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MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE
γένοιτο δ’ ἂν πᾶν ἐν τῷ μακρῷ χρόνῷ.
Herodotus, V. 9.
MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE
BEING MEMOIRS OF THE YEARS 1915‒1972
WRITTEN IN THE YEAR OF GRACE 1988
BY
OPAL, LADY PORSTOCK
EDITED BY
RONALD A. KNOX
McCLELLAND & STEWART
PUBLISHERS TORONTO
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
DEDICATED TO
LAURA, TOMMY, E.V., AND MAURICE
THE FIRST READERS OF THIS BOOK
AND, I FEAR,
ITS KINDEST CRITICS
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
EDITOR’S PREFACE ix
AUTHOR’S PREFACE xiii
I CHILDHOOD (1915‒1930) 1
II SCHOOL DAYS (1930‒1934) 16
III OXFORD (1934‒1938) 33
IV TRAVELS ON THE CONTINENT (1938‒1940) 50
V ON THE SICK LIST (1940‒1941) 66
VI BUSINESS AND PLEASURE (1941‒1944) 81
VII WHAT I FOUND IN AMERICA (1944) 98
VIII MY MARRIAGE (1944) 112
IX LONDON SOCIETY AND ITS FOLLIES (1945‒1953) 128
X MY PARLIAMENTARY ELECTION (1953) 144
XI IN PARLIAMENT (1953‒1959) 159
XII HOME LIFE (1953‒1963) 175
XIII GREAT MEN OF THE DAY (1960) 191
XIV AN OLD WAY OF MAKING A NEW DEPARTURE (1968) 210
XV ENGLAND ON THE EVE OF THE GREAT WAR (1972) 226
INDEX OF PERSONS REFERRED TO 241
EDITOR’S PREFACE
_Being a fugal variation on the Author’s Preface, which follows_
We do ill, if we fail in veneration for the future—rather, we do
impiously, for we beget it, and it is of our blood. The man, the nation
that can sneer at unborn loves and unborn enthusiasms is as if a father
should kick his son downstairs, unnatural. To sneer at what is
new-fangled is an easy triumph, for the unborn cannot plead in answer;
cannot try to explain, far less succeed in explaining to us, what it
will feel like to wear those clothes, use that unimagined slang,
cultivate those types and thrill to those ideals. True, their
unchartered and undesired advocates, the praisers of the future, have
done their cause disservice: old age will have its hit back at the
coxcombs for all the H. G. Wells-tedium that manhood endured, in forced
silence. But our grandsons will be unwitting accomplices in the
conspiracy of unconventionality that now educates us: there will be no
attitudinizing about their scepticism, no _arrière pensée_ in their
immorality. To them, as to us, the fashion of the age will seem a
Providential culmination: they will play hide-and-seek in its shadowy
confines without stopping to ask whether or no they are lost in them.
And if they could come down to defend their cause against us, they would
surely remonstrate with us by appealing to us to do as we would be done
by: “Your own times, too,” they would say, “used one day to seem
uncouth, and hectic, and over-emotional: and brilliant pessimists
disproved the possibility of doing what you did, before you had time to
do it. Learn to forget that we were ever held up to you as models of
what men should be: remember only that we are pictures of what men will
be: to see human nature, fashioned of the same clay and cast in the same
ultimate mould as yourselves, living in other conditions and reacting
upon a situation that is not yours, may be tedious indeed, but not
altogether unprofitable. Do not despise the future; you go into it, and
from you it comes.”
