Three Houses (8 page)

From the hall two steps led up into the blue-staircase house and the head of the kitchen stairs. In our early days Mr and Mrs Mounter lived in the kitchen and I cannot discover that Mr Mounter ever did anything at all, but he had a pair of immensely long black moustaches and had been a soldier. There was a tradition in the family that Mr Mounter had once been in the desert somewhere, marching on something, and there was no water and at last they came to a Muddy Pool and all the other soldiers lay on their stomachs and drank; but Mr Mounter only took a little water in his mouth and swished it round and spat it out again, and all
the other soldiers died in torment and he lived to this very day. I think this story was chiefly used to discourage us from trying to drink out of the village pond, after which green and slimy draught we should undoubtedly have shared the fate of Mr Mounter’s soldier friends. My brother, being of tender years and eminently kissable, was one day lured into the kitchen by Mrs Mounter and given cakes and thoroughly hugged, after which he came upstairs yelling and when told to stop could only repeat, ‘I don’
want
be kissed by person in kitchen; I don’
want
be kissed by person in kitchen.’ This piece of snobbishness was only surpassed by my horrid self when, at a tea-party for village children, being told to hand round cakes, I said in a fat sulky voice, ‘I’m not a servant,’ which so horrified my grandmother that she was unequal to any kind of blame.

It was on the whole safer then to avoid the kitchen and pass along the passage to the drawing-room. When I think of the drawing-room at North End House I think of a very little girl wrestling with a stiff door handle till the lock rattles, one of those brass handles that are meanly and miserably small so
that they give you nothing to hold and you can turn them in any direction without having any effect and it is enough to make you give up in despair if you are small enough, but some one will nearly always come from inside and open the door for you. Sometimes it is summer and the windows are wide open on to the village green and the grey church opposite is bathed in afternoon light. Sometimes it is winter, the heavy curtains between the two halves of the drawing-room are closely drawn, and in the inner room a fire is gleaming on the ruddled hearth. There is holly behind the pictures and there are rumours of a play about St George to be acted after tea. But if we are to look at the room, this quiet sunny afternoon at the end of summer will be our best time. My father and grandfather will be smoking in the Mermaid and my mother and grandmother are reading, and if I disturb no one I shall be allowed to wander about and look at things.

Just behind the drawing-room door is the little upright piano which after many years found its way to South Kensington Museum to spend the rest of its life there. Even in those days its musical
life was near its end and it would only make a sad cracked tinkling, but it had been designed by my grandfather to show how a cottage piano needn’t necessarily be a lump of hideousness. It was a simple, unpretentious shape, made of plain wood stained brown, and on it my grandfather had painted a picture of girls playing in a garden and Death, veiled and crowned, scythe in hand, knocking at the garden door. The piano he had designed and painted for Frances Horner was richer and more beautiful, but this early work had a more touching if less assured beauty of its own. The design of musical instruments was of great interest to him and he had carried out several other large pianos constructed on the lines of the harpsichord, that is to say, a case in harmonious relation with the lines of the strings, tapering away towards the end, instead of the rounded monstrosity of the ordinary drawing-room grand, and legs that were elegant and serviceable instead of merely elephantine. Broadwood made these pianos for him and my parents had one of them for many years, with an oak case stained green and green ivory keys instead
of black. It is now in the Royal College of Music, its own music nearly dead, but a mute testimony to the fact that a piano needn’t be a blight upon a beautiful room. This piano and a harpsichord by Broadwood and Tschudi stood for years in the same room and they had the same distinction of line and the beauty that comes from complete harmony between soul and body – the chords that make the music and the case that holds them. Another of his experiments was the case of a clavichord which Arnold Dolmetsch made to his design. He painted the outside a deep red like Chinese lacquer and on it in white letters a poem in Latin which my father wrote, and in a laurel wreath the words
CLAVIS CORDIUM
, a pun on Clavichord. It was made for my mother, so there was a picture of St Margaret leading her dragon. Inside, under the strings, he painted a girl gathering flowers.

As for the little brown piano in the back drawing-room at North End House, we never dared touch it without permission. Sometimes, before its voice was too old, my grandmother would sing to it. Italian songs from the collection called
Gemme 
d’Antichità,
or English songs from Chappell’s
Popular Music of the Olden Time
, or songs whose provenance we never knew, among them a song whose only words, repeated again and again were:

My grandmother was devoted to music, though without special training, and used to amuse herself by finding pieces – often most unexpected – of classical music to fit poetry that she loved. She had a manuscript book of these songs, a few of which I remember. One was Rossetti’s ‘Song of the Bower’ sung to a Schubert waltz (the one that became so hauntingly familiar in
Lilac Time
), and another, Keats’s ‘Drear Nighted December’ surprisingly and effectively mingled with the trio from the slow movement of Beethoven’s Sixth Sonata. Schubert’s songs she knew nearly by heart and both she and my grandfather were devoted to Gluck, largely I think through Giulia Ravogli whose Orfeo had ravished them both.

