when people sit down to write their recollections they exclaim with regret, “if only i had kept a diary, what a rich store of material i should now have at my disposal!” i remember one of the masters at eton telling me, when i was a boy, that if i wished to make a fortune when i was grown up, i had only to keep a detailed diary of every day of my life at eton. he said the same thing to all the boys he knew, but i do not remember any boy of my generation taking his wise advice.
on the other hand, for the writer who wishes to recall past memories, the absence of diaries and notebooks has its compensations. memory, as someone has said, is the greatest of artists. it eliminates the unessential, and chooses with careless skill the sights and the sounds and the episodes that are best worth remembering and recording. the first thing i can remember is a christmas tree which i think celebrated the christmas of 1876. it was at shoreham in kent, at a house belonging to mr. h. b. mildmay, who married one of my mother’s sisters. i was two years old, and i remember my christmas present, a large bird with yellow and red plumage, which for a long time afterwards lived at the top of the nursery wardrobe. it was neither a bird of paradise nor a pheasant; possibly only a somewhat flamboyant hen; but i loved it dearly, and it irradiated the nursery to me for at least two years.
the curtain then falls and rises again on the nursery of 37 charles street, berkeley square, london. the nursery[2] epoch, which lasted till promotion to the schoolroom and lessons began, seems to children as long as a lifetime, just as houses and places seem to them infinitely large. the nursery was on the third floor of the house, and looked out on to the street. there was a small night-nursery next door to it, which had coloured pictures of st. petersburg on the wall.
i can remember the peculiar roar of london in those days; the four-wheelers and hansoms rattling on the macadam pavement through the fog, except when there was straw down in the street for some sick person; and the various denizens of the streets, the lamplighter and the muffin-man; often a barrel-organ, constantly in summer a band, and sometimes a punch and judy. during the war, when the streets began to be darkened, but before the final complete darkness set in in 1917, london looked at night very much as it was in my childhood. but the strange rumbling noise had gone for ever. sometimes on one of the houses opposite there used to be an heraldic hatchment. the nursery was inhabited by my brother hugo and myself, our nurse, hilly, and two nurserymaids, grace hetherington, and annie. grace was annexed by me; annie by hugo. hilly had been nurse to my sisters and, i think, to my elder brothers too. she had the slightly weather-beaten but fresh agelessness of nannies, and her most violent threat was: “i’ll bring my old shoe to you,” and one of her most frequent exclamations: “oh, you naughty boy, you very naughty boy!” the nursery had landseer pictures in gilt frames, and on the chest of drawers between the two windows a mechanical toy of an entrancing description. it was a square box, one side of which was made of glass, and behind this glass curtain, on a small platform, a lady sat dressed in light blue silk at an open spinet; a dancing master, in a red silk doublet with a powdered wig and yellow satin knee-breeches, on one side of it, conducted, and in the foreground a little girl in short skirts of purple gauze covered with spangles stood ready to dance. when you wound up the toy, the lady played, the man conducted elegantly with an open score in one hand and a baton in the other, and the little girl pirouetted. it only played one short, melancholy, tinkling, but extremely refined dance-tune.
at one of the top windows of the house opposite, a little girl used to appear sometimes. hugo and i used to exchange[3] signals with her, and we called her miss rose. our mute acquaintance went on for a long time, but we never saw her except across the street and at her window. we did not wish to see more of her. nearer acquaintance would have marred the perfect romance of the relation.
there were two forms of light refreshment peculiar to the nursery, and probably to all nurseries: one was albert biscuits, and the other toast-in-water. children call for an albert biscuit as men ask for a whisky-and-soda at a club, not from hunger, but as an adjunct to conversation and a break in monotony. at night, after we had gone to bed, we used often to ask monotonously and insistently for a drink of water. “hilly, i want a drink of water”; but this meant, not that one was thirsty, but that one was frightened and wanted to see a human being. all my brothers and sisters, i found out afterwards, had done the same thing in the same way, and for the same reason, but the tradition had been handed down quite unconsciously. i can’t remember how the nursery epoch came to an end; it merges in my memory without any line of division, into the schoolroom period; but the first visits in the country certainly belonged to the nursery epoch.