That is our apology—ours who are young—for this business of writing
forecasts. You may, if you will, be content to read of us only what you
will read in scrappy almanacks, but you will lose the sense of your own
value in doing so: you will be like one who stops reading a _feuilleton_
at the twentieth chapter, with no more anticipation than such as is
offered by the author’s hints of what will follow: or like one who
strolls out when the third act of a drama is being played, and whispers
to his friends a brief summary of what will be the rest of the plot. We
are Act 5 of the drama, you are Act 3; without us, you cannot understand
yourselves. You must follow in detail, as it unfolds itself, the
development of the times that will spring from you, if you would taste
the full savour of the times out of which they sprang. You will accuse
our prognostications of partiality and of false perspective: “All will
not be so rosy,” you will be tempted to say, “as sanguine forecast has
pictured it, you have represented the exceptional as the typical, the
typical as the exceptional; hard outlines have become blurred for you,
and shadows, in their turn, taken substance.” Well, we do our best; we
are puppies, perhaps, and idealists, but you will do well to take our
depositions and to sift them for yourselves.
One day you were young, and you too wanted to write forecasts; and you
too found that to envisage the future was arduous, that old ways of
thinking and _status quo ante_ judgments of value imposed themselves
upon your mind, and made you despair of the true estimate and the
adequate phrase. And you found that, however unclouded your own faculty
of prognostication, you searched in vain for the magic touch which would
interpret the future for your older contemporaries, take them forward
with you and make them see it with your eyes, your presuppositions. If
you could be now what you were then, though it be farther than ever
removed from the new days of which this book is an awful warning, you
would be more disposed to bear a young man’s nightmares with patience,
and allow for him where he has exaggerated, and pardon him where he has
erred.
R. A. K.
AUTHOR’S PREFACE
We do ill, if we fail in veneration for the past—rather, we do
impiously, for it begot us, and we are of its blood. The man, the nation
that can sneer at dead loves and dead enthusiasms is as if a son should
kick his father downstairs, unnatural. To sneer at what is old-fashioned
is an easy triumph, for the dead cannot plead in answer; cannot try to
explain, far less succeed in explaining to us, what it felt like to wear
those clothes, use that forgotten slang, cultivate those types and
thrill to those ideals. True, their unchartered and undesired advocates,
the praisers of the past, have done their cause disservice: youth will
have its hit back at the greybeards for all the Polonius-tedium that
boyhood endured, in forced silence. But our grandfathers were unwitting
accomplices in the conspiracy of convention that then educated us; there
was no attitudinizing about their faith, no _arrière pensée_ in their
respectability. To them, as to us, the fashion of an age seemed a
Providential culmination; they played ball against its brick enclosure
without stopping to ask whether or no it cramped them. And if they could
rise up to defend their case against us, they would surely remonstrate
with us by appealing to us to do as we would be done by: “Your own
times, too,” they would say, “will one day seem uncouth, and frigid, and
unimaginative: and brilliant essayists will ransack your gold for the
dross in it, their flashlight will make the colour fade from your
enthusiasms. Learn to forget that we were ever held up to you as models
of what men should be: remember only that we are pictures of what men
were: to see human nature, fashioned of the same clay and cast in the
same primal mould as yourselves, living in other conditions and reacting
upon a situation that is not yours, may be tedious indeed, but not
altogether unprofitable. Do not despise the past; you came from it, and
into it you go.”
That is our apology—ours who are old—for this business of writing
memoirs. You may, if you will, be content to read of us only what you
will read in scrappy histories, but you will lose the sense of your own
value in doing so: you will be like one who picks up a _feuilleton_ at
its twentieth chapter, with no more preparation than such as is offered
by the editor’s synopsis of previous events: or like one who strolls in
when the third act of a drama is being played, and will have his friends
whisper a brief summary to put him _au fait_ with the plot. We are Act 1
of the drama, you are Act 3; without us, you cannot understand
yourselves. You must follow in detail, as it unfolds itself, the
development of the times you sprang from, if you would taste the full
savour of the times into which you sprang. You will accuse our
retrospect of partiality and of false perspective: “All was not so
rosy,” you will be tempted to say, “as grateful memory has pictured it,
you have represented the exceptional as the typical, the typical as the
exceptional; hard outlines have become blurred for you, and shadows, in
their turn, taken substance.” Well, we do our best; we are fogeys,
perhaps, and sentimentalists, but you will do well to take our
depositions and sift them for yourselves.