Round the drawing-room, but rather high for
a child’s vision, hung paintings for the Sangraal tapestry which Morris carried out. They were only a few among the hundreds of designs that he made. There are notebooks filled with sketches of a hand or a head or a piece of armour in many different positions, and even so there were also pictures upon pictures until the real picture, seen in an hour of insight, was forced to take its own shape on canvas. The Call to the Quest was there, the Arming of the Knights, the failure of the knights whom sloth or love kept from sight of the Grail, and the vision of the Sangraal which only Galahad might see while Bors and Percival kneel patiently at a distance. The story of the Sangraal was with him all his life and countless were the drawings and paintings he made for it. His only incursion into the theatrical world was the designing of scenery, dresses, and armour for Irving’s
King Arthur
. Some of the beautiful pieces of armour which were made from his drawings were kept as studio properties.

In the larger part of the drawing-room was my grandmother’s toy cupboard. Originally begun as a toy cupboard for our visits, it had gradually fallen
into her far worthier hands and she kept it and added to it with the collector’s passion. When the oak cupboard was unlocked what an enchanting sight was there. It was like a page from Nutcracker and Mouse King, or a story from Ole Luk Oie. Tiny houses, gardens, hedges, and people. Russian families of painted wood, shutting up one inside the other from grandfather to baby. Merry-go-rounds that made a little tinkling noise as one turned the handle. Tiny shops and stalls with suitable apples, pears, carrots, turnips, and cauliflowers. Flocks and herds that knew no other grazing lands than the table-cloth. Fishes of mother-of-pearl from Chinese seas. Sicilian carts drawn by bedizened oxen. Saucepans and jugs and coffee-pots carved from wood, no bigger than a baby’s finger nail – and whatever more of littleness you can imagine. Her friends used to add to the collection and any one who came to Rottingdean bringing some tiny tree, or flower, or figure, was doubly welcome.

On each side of the fire-place was a frantically uncomfortable pre-Raphaelite sofa, too short for any one but my little grandmother and inconceivably hard.
Above them hung pictures of the archangels, Gabriel with the lily, Raphael who cares for children, Uriel, Azrael, Chemuel. But when it came to Lucifer there was only a black opening in the walls of heaven near where Michael stood, with tongues of flame licking up the pit. It made one stand rather quiet for a moment and then one turned and climbed up on to the window seat.

The window seat in the drawing-room was a perfect place. With the hard oblong cushions one could build a fort, or make an omnibus, and my brother and I could sit perched up one at each end reading, just far enough apart not to be able to kick each other. But chiefly, built out a little from the house as it was, it afforded unrivalled opportunities for observing village life. Through the side window my grandmother had kept her watch for us as we drove up to the house and from the large middle window she smiled her welcome. Let us look through the side window, the one that faces south. There is not much to see just now as we look down the village street
unless it is the form of Mr Thomas of the Royal Oak waddling up on some errand. Mr Thomas’s legs were so short in relation to his stout body that he was called Trunky Thomas by the primitive population and by us when Nanny wasn’t listening. Or old Mr Ridsdale might be strolling down the road, looking like a patriarch with his white beard, velvet coat, and peculiar soft hat, shoulders a little bowed and hands clasped behind him, accompanied by his little grandson Oliver Baldwin who rejoiced the village by falling unconsciously into an exact reproduction of his grandfather’s gait as golden hair walked by white hair.

The sight of Mr Ridsdale and Oliver made us move to the middle window to study the further movements of the Ridsdale family. Their house, The Dene, also faced the green, at right angles to ours, and in the summer it overflowed with children and Nannies. Our mother’s cousin Stanley Baldwin had married the elder Miss Ridsdale and every year they came down from their home in Worcestershire to spend some weeks at Rottingdean. What with babies and Nannies and luggage, they were such a large
party that Cousin Stan used to have a slip coach for them which was shunted somehow from Stourport to Brighton. This impressed our young imaginations tremendously, as did the fact that an extra wing had to be built on to The Dene to accommodate them. When Cousin Stan was married I was to have been a bridesmaid in a muslin bonnet with one pink string and one blue, but on hearing the organ I shrieked so loudly that I had to be removed. Their wedding day, the twelfth of September, was always celebrated at Rottingdean and we used to write a wedding ode to them yearly. I can only remember one, which ran as follows:

