Three Houses (9 page)

Here we could stay in peace, feeling more than we could understand, till our inconstant minds were as full of beauty as they could hold and the prickings of conscience for our unauthorised outing began to make themselves felt. Then we went down the nave into the sunlight and saw the white porch of our home waiting for us across the green and so back to the drawing-room.

Four months later the drawing-room would see very different sights. It would be Boxing Night and we were all seated in the inner room waiting for the mummers. Rumours of splendid preparations for their entertainment were afoot – supper for them in the dining-room with a gigantic pork pie and quantities of cider. A knock was heard at the door heralding their arrival and the audience began to wriggle on its seat with anticipation. Then noises and bumps and murmurs were heard from behind the curtain and dumpings on the bare boards (the Morris carpet had been rolled up and put away for the evening), and at last, just before we burst with curiosity, the curtains were drawn and the play of St George and the Dragon was shown to our enchanted eyes. The actors could make but little attempt at dressing-up. They were poor labourers and most of them wore smocks and leggings with a few ribbons and pieces of coloured paper to adorn them. The smock-frock was still worn in Sussex by the older men when I was a child, and some of them had venerable furry top-hats. The play proceeded on its usual course, St George, Turkish Knight, very
unfeminine princess, Dragon, and Doctor; it has often been described. At the end of the play they took their customary toll of the audience:

But after this they added an epilogue of their own contriving. They stood in a circle all facing inwards – a method much to be recommended for shy performers – and sang, not as you might archaeologically hope, old Sussex carols and folk-songs, but ballads about Lord Raglan and his Crimean War. Folk-songs in the making perhaps. And then, because of Christmas time, the ‘Mistletoe Bough’, with a rough attempt at harmony in the last melancholy lines of chorus,

The long-drawn tale of the Baron’s young bride who invited the guests to play hide-and-seek on her wedding night and then got into a chest and was never discovered till years later when:

chilled our young blood and was directly responsible for nine-tenths of our nursery nightmares.

But at last even this horrible joy was over and the mummers went clumping away to the pork pie. I remember, for memory has her tactless moments, that the back drawing-room windows had to be opened wide to let out the smell of unwashed corduroys, and the cold night wind rushing in made the candles gutter in their tall brass candlesticks. Then a sleepy child was sent up to bed and fell asleep to the sound of the revellers’ voices below.

Christmas at Rottingdean began by the arrival of the turkey with gilded claws, which came by the omnibus, together with a great sheaf of holly and mistletoe. We were allowed to help with
decorations, sticking bits of holly in behind pictures (the scratching noise of holly leaves on whitewash sets my nails on edge even now), and tying mistletoe over the kitchen stairs and in the nursery. For a week beforehand the waits had been about the village, frankly blackmailing the inhabitants by the horrid noise they made. There was no romantic Christmas atmosphere about them. I don’t suppose any of them knew any carol beyond a very garbled version of Good King Wenceslas in which they always telescoped the last two bars into one, making two crotchets and a minim out of two minims and a semi-breve on the word ‘weather’. There were no relics of folk-song here, no hymn to Woden dressed in Christmas guise and handed down from father to son, no Christmas ballads whose words were ‘outway rude’ though their tunes were modal, and no reverence for Christmas except as an easy way of getting sixpences. Six or seven village boys would join together with a lantern and come up the street murderously rattling through Good King Wenceslas. Nearer and nearer they came till at last we could hear the click of the front gate and the shuffling of
feet in the porch. Then the real spirit of tradition got loose in the following hymn or canticle sung at a rattling pace with an accelerando to the fortissimo on the knocker.

When the parlourmaid went to the door a shrill chorus of voices demanded ‘Shilling for the waits, please Miss’ and the message was brought to the drawing-room, which was only too thankful to buy immunity at the price of a couple of shillings. Hardly waiting to say thank you, the vocalists dashed off to blackmail The Elms or Hillside.