One day you will be old, and you too will want to write memoirs; and you
too will find that to recall the past is arduous, that modern ways of
thinking and _ex post facto_ judgments of value impose themselves upon
your mind, and make you despair of the true estimate and the adequate
phrase. And you will find that, however unclouded your own faculty of
retrospect, you will search in vain for that magic touch which would
interpret the past for your younger contemporaries, take them back with
you and make them see it with your eyes, your presuppositions. If you
could be now what you will be then, though it be farther than ever
removed from the old days of which this book is a remembrancer, you
would be more disposed to bear an old woman’s day-dreams with patience,
and allow for her where she has exaggerated, and pardon her where she
has erred.
MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE
CHAPTER I
CHILDHOOD
Why was I born, ye Fates, and why,
Being born, did I not die?
JAMES PHILPOT: _The Unanswered Question_.
I was born in 1915, a great anniversary, but one little kept. Little
kept, because at the time of its occurrence England and France, the two
protagonists of Waterloo, were leagued in what then seemed a holy
alliance, and Germany, whose tardy aid settled the fortunes of that
earlier conflict, could find no place, a hundred years later, in the
sympathies of either combatant. My sex, it will be seen, belied the
omens of my nativity. My father, at that time a commoner, was a
Winterhead, of a good old Somerset family, whose ramifications it were
poor modesty in an autobiographer to trace out for her own ennoblement.
My mother, whose maiden name was Linthorpe, was the daughter of a
Westmorland squire of comfortable means but little prominence. At the
time of their marriage my father’s business position was so sound (he
was a partner in several rubber companies) that no great pains were
taken about the drawing up of the settlement; and, by a series of family
accidents which I do not propose to set out here, the whole of my
mother’s very considerable prospects passed into other hands. Such a
deprivation caused, at the time, little foreboding to a man who had an
ample income from stocks, quite apart from the position which he enjoyed
as squire of Barstoke, a dream-like village that rests, half-hidden
among mist-wreathed poplars, in one of the fairest valleys of Somerset.
It would have been my good fortune to find solace in the companionship
of two brothers younger than myself, had not a mysterious destiny—which
of us can read his life’s record without confusion, when he considers
the long tale of infants who never reach maturity?—carried off both in
the age of their innocence to a world where innocence has its value. An
only child—for such I was, in effect—keeps fewer memories, I suppose, of
its very earliest years than one which from the first takes its place
among a series. The shadowy forms that people those years for me are the
forms of domestic servants, comfort-bringing cooks and awe-inspiring
butlers, whose short and simple annals there is no need to record in
this book. My nurse, a woman of strong character and decided views, left
me little permanent legacy of her care except that which most nurses
leave to most English children—a horror of spiders and of the Pope. My
mother was known to me as a lady who lived in a comfortable smell of
tweeds on a hard, scratchy chair, in front of a table full of shiny
things which I was forbidden to touch (not without reason, I found, for
they were hot when touched), and appeared to surround herself with a
group of similarly dressed ladies whom it was my favourite parlour trick
to distinguish, in spite of superficial resemblances, from her. My
father was two round legs, with provocative little tags hanging out of
either stocking, who must be approached cautiously if it were soon after
a meal, because the approach was likely to result in a sudden,
breathless elevation to the level of the mantelpiece—the level, but not
the proximity, as two Dresden shepherdesses, still unbroken before me as
I write, can testify.
