At the end of the cloisters nearest the house there grew a bay-tree affording easy access to the tiled roof on which we walked like cats with bare feet. This spot was technically forbidden for various reasons. Nanny forbade it on general grounds of disapproval of anything we wanted to do. My mother had visions of our mangled forms falling six feet on to the ground on our side, or ten feet into the boarding-house yard on the other. My grandmother very properly objected to a habit of using the gutter which ran along the lower edge of the cloister roof as a final foothold, for this gutter was of a peculiarly sacred nature, supplying as it did the rain water for the huge butt
that stood beside the bay-tree. But in the summer holidays these restrictions were partially removed because a barefoot child could run along the roof to where the big fig-tree hung over at the farther end and put the ripening figs into green muslin bags to protect them from birds and wasps. How the faint smell of the fig-tree comes back to me and the rough sticky feeling of the leaves as I thrust among the crooked branches, exploring for half-ripe figs to be jacketed, or picking those that were burstingly ripe and ready for the dining-room.

There were little figs that never reached normal size though they were perfectly ripe, and they were the property of the first child who found them. How superior are our long Sussex figs to the short round foreign variety. My grandparents had three trees, two purple and one white, and while their season lasted we fed on honey-dew every day. When we were given figs in the dining-room we had to eat them in a special, and I think elegant, way. The fig was held by the stalk in the left hand and cut lengthwise with a silver knife and then lengthwise again, so that it opened like a flower with four perfect petals spreading outwards. It
was then an easy matter to scoop out the ambrosial inside with a spoon or the human tooth.

As one descended from the cloister roof one was apt, if in too much of a hurry, to land with one foot in the snail-pot, a large tin bowl with a wooden handle which lived permanently under the rain-water butt with a handful of salt in it for the disposal of snails. Never have I known a garden so infested with snails. Enormous grandfathers congregated together in twos and threes under the roof of the cloisters and in every angle of the wooden pergola on the other side of the lawn. Middle-sized parents lived under every leaf and on the stalks of every flower, while there was a perfect congested district of tiny, brittle-shelled descendants in every iris clump round the pear-tree outside the Bower window. It was one of our jobs, and seldom was a useful duty undertaken with so little reluctance, to collect these pests of society whenever we saw them and drop them into the snail-pot to die. Some children were paid a penny a hundred, but I don’t think the idea of payment ever entered our heads and we hunted them down with the hunter’s stern joy in the chase. What happened to the nauseous mixture I don’t know.
Probably Ernest, the garden boy, dealt with the corpses and buried them in the rubbish heap, but every day a fresh brew of salt and water was waiting by the rain butt for us to fill.

The whole garden cannot have been much larger than a tennis-court with plenty of room round it, but it had been so ingeniously cut up and laid out that to us it seemed infinite space. Beyond the snail-haunted pergola was a little plot of ground with trellis round it where we were each supposed to have a garden, but beyond bringing up stones from the beach to mark the confines of our separate plots, and sowing one penny packet of mustard and cress and one of nasturtiums, I cannot remember that we ever paid any attention to horticulture. We were far more interested in the brick incinerator where my grandmother superintended the garden boy burning the rubbish. She was something of a gardener herself on a small scale and had a touching faith in human nature which made her take boy after boy from the village to be ‘trained’. As the training consisted of working for a couple of hours after school under her very mild supervision, with intervals for talk about books and life in general, it was hardly
surprising that the garden suffered. We were used to hearing, year after year, accounts of the laziness and incompetence of this or that boy who was to have been a paragon, but it never seemed to occur to her that they imposed upon her at all, or took advantage of her readiness to read bits of Ruskin aloud to them when they ought to be working. The only time when her faith was a little shaken was the year when the very laziest and most incompetent boy of all, under whose unloving care the garden had become a wilderness, won the first prize at the local flower show for his own garden; though even then she was able to persuade herself that without her training the prize would not have been won.

My grandmother had a great deal of natural self-possession and dignity and a power of accepting every one – no matter what their social position – entirely for what they were in themselves. She could talk to working people in their cottages with as much ease as she received royal princesses who came to look at pictures. I must say that I think the first of these tasks by far the most difficult and I was always paralysed with shyness if my grandmother took me with her on
one of her cottage visits. There was no condescension in her visits and no familiarity, though the child who accompanied her was ready to cry with confusion as she sat with her large blue eyes fixed on some gnarled unlettered old woman, telling her tidings of comfort from
Fors Clavigera
. Only her entire absence of self-consciousness made these visits possible and there were other and – to us – even more shameful occasions when she would have a worthy carpenter or wheelwright to the house once a week to discuss the socialism in which she so thoroughly and theoretically believed. All the snobbishness latent in children came to the fore in us as we watched the honoured but unhappy workman sitting stiffly on the edge of his chair in his horrible best clothes while my grandmother’s lovely earnest voice preached William Morris to him. Then there were times when she believed that a hideous but favoured maid was worth educating. In the evening there would be an embarrassing ritual and the maid would sit in the drawing-room, though at a respectful distance, and read aloud to my grandmother from such books as she thought suitable to the domestic intellect on
The Distribution of Wealth
and the
Early Italian 
Painters
. How we hated it all and how uncomfortable it was for every one concerned except the kind giver of these mental feasts. There can rarely have been a woman who was so absolutely unconscious of self, though it was carried to such a pitch that even her sense of humour fell into abeyance. Now and then her humour did get the better of her, as when she described a visit she had paid to some poor family who had an invalid child ‘surrounded with medals for abstaining from vices of which he was incapable’.