One year Lily Ridsdale, the younger daughter at
The Dene, trained a sewing class of village girls to sing carols in parts and then it was very different. A little girl tucked up in bed heard mysterious voices out of the dark singing, ‘From far away we come to you,’ the carol for which Mr Morris wrote the words with a double refrain:

The far-off beauty of the mingled parts from the cold night outside was a thing she never forgot. As she lay listening in a little room with the fire flickering on the whitewashed ceiling and a long limp stocking pinned to the foot of her bed, knowing that tomorrow morning it would be full and lumpy, it was almost too much happiness to bear.

It was a point of honour to wake very early on Christmas morning and on that one day Nanny relaxed her stringent (and well-advised) rules about lighting candles ourselves and I was allowed to grabble for the matches when I woke and light my
own candle and look at my stocking. There was something unspeakably satisfying about the feel of a well filled stocking stuffed with lumps of all sizes and shapes. Cubic lumps, spherical lumps, lumps in crackly tissue paper, lumps that might be penknives and sometimes a dormouse curled up all stiff and cold. Dormice were a recurring Christmas gift because last year’s usually got lost. One dormouse, woken by the unaccustomed warmth of Christmas Day, came alive, leapt from my hand and disappeared. I was disconsolate and another dormouse was got to replace it and weeks afterwards the original dormouse was found curled up asleep, quite well, under a heavy pile of blankets in the linen cupboard. Another dormouse escaped – my own fault alas! I forgot to put his water-tin back and he squeezed out through the hole – and drowned himself in the nursery slop-pail. I cried bitterly till my grandparents let me bury him in the garden among the lilies of the valley and my father drew me a picture of his little form with wings flying to Paradise, with earth spread out far below, and I coloured it with the nursery chalks and my
grandfather had it framed in a carved and gilded frame – or at least it looked like that. But live stock was on the whole a rarity and the lumps were mostly inanimate, and always in the toe of every stocking was a tangerine orange. Nothing else would do.

The ritual of the morning was that my brother and I should bring our stockings into our grandmother’s bedroom and examine them there. Her bedroom was over the drawing-room and had a big window facing east like the window in the room below. Through it she could see the sun rise over the brow of East Hill until elms growing taller on the other side of the green made a jagged edge where once the line of the downs had stood out clear cut against the dawn. But we were with her long before the winter sunrise, climbing on to her bed, an oak four-post bed with curtains of the most delicate Madras muslin, soft enough to go through a wedding ring and so exquisitely patterned that one of her grandchildren wore dresses made from them twenty years later. In my remembrances she always used very fine cashmere sheets against the cold, and even in bed had lace on her head and the softest shawls pinned with a paste
brooch. It was so cold getting out of one’s own bed by candlelight in front of a black fire-place, that one could hardly wait to put on dressing-gown and slippers, and then we dashed into our grandmother’s room where the fire had been kept in all night and my brother got in beside her with his sock, while I made a nest for myself at the foot of the bed with my stocking. I usually brought with me a couple of ginger-nuts which I had taken to bed the night before to make them soft and malleable. On any other morning it would have been my pleasure to roll them into sausages, or mould them into balls, or into a likeness of the human face, but this morning even they might be left unheeded, for there were better things to do.

How delicious it was to plunge one’s hand deeper and deeper into the stocking, pull out the presents, tear off the tissue paper and gloat on the reindeer gloves with fur lining, the necklace, the little fan, the tiny Prayer Book with print that no human eye could read and Sir Joshua Reynolds’ angels stamped in silver on the cover (how perfectly beautiful one thought it then), the pastels, the box of round
chocolates sprinkled with sugar, and always at the end the tangerine, so cool to the touch, so sweet to the mouth, and even after you had eaten it, still useful for fireworks. You pinched a piece of the peel sharply, very near the candle and little spurts of oil from it caught fire for a moment and flashed through the flame.