we used to go in the summer to coombe cottage, near malden, an ivy-covered, red-brick house, with a tower at one end, a cool oak hall and staircase, a drawing-room full of water-colours, a room next to it full of books, with a drawing-table and painting materials ready, and a long dining-room, of which the narrow end was a sitting-room, and had a verandah looking out on to the garden. there was also a kitchen garden, lawns, a dairy, a gardener, mr. baker, who made nosegays, a deaf-and-dumb under-gardener who spoke on his fingers, a farmyard, and a duck-pond into which i remember falling.
coombe was an enchanted spot for us. my recollection of it is that of a place where it was always summer and where the smell of summer and the sounds of summer evening used to make the night-nursery a fairy place; and sometimes in the morning, red-coated soldiers used to march past playing “the girl i left behind me,” with a band of drums and fifes. the uniforms of the soldiers were as bright as the poppies in the field, and that particular tune made a lasting impression on me. i never forgot it. i can remember losing my first front tooth[4] at coombe by tying it on to a thread and slamming the door, and i can remember my sisters singing, “where are you going to, my pretty maid?” one of them acting the milkmaid, with a wastepaper basket under her arm for a pail. best of all, i remember the garden, the roses, the fruit, trying to put salt on a bird’s tail for the first time, and the wonderful games in the hayfields.
we are probably all of us privileged at least once or twice in our lives to experience the indescribable witchery of a perfect summer night, when time seems to stand still, the world becomes unsubstantial, and nature is steeped in music and silver light, quivering shadows and mysterious sound, when such a pitch of beauty and glamour and mystery is achieved by the darkness, the landscape, the birds, the insects, the trees and the shadows, and perhaps the moon or even one star, that one would like to say to the fleeting moment what faust challenged and defied the devil to compel him to cry out: “verweile, du bist sch?n.”
it is the moment that the great poets have sometimes caught and made permanent for us by their prodigious conjury: shakespeare, in the end of the merchant of venice, when lorenzo and jessica let the sounds of music creep into their ears, and wonder at patines of bright gold in the floor of heaven; keats, when he wished to cease upon the midnight with no pain; musset, in the “nuit de mai”; victor hugo, when, on their lovely brief and fatal bridal night, hernani and do?a sol fancy in the moonlight that sleeping nature is watching amorously over them; and the musicians speak this magic with an even greater certainty, without the need of words: beethoven, in his sonata; chopin, again and again; schumann, in his lyrics, especially “frühlingsnacht”; schubert, in his “serenade.”
i have known many such nights: the dark nights of central russia before the harvest ends, when the watchman’s rattle punctuates and intensifies the huge silence, and a far-off stamping dance rhythm and a bleating accordion outdo shakespeare and schubert in magic; june nights in florence, when you couldn’t see the grass for fireflies, and the croaking of frogs made a divine orchestra; or in venice, on the glassy lagoon, when streaks of red still hung in the west; may nights by the neckar at heidelberg, loud with the jubilee of nightingales and aromatic with lilac; a twilight in may at arundel park, when large trees, dim lawns, and antlered shapes seemed to be[5] part of a fairy revel; and nights in south devon, when the full september moon made the garden and the ilex tree as unreal as prospero’s island.
but i never in my whole life felt the spell so acutely as in the summer evenings in the night nursery at coombe cottage, when we went to bed by daylight and lay in our cots guessing at the pattern on the wall, to wake up later when it was dark, half conscious of the summer scents outside, and of a bird’s song in the darkness. the intense magic of that moment i have never quite recaptured, except when reading keats’ “ode to the nightingale” for the first time, when the door on to the past was opened wide once more and the old vision and the strange sense of awe, unreality, and enchantment returned.
but to go back to nursery life. our london life followed the ritual, i suppose, of most nurseries. in the morning after our breakfast we went down, washed and scrubbed and starched, into the dining-room, where breakfast was at nine, and kissed our father before he drove to the city in a phaeton, and played at the end of the dining-room round a pedestalled bust of one of the popes. then a walk in the park, and sometimes as a treat a walk in the streets, and possibly a visit to cremer’s, the toy-shop in bond street. hugo and i detested the park, and the only moment of real excitement i remember was when one day hilly told me not to go near the flower-beds, and i climbed over the little railing and picked a towering hyacinth. police intervention was immediately threatened, and i think a policeman actually did remonstrate; but although i felt for some hours a pariah and an outcast, there was none the less an aftertaste of triumph in the tears; attrition, perhaps, but no contrition.