In spite of her wide affections and deep understanding she was curiously removed from real life and I think she honestly believed that
The Seven
Lamps of Architecture
on every working-man’s table would go far to ameliorate the world. She was absolutely fearless, morally and physically. During the South African War her sympathies were with the Boers, and though she was at that time a widow, living alone, she never hesitated to bear witness, without a single sympathiser. When peace was declared she hung out of her window a large blue cloth on which she had been stitching the words: ‘We have killed and also taken possession’. For some time there was
considerable personal danger to her from a populace in Mafeking mood, till her nephew, Rudyard Kipling, coming over from The Elms, pacified the people and sent them away. Single-minded people can be a little alarming to live with and we children had a nervous feeling that we never knew where our grandmother might break out next.

To us it was far more amusing to leave our own little gardens untended and go on through the tiny orchard which contained at least ten apple-trees (one rumoured to be a real Ribstone pippin), to the summer house, a two-storey building in the angle formed by two high flint walls, facing south and east. The lower floor was concreted and used for tools, and the top floor was reached by an outside staircase, or, more accurately, a broad ladder. The little room above was a triumph of pre-Raphaelite discomfort. Bitterly cold in winter and stiflingly hot in summer, none of its windows would open or shut properly, being, like the windows in Uncle Phil’s room, arranged to slide, or more commonly stick, in grooves. It contained a small wooden table and two or three wooden chairs which were suited to no known human body. They had been designed by my
grandfather for the seats of knights at the Round Table in the tapestry which William Morris made from his cartoons and the chairs had actually been translated into wood by a skilful carpentering friend so that my grandfather could draw them from life. Some had round backs and some were square and there was little to choose between them for sheer discomfort. The seats were very high off the ground with no depth from back to front, so that any knight who used them would have sat like a child with his feet dangling in the air, if indeed he managed to keep himself balanced on the exiguous seat at all. The arms of the chairs were too close together to allow any one to use a knife and fork with any freedom and too high to get one’s arms clear of them, and altogether a more unsuitable set of dining-room chairs for a royal dining-room can hardly be imagined. If that is how Arthur’s court was furnished it is quite enough to explain the eagerness of the knights to leave their seats and follow the quest of the Holy Grail and one can only conclude that the Siege Perilous was even more uncomfortable and ill-adapted to the human frame than the seats of the other knights.

The apples in the tiny orchard were warm in the
afternoon sun when we came down from the summer house. We were only allowed to eat windfalls, but much can be done to help Nature at her work, and to bump violently into a tree was not considered unfair. One had to be careful of the windfall though, for sometimes a wasp had eaten his way in at a bruised place and as one lifted the apple from the grass there was a loud angry noise from the feaster disturbed, and a black and yellow fury came out of the apple, swift to visit his vengeance on bare arm or leg or undefended neck. The nectarines and peaches that ripened on the high wall which faced due south were also a haunt of wasps and more than once a child, cautiously lifting a peach to see if it would conveniently snap from its stalk, was overtaken by sudden and deserved retribution as the winged terror came out of its temporary dining-room. The cooking apples were grown on espaliers on one side of the path which bounded a half circle of grass enclosed by a sweetbriar hedge. The smell of sweetbriar on a hot afternoon filled the air and permeated everything. The russet apples tasted of sweetbriar and surely no apples were ever so sweet, or broke between the teeth so crisply, or
held such ambrosial perfumed juice. Sweet they were to the core and there was no need to pare them, for the skin was thin and delicate. It seems to me that apples now have thick tough skins that spoil the pleasure of biting deep into the fruit. It would have been a sin to touch these apples, even with a golden knife, for every part of them was honey-sweet and perfumed with the scented briar.

Inside the sweetbriar close a tent was sometimes pitched for us in summer. I do not know why it had been bought and it was the most wretchedly uncomfortable and stuffy form of shelter that could be devised, but naturally we felt its romance deeply. It was a round tent with a rickety wooden table on two legs encircling the centre pole and it was our supreme joy to have tea in it and equally Nanny’s supreme detestation. To her it must have meant stuffiness, table manners running riot, the carrying out of heavy trays, mess of milk and crumbs, overpowering breathless heat and deep discomfort, and now I think I would agree with Nanny. But to us then it was glorious adventure. One might easily be a Knight of the Round Table in his pavilion, or Saladin receiving Richard, or
the Greeks before Troy, and the highly uncomfortable meal eaten reclining on a rug in the atmosphere of the Black Hole of Calcutta among swarms of flies became Alexander’s feast. Or if we happened to be Cavaliers at the moment and the Roundheads were known to be approaching in force, what was easier than to slip out on one’s stomach under the flaps of the tent and, re-forming rapidly in upright position, to take them in the rear. We threw ourselves into the fray with all the more ardour when the Roundhead of the day happened to be our cousin, Rudyard Kipling, who lived at The Elms across the village green.