After so much emotion there were sausages for breakfast as if it were Sunday, as indeed it sometimes was, and – we must have been an extremely lucky nursery – heaps of presents on the dining-room table. All the things that were too big to get into our stockings, things like books and engines and bricks and a real carriage-clock of one’s own and always something very magnificent from Uncle Phil like a Punch and Judy Show that we could work ourselves, or a fort with a drawbridge, fully garrisoned, or one’s favourite poet (Longfellow that year, Browning next), bound in blue or green morocco with one’s name in gold on the cover, or quires of notepaper from Asprey’s with monograms in gold and silver and all colours.

This second wave of emotion carried us on to
church time. As far as I can remember we never went to church in London, except the Abbey, which is different, but always in the country because of not hurting the Vicar’s feelings, so on Christmas day the family, represented by the women and children, turned up in full force. I had on a green woollen frock from Liberty’s with an embroidered yoke, a brilliant red woollen jacket, a blue tam-o’-shanter, and my new reindeer gloves which it took me the whole length of the service to get properly buttoned. How we enjoyed singing in the church and how delightfully Lily Ridsdale’s voice sounded and how infinitely more we admired the peacock yell of Miss White, the village laundress, and how nobly Mr Sanders the carpenter demeaned himself on the organ. Then there was the fun of saying ‘Happy Christmas’ to every one, lunch, the turkey with its gilded claws and general repletion.

After a decent interval the Curse of Christmas descended upon us in the shape of thank letters. My brother and I had written a quantity of blank forms in trusting anticipation of a good haul of presents, more or less in this form:

But unluckily a rather hurried calligraphy made ‘much’ look like ‘muck’ and most of the thank forms were confiscated and destroyed. What a brooding nightmare thank letters are to children. One can’t tell them not to write, but when I get letters from my nieces running more or less as follows:

My heart aches for the tedious time they have spent on this and other thank letters.

After dark my brother and I were sometimes allowed, for a great treat, to go into the studio,
which was as a rule forbidden ground. To reach it you went up the blue staircase and turned off past the linen-cupboard through a bamboo curtain. It was impossible to get a north light at North End House, so the studio faced east as the next best thing, but the light was never suitable for oil painting and my grandfather mostly worked in charcoal, pencil, or water-colour when he was there. There was an extravagance in his nature which loved to make pictures in a medium that would not last; to make a lovely or impish drawing on the back of a sheet of notepaper which some one else would use for a business letter, to paint birds and beasts and angels on a rough whitewashed wall where they would be rubbed and scratched. Among the exquisite letters with coloured pictures which he wrote to me as a very little girl, many are written on scribbling paper which was not good enough to wrap up groceries and have only been kept from falling to pieces by extreme loving care. Every year he made a sacrifice to art on my father and mother’s wedding cake. A large cake, smoothly iced with pure white icing was brought into the studio on a board and laid on the
large table. On it he painted a picture of the church, or the downs, or fat babies with a cat, or a pond with ducks, all in water-colour so that we could eat it without any damage.

When we left the studio to go upstairs to bed we went up by the blue staircase, past my grandfather’s bedroom hung with Arundel prints and Baring-Gould’s
Lives of the Saints
over the mantelpiece, and past my grandmother’s room, lingering a moment on the landing before attacking the last flight to our warm nursery. On this landing all the un-self-consciousness, all the discomfort, and all the beauty of pre-Raphaelitism was epitomised in a small space. Just at the foot of the top flight of blue stairs a zinc-lined cave had been built out from the wall with a tap in it for the use of the housemaid. There was no attempt at concealment inside or out. From the outside this preposterous square excrescence was stuck on to the back of the house, looking ready to fall off at any moment, and from the inside there it was, obviously a housemaid’s sink, with no disguise, and the water coming in from the Brighton main made a roaring that filled the blue staircase. Above
the bold-faced sink was a stained-glass window of jewelled brilliance, containing four scenes from the story of the Sangraal; the summoning of the knights, the adventure of the Sangraal, and at the end the holy cup itself, guarded by angels in Sarras. The Holy Grail above a housemaid’s sink, both needed, both a part of daily life. It is easy to laugh a little, but there was a splendid disregard of external values in this juxtaposition and it was a summing up of the best part of the pre-Raphaelite attitude to life.