when we got to be a little older … older than what? i don’t know … but there came our moment when we joined our sisters every morning to say our prayers in my mother’s bedroom, every day before breakfast. they were short and simple prayers—the “our father” and one other short prayer. nevertheless, for years the “our father” was to me a mysterious and unintelligible formula, all the more so, as i said it entirely by the sound, and not at all by the sense, thinking that “whichartinheaven” was one word and “thykingdomcome” another. i never asked what it meant. i think in some dim way i felt that, could i understand it, something of its value[6] as an invocation would be lost or diminished. i also remember learning at a very early age the hymn, “there is a green hill far away,” and finding it puzzling. i took it for granted that most green hills had city walls round them, though this particular one hadn’t. besides going to coombe we went at the end of the summer to devonshire, to membland, near the villages of noss mayo, and newton, and not far from the river yealm, an arm of the sea. it was when getting ready for the first of these journeys that i remember, while i was being dressed in the nursery, my father’s servant, mr. deacon, came up to the nursery and asked me whether i would like a ticket. he then gave me a beautiful green ticket with a round hole in it. i asked him what one could do with it, and he said, “in return for that ticket you can get bath buns, banbury cakes, jam-rolls, crackers, and pork sausages.” in the bustle of departure i lost it. paddington station resounded with the desperate cries of the bereaved ticket-holder. in vain i was given half a white first-class ticket. in vain mr. bullock, the guard, offered every other kind of ticket. it was not the same thing. that ticket, with the round hole, had conjured up visions of wonderful possibilities and fantastic exchanges. sausages and banbury cakes and bath buns (all of them magic things), i knew, would be forthcoming to no other ticket. the loss was irreparable. i remember thinking the grown-up people so utterly wanting in understanding when they said: “a ticket? of course, he can have a ticket. here’s a ticket for the dear little boy.” as if that white ticket was anything like the unique passport to gifts new and unheard of, anything like that real green ticket with the round hole in it. at the end of one of these journeys, at kingsbridge road, the train ran off the line. we were in a saloon carriage, and i remember the accident being attributed to that fact by my mother’s maid, who said saloon carriages were always unsafe. it turned out to be an enjoyable accident, and we all got out and i was given an orange.
mr. bullock, the guard, was a great friend of all of us children; and our chief pleasure was to ask him a riddle: “why is it dangerous to go out in the spring?” i will leave it to the reader to guess the answer, with merely this as a guide, that the first part of the answer to the riddle is “because the hedges are shooting,” and the second part of the answer is peculiarly[7] appropriate to mr. bullock. i am afraid mr. bullock never saw why, although no doubt he enjoyed the riddle.
i have already said that i cannot fix any line of division between the nursery and the schoolroom epochs, but before i get on to the subject of the schoolroom i will record a few things which must have belonged to the pre-schoolroom period.
one incident which stands out clearly in my mind is that of the fifty-shilling train. there were at that time in london two toy-shops called cremer. one was in new bond street, no. 27, i think, near tessier’s, the jeweller; another in regent street, somewhere between liberty’s and piccadilly circus.
in the window of the regent street shop there was a long train with people in it, and it was labelled fifty shillings. in the year 1921 it is only a small mechanical train that can be bought for fifty shillings. i can’t remember whether i had reached the schoolroom when this happened, but i know i still wore a frock and had not yet reached the dignity of trousers. i used constantly to ask to go and look at this shop window and gaze at the fifty-shilling train, which seemed first to be miraculous for its size, and, secondly, for its price. who in the world could have fifty shillings all at once?
i never went so far as thinking it was possible to possess that train; but i used to wonder whether there were people in the world who could store up fifty shillings. we were each of us given sixpence every saturday, but it was always spent at once, nor could i calculate or even conceive how long it would take to save enough sixpences to make fifty shillings.