My father and mother’s wedding day was a few days earlier and just about this time there was always a great picnic on the downs. Mrs Ridsdale
hired a farm wagon for the afternoon and a carter to lead the lumbering horses, and into it dozens of children and nurses were packed with the baskets of food and two great elephants of cart horses with feathery legs dragged it slowly up to Height Barn while the older children walked, or distracted their parents by climbing on the wagon or hanging on underneath. It was always a golden harvest afternoon when we went slowly up the road among the chalk ruts, along by the low flint wall covered with many coloured lichen. On the left the stubble lay white in the sun with a few poppies still blazing among the corn stooks. Then we were on the open downs, on that short springy herbage that makes walking a delight and nourishes the sainted mutton so well, and began to look abroad over the world. East Hill away across the valley on our right, Saltdean, where there used to be steps cut in the chalk cliff down to the beach, hidden at the end of a valley, Brighton racecourse standing out far behind us, the windmill brooding over the village and the road beneath winding away to the clump of dark trees that marked Woodendean, while ahead of us,
a vision of enduring peace, was the perfect outline of Height Barn. Nothing but a large flint barn with tiled roof, but, through its absolute fitness in place and design for its destined work, drawing every line of the downs to converge together upon its perfect self.

Behind the barn was a deep hollow known to us as Wedding Hollow. It was too deep for a dew pond and I have no guess as to its origin. At its brink the horses were stayed and we all trooped down the winding path that led among gorse and blackberry bushes to the bottom. The nurses spread the rugs and unpacked the food and we settled down to our business of eating and playing till it was time to pack into the wagon and ride slowly home again, dropping the party one by one at their respective homes, till last of all the Baldwin children were decanted at The Dene.

The personality of Mrs Ridsdale was the life of The Dene. Who in Rottingdean does not remember her sailing down the village street, commanding of figure, a large silver-topped leather bag always hanging at her side, a word for every one, an eye
to every one’s business, and always the first to do a kindness? A person too of immense character. Was it not she who invented and carried out the questionnaire for Kipling-hunters? ‘Can you tell me where Rudyard Kipling lives?’ a tourist would ask. Mrs Ridsdale would stop and fix him, or her, with her shrewd eye, saying, ‘Have you read anything of his?’ Very often the answer was ‘No,’ when Mrs Ridsdale would remark, ‘Then I won’t tell you,’ and pass majestically on. The first characteristic of the Ridsdale family which struck an outsider was their alarming frankness of speech with each other. As children we used honestly to be a little afraid of being sent on a message to The Dene in the morning. The family of father, mother, three grown-up young gendemen and one grown-up young lady (for Cissie Ridsdale was married to Cousin Stan and away in Worcestershire by then) would be sitting at breakfast still. In any other family the torrent of criticism and plain speaking which burst out would have meant a violent family row. But with the Ridsdales it was merely a family conversation and though we knew it to be so, we
were not the less alarmed and lived in some kind of expectation of immediate bloodshed, so that it was a relief when a diversion occurred. Perhaps old Mr Ridsdale would take us to his study, a low dark room full of Indian curiosities and prickly fish and books. He was a mysterious and rather alarming figure to us, but always very kind, and whenever we met him in town he took us straight to a toyshop and bought us a toy, and what more can a grownup do?

Or kind Lily Ridsdale would carry us off to the garden to play croquet, or to her sitting-room where, on winter evenings, she would play the piano indefinitely for us and the Baldwin children while we sang such time-worn songs as ‘Where did you get that hat?’, or ‘I’m a Prima Ballerina Assoluta’, or ‘The man that broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’. Or there was the excitement of a visit to the billiard-room upstairs with those charming coloured balls to play with and the chance of being horribly teased by one of the grown-up brothers who were not too grown-up to enjoy lashing a little girl into a frenzy for their amusement.

The Ridsdales had been in Rottingdean long before my grandparents came. They remembered the village in the early days when there was no water except that supplied by a donkey who walked round about with pails filled at the village pump which stood in the angle of Trunky Thomas’s barn and cowsheds on the village green. Those were the days when the Dover Coach Road still ran to the south of Welfare’s Green and the miller was living in his little house below the great sails of the windmill and the winter storms brought strange cargoes to Rottingdean beach. One wintry week of south-west gales cast up a bullock and a baby, rapidly followed by a whale and a grand piano; but the glory of Rottingdean was the day that a cargo of brandy came ashore and messengers were sent all over the country on horse and on foot with the happy words, ‘Free drinks at Rottingdean.’ On another occasion the beach was again covered with casks and the messengers were sent out, but it was all an idle dream, for the cargo was paraffin oil. Rottingdean was certainly concerned in the smuggling trade in still earlier days and there were caves in the chalk
cliffs which no one entered. One indeed was shut with an iron door, an object of immense interest and terror to us. There were rumours too of an underground passage leading from the old Vicarage to the beach with an outlet in one of these caves, but of this we never had proof.

The Dene possessed the first telephone that reached Rottingdean and the first we had ever seen. It was the kind that you had to wind up with a handle for a long time before it would start and you had to hold the combined receiver and mouthpiece in a tight nervous grip to keep it connected, so that you were nearly paralysed if your talk lasted any length of time. It was one of our treats to be allowed to hear Mrs Ridsdale telephoning to Brighton.