one evening, when we were at coombe, in the summer, i was sent for to the drawing-room and then told to go into the dining-room. i opened the door, and there, on the floor, was the fifty-shilling train. if a fairy had flown into the room and lifted me to the ceiling i could not have thought a fact more miraculous. from that moment i knew for certain that miracles could happen and do happen, and subsequent experience has confirmed the belief. alas! the funnel of the engine was soon broken, and mr. toombs, the carpenter, was said to be able to mend it, and i looked forward to another miracle. he did, but in a way which was hardly satisfactory considered as a miracle, although perfect for practical usage. he turned on a lathe a solid funnel made of black wood, but not hollow, and he stuck it in where the funnel ought to be. i pretended[8] i was satisfied, but my private belief was that mr. toombs didn’t know how to make funnels.
another thing which happened when i was six years old was a visit to the drury lane pantomime, which was mother goose. this, of course, with a transformation scene with a large fairy with moving emerald butterfly-like wings and arthur roberts who, when playing a trumpet, spat out all his teeth on to the floor as if they were an encumbrance, was an ecstasy beyond words.
another event almost more exciting was the arrival of a doll’s house. i played with dolls, but not as girls do, mothering them and dressing them. mine were little tiny dolls, and could not be dressed or undressed, and they were used as puppets. i made them open parliament, act plays and stories, and most frequently take the part of the french merovingian kings. this was at the beginning of the schoolroom period, and the dolls were called chilpéric, ermengarde, clothilde, blanche de castille, frédégonde, brunehaut, galswinthe, and pépin le bref, and other names belonging to the same remote period of history. one day i was told that a doll’s house was coming. i couldn’t sleep for excitement, and hilly, grace, and annie gravely held a conclave one night when i was in bed and supposed to be asleep, over their supper, and said that so exciting a thing as a doll’s house ought not to be allowed me. it would ruin my health. i feigned deep sleep, and the next day pretended to have lost all interest in dolls’ houses, but when it came, all its furniture was taken out, put on the floor, and arranged in two long rows, with a throne at one end, to enable chilpéric and frédégonde to open parliament.
one year in london i actually saw queen victoria drive to the opening of parliament in a gilded coach with a little crown perched on her head and an ermine tippet. it was not quite a satisfactory crown, but still it was a crown, and the coach had the authentic cinderella quality.
to go back to the dolls for a moment. i used to go to membland sometimes for easter with my father and mother when the rest of the family stayed in london, and margaret used to write me letters from the dolls, beginning “cher papa” and ending “ermengarde” or “chilpéric,” as the case might be. these letters used to cover me with confusion and mortification before the grown-up people, as i kept it a secret that i[9] ever played with dolls, knowing it to be thought rather eccentric, and liable to be misunderstood, especially when there were other boys about, which there were.
of course, in the nursery, hugo and i had endless games of pretending, especially during bath-time (baths were hip-baths), and i remember hugo refusing to have his bath because when we were playing at fishes i seized the shark’s part and wouldn’t let him be a shark. “hilly,” he wailed, “i will be a shark.” but no, i wouldn’t hear of it, and he had to be a whale, which the shark, so i said, easily mastered.
promotion to the schoolroom meant lessons and luncheon downstairs. the schoolroom was inhabited by my three sisters, elizabeth, margaret, and susan, and ruled over by the french governess, chérie. i thought chérie the most beautiful, the cleverest, and altogether the most wonderful person in the world. my earliest recollection of her almost magical powers was when she took a lot of coloured silks and put them behind a piece of glass and said this was une vision. i believed there was nothing she didn’t know and nothing she couldn’t do. i was also convinced that one day i would marry her. this dream was sadly marred by the conduct of my sister elizabeth. elizabeth was the eldest, margaret the second, and susan the third, of my sisters. i firmly believed in fairies. elizabeth and margaret fostered the belief by talking a great deal about their powers as fairies, and elizabeth said she was queen of the fairies. one day she said: “just as you are going to be married to chérie, and when you are in church, i will turn you into a frog.” this was said in the schoolroom in london. the schoolroom was on the floor over the nursery. no sooner had elizabeth made this ominous remark when i ran to the door and howled in a manner which penetrated the whole house from the housemaids’ rooms upstairs to the housekeeper’s room in the basement. screams and yells startled the whole house. hilly came rushing from the nursery; chérie came from her bedroom, where she had been doing some sewing; dimmock, my mother’s maid, whom we called d., came downstairs, saying: “well, i never”; sheppy, the housekeeper, peered upwards from the subterranean housekeeper’s room; and, lastly, my mother came from the drawing-room. the cause of the crisis was explained by me through sobs. “she says” … sob, sob, yell … “that she’s a fairy” … sob, sob …[10] “and that she’ll turn me into a frog” … sob, sob … “when i marry chérie…” all attempts to calm me were in vain. elizabeth was then appealed to, and the whole house in chorus said to her, “say you’re not a fairy.” but elizabeth became marble-constant. she said, “how can i say i’m not a fairy when i am one?” a statement which i felt to be all too true and well founded. more sobs and yells. universal indignation against elizabeth. my paroxysm was merely increased by all the efforts everyone made to soothe me. elizabeth was cajoled, persuaded, argued with, bribed, threatened, exhorted, blamed, anathematised, entreated, appealed to, implored, but all in vain. she would not budge from her position, which was that she was a fairy.
the drama proceeded. nothing stopped the stream of convulsive sobs, the flood of anguish—not all chérie’s own assurances that the wedding would be allowed to take place.
elizabeth was taken downstairs to be reasoned with, and after an hour and a half’s argument, and not before she had been first heavily bribed with promises and then sent to bed, she finally consented to compromise. she said, as a final concession, “i’ll say i’m not a fairy, but i am.” when this concession was wrung from her the whole relieved household rushed up to tell me the good news that elizabeth had said she was not a fairy. the moment i heard the news my tears ceased, and perfect serenity was restored. but although elizabeth capitulated, margaret was firmer, and she continued to mutter (like galileo) for the rest of the afternoon, “but i am a fairy all the same.”
margaret was the exciting element in the schoolroom. she was often naughty, and i remember her looking through the schoolroom window at coombe, while i was doing lessons with chérie, and making faces. chérie said to her one day: “vous feriez rougir un régiment.” elizabeth was pleasantly frivolous, and susan was motherly and sensible, and supposed to be the image of her father, but margaret was dramatic and imaginative, and invincibly obstinate.
she knew that for chérie’s sake i didn’t like admitting that the english had ever defeated the french in battle, so every now and then she would roll out lists of battles fought by the english against the french and won, beginning with cre?y, poitiers, getting to agincourt with a crescendo, and ending[11] up in a tremendous climax with waterloo. to which i used to retort with a battle called bouvines, won by philippe auguste, in some most obscure period over one of the plantagenet kings, and with fontenoy. i felt them both to be poor retorts.
another invention of margaret’s was a mysterious princess called louiseaunt, who often came to see her, but as it happened always when we were out. if we suddenly came into the room, margaret would say, “what a pity! louiseaunt has just been here. she’ll be so sorry to have missed you.” and try as we would, we always just missed louiseaunt.
if we went out without margaret, louiseaunt was sure to come that day. we constantly just arrived as louiseaunt had left, and the inability ever to hit off louiseaunt’s precise visiting hours was a lasting exasperation.
another powerful weapon of margaret’s was recitation. she used to recite in english and in french, and in both languages the effect on me was a purge of pity and terror. i minded most “lord ullin’s daughter,” declaimed with melodramatic gesture, and nearly as much a passage from hernani, beginning—
“monts d’aragon! galice! estramadoure!
oh! je porte malheur à tout ce qui m’entoure!”
which she recited, rolling her eyes in a menacing attitude.
“lord ullin’s daughter,” said with the help of susan, whose rendering had something reassuringly comfortable and homely about it—susan couldn’t say her “r’s,” and pronounced them like “w’s”—in contradistinction to margaret’s sombre and vehement violence, did a little to mitigate the effect, but none the less it frightened me so much that it had to be stopped. hugo was not yet in the schoolroom then.
lessons in london began soon after breakfast. they were conducted by chérie and by an english governess, mrs. christie, who used to arrive in a four-wheeler, always the same one, from kentish town, and teach us english, arithmetic, and latin. mrs. christie was like the pictures of thackeray, with spectacles, white bandeaux, and a black gown. during lessons she used to knit. she was in permanent mourning, and we knew we must never ask to learn “casabianca,” as her little boy who had died had learnt it. she used to arrive with a parcel of books from the london library, done up in a leather strap. she was the first of a long line of teachers who failed to teach me arithmetic.[12] she used to stay the whole morning, or sometimes only part of it. during lessons she used to have a small collation, a glass of claret, and a water biscuit. she also taught other families.