Rottingdean must have been well abreast of the times, for not only did it introduce us to telephones, but to our first motor. From our eyrie in the drawing-room window we could see on the other side of the green the Kiplings’ motor pawing the ground before the door. It was one of those incredible machines raised high from the ground with a door in the middle of the back and it didn’t like starting and when it had
started it didn’t want to stop, except halfway up a hill, and it perpetually ran dry on the tops of lovely downs miles away from even a dew-pond and when the grown-ups went in it the ladies wore tweed motor caps of gigantic size with veils swathed tightly round them and stuck through with enormous hatpins. When we saw the Kipling children dancing round it, we were consumed with longing to go and dance too, so slipping from the room we ran across the green and kicked up the dust with bare feet to express our joy. Finally the majestic machine got under weigh and drove off with a trail of smoke and smell behind it and we were left lamenting. To the best of my remembrance I never went for a drive in the monster, because whenever a ride had been promised it refused to go and we sat and sat in it while the chauffeur tinkered at its inside and then had to get out with a promise for a real ride some day. But ‘some day’, as my brother very truly remarked, ‘is in the days that never come.’ Just at this moment the young Kiplings were descended upon and carried off by a horde of nurses and governesses and we betook ourselves to the churchyard for further entertainment.

The grey Saxon church faced our grandparents’ house across the green and stood on a slight slope. As in most country churchyards the same names occurred repeatedly on the graves; Mockfords, Moppetts, Dudeneys, Carpenters, Snuddens. It was not always safe to wander in the churchyard, as Bowles the sexton was apt to chase one away and had a religious belief that bare feet were unsuitable to consecrated ground (a belief shared by Nanny). But as he was luckily working on the north side of the church, up against Farmer Brown’s muck-yard, we were able to slip round to the south side and contemplate that sinister family tomb which gave the names and qualifications of all the family except one sister, after whose name was nothing but the word
OBLIVION
. There was another terrifying tomb which said,
‘I AM HIDING IN THEE’,
and we always had visions of what might come out of it towards dusk. The corner to the south of the porch was as yet untenanted and there my grandfather was to lie and a little great-granddaughter near him, and at last my grandmother’s ashes.

Now, a little sobered by our sojourn among the
tombs, we waited till Bowles’s back was turned – for he was a strict Pauline and I had no hat – and went softly into the church, all hung with fruit and flowers for Harvest Sunday, with a great sheaf of corn below the pulpit. We always had a feeling that the little church was part of family life, because the East end was made glorious by seven of my grandfather’s stained-glass windows. As we mounted the chancel steps the Tree of Jesse was on our right, beginning with Jesse asleep at the roots and spreading its branches through David with his harp, Solomon holding a little temple, Hezekiah with his sundial and so up to the humble Mother and her Baby enthroned on the topmost boughs. Opposite was Jacob’s ladder, where angels went up and down between earth and heaven. My grandfather and William Morris worked on all the windows together and as long as they both lived the standard of noble form and rich colour was unsurpassed. As with so much of Morris’ work, the master’s hand was needed and after his death, followed so closely by my grandfather’s, windows were still carried out from Burne-Jones designs,
but they were never the same. Their most glorious joint work was the great windows of St Philip’s Cathedral in Birmingham where reds and blues are a deep flaming beauty and every line in the leading of the glass is a master’s line. The windows at Rottingdean are not so stupendous as these, but they are perfect in their way.

A little further on, just before the altar, was another pair of windows facing each other, St Mary and St Margaret who was there with a thought of the artist’s own daughter Margaret. They are in deep blue, St Mary standing quietly alone, St Margaret leading her conquered dragon on a cord. Above the altar were the three windows which my grandfather gave for his daughter ‘
in hac aede feliciter nupta
’; a triptych of angels. To the left is Gabriel with the lily, to the right Raphael with his pilgrim staff, and in the middle Michael the archangel pinning the dragon with his lance, his helmet cast aside. Below each angel is a little picture of his doings; Gabriel bringing his lily to the Virgin Mary, Michael fighting the grisly coils of the worm, and Raphael leading a little child
who walks confidingly by his side with quick steps, holding his hand, with face upturned to his heavenly companion. My grandfather returned to this picture when he had a silver seal made for me with a green ivory handle and on the seal the engraving of an angel leading a child by the hand across a hill under a starry sky. One of the great differences between my grandfather’s stained-glass windows and others was not only the colour – for Mr Morris was largely responsible for that – but the skilful use of the lead between the pieces of glass to build up the design. The leading seemed to follow the flowing line of his pencil and never cut across or disturbed the unity of the picture. That is, I think, where so many glass designers fail.