at coombe the schoolroom looked out on the lawn, a long, flat lawn which went down by steps on a lower lawn, at the bottom of which we had our own gardens and where there was a summer-house. i remember sitting in the schoolroom next to chérie while, with a large knitting needle, she pointed out the words pain and vin written large in a copy-book, with a picture of a bottle of red wine and a picture of a piece of bread, to show what the words meant, while margaret was copying out clarence’s dream in a copy-book and murmuring something about skulls, and all the time through the window framed with clematis came the sound, the magic sound of the mowing-machine, the noise of bees, and a smell of summer, tea-roses and of hayfields.
on certain days of the week mademoiselle ida henry used to come and give us music lessons. our house was saturated with an atmosphere of music. my mother played the violin and was a fine concertina player, and almost before i could walk i had violin lessons from no less a person than mr. ries. until i was three i was called strad, and i think my mother cherished the dream that i would be a violinist, but i showed no aptitude.
my first music lesson i received from mademoiselle ida over stanley lucas’ music shop in bond street. i was alone in london with my mother and father, one november, and i suppose about six. mademoiselle ida was very encouraging, and—unduly, as it turned out—optimistic, and said: “il a des mains faites pour jouer le piano,” and soon my morceau was diabelli’s duets. while i was learning diabelli’s duets, susan was learning a fantasia by mozart, which i envied without malice. it had one particular little run in it which i learnt to play with one finger. one day i played this downstairs in the drawing-room. a few days later mademoiselle ida came to luncheon, and my mother said: “play that little bar out of the mozart to mademoiselle ida.” i was aghast, feeling certain, and quite rightly, that mademoiselle ida would resent my having encroached on a more advanced morceau, and indeed, as it became clear to her what the bar in question was, she at once said: “je ne veux pas que tu te mêles des morceaux des autres.” that was what i had feared. my mother was quite unconscious of the solecism that she was committing, and[13] pressed me to play it. finally i hummed the tune, which satisfied both parties.
i never liked music lessons then or ever afterwards, but i enjoyed mademoiselle ida’s conversation and company almost more than anything. every word she ever said was treasured. one day she said to mrs. christie: “bonjour, madame christé. j’ai bien mal à la tête.” “je suis très fachée de le savoir, mademoiselle henri,” said mrs. christie in icy tones, and this little dialogue was not destined ever to be forgotten by any of us. we used often afterwards to enact the scene.
elizabeth and susan learnt the piano, and margaret was taught the violin by herr ludwig, a severe german master. john, my eldest brother, was an accomplished pianist and organist; everard, my third brother, played the piccolo. cecil sang, and my mother was always bewailing that he had not learnt music at eton, because his house-master said it would be more useful for him to learn how to shoe a horse. this, alas! did not prove to be the case, as he has seldom since had the opportunity of making use of his skill as a blacksmith. the brothers were all at eton when i first went into the schoolroom, but they often used to visit us in the evening at tea-time, and sometimes they used to listen when chérie read aloud after tea.
echoes of the popular songs of the day reached both the nursery and the schoolroom, and the first i can remember the tunes of are: “pop goes the weasel,” which used to be sung to me in the nursery; “tommy, make room for your uncle”; “my grandfather’s clock”; “little buttercup” from pinafore, which used to be played on a musical box; “oh where and oh where is my little wee dog?” with its haunting refrain.
later we used to sing in chorus and dancing a pas de trois, a song from a gaiety burlesque:
“we’ll never come back any more, boys,
we’ll never come back any more.”
and, later still, someone brought back to london for christmas the unforgettable tune of “two lovely black eyes,” which in after-life i heard all over the world—on the lagoon of venice and in the villages of mongolia.
one day after luncheon—on sunday—john played the “two grenadiers” at the pianoforte, and i remember the experience being thrilling, if a little alarming, but a revelation, and a first introduction into the world of music.