My earliest at all datable reminiscence, and that is early enough in all
conscience, is of the air-raid over London that took place on
Whit-Sunday in 1917. We were, I have been told since, staying in London
at the time, and I was hastily roused from sleep and carried into the
cellars; for, although the danger from such raids in the Five Years’ War
was, judged by the standards of modern warfare, almost negligible, it
was a novelty and as such a cause of panic. My only reason for
remembering the incident is that, in her hurry to get me downstairs, my
nurse ran a pin into me; which immediate sensation meant far more to me
at the time than any nocturnal perils overhead. But that refers, of
course, to my conscious memory: according to what the doctors used to
tell me in the days when mind-curing was fashionable, the air-raid must
have left a deep and permanent mark on my subconsciousness. I have been
assured that I have to attribute to this cause my dislike of being in
the dark (except when I am in bed), my occasional nervousness about
loud, sudden noises, my nervousness about other people, especially
children, carrying firearms, my preference for having the door shut when
I am asleep, my preference for having the window open on the same
occasions, my want of ear for music, my inability to face learning the
German language, my distaste for sausages, my fondness for lying in bed
after I am called, my fear of cellars (which I thought was due to rats),
my refusal to wear a maroon dress, my irritability when people whistle
much in my hearing, my antipathy to the Tube when it is crowded, and
Heaven knows what other sinister characteristics. Really, if this
unremembered event made such a portentous difference in my life, so that
my character was practically fixed from the moment of its occurrence (as
these gentlemen seemed to imply), I am not sure that I ought not to end
off my reminiscences here! Whatever follows will surely seem trivial by
comparison.
It was while I was still too young to be taking any intelligent interest
in our family affairs that my father received his peerage. At a moment
when the George Government was in a difficult position owing to the
unfriendly attitude of certain of its Liberal critics, my father, who
was before all else a patriot, rendered services to the chief powers of
the nation which they were not slow to reward with a title. It is
pleasant to think that we thus belong to the old nobility, before
peerages were actually sold to the highest bidder—it was not until 1928,
it will be remembered, that this necessary but regrettable innovation
was introduced. My father would not take the title of Lord Barstoke,
because our villagers at home pronounced the name in a way that would
have made him hardly distinguishable from Lord Bostock; it was
characteristic of his easy way of doing things that he simply took down
a Bradshaw, ran his finger at random down the index of names, and became
Lord Blisworth for the rest of his life.
My girlhood was mostly spent in the country. My father, after his long
days and often nights of work at the Board of Rubber Control, felt
himself entitled to settle down when the war was over, and direct his
financial schemes from a distance. A fatal resolution, could he but have
foreseen its consequences! His preference was for the life of the
country; he hated, he said, to be jostled by a crowd of strangers, and
if the worst came to the worst, in a country place you could always go
round with the professional. Hills were dear to him, and woods, and
streams (especially the one you crossed in approaching the fifth green),
and the little world of Barstoke was all he asked for and all he cared
to know.
Barstoke, Barstoke in the ’teens of the century, how shall I ever
describe you? How communicate your atmosphere to the generation that
will soon have the pride of dating its letters with three noughts? The
stone-walled court by which you approached the front door, the mellow
façade of plaster, dating from the Fourth William, the terraces, the
beds with their quaint, tiled borders, the open lawn on which in those
days one used to play tennis, the box-hedges, cut as you never see them
cut now, the kitchen garden, with its warm brick walls, wasp-haunted,
yet dangling prizes to the adventurous. The wide hall, panelled all
through in pitch-pine, surrounded with the trophies of the chase and the
spoils of our ancestors; “heads” of stags shot (if you please) on
British soil; salmon found in Scottish lochs; arquebuses, flintlock
muskets, Mills bombs, and every form of obsolete artillery. The
dining-room, with its great maple-wood sideboard, that had facings of
beaten copper; all the walls hung with priceless old photogravures from
pictures by Landseer and Dicksee (I have seen £150 offered for a pair of
these lately at Frosting’s). The “drawing-room,” as it was still called,
with its gold-backed velvet chairs, its satin-textured wall-paper, its
marble mantelpiece and encaustic-tiled fireplace; where, on a winter
evening, my father would sit down with his friends to “bridge” or
“auction,” or, as a treat for myself, the then popular gramophone would
elicit its curious, drawling imitation of the airs of the day. And over
all this, when the curtains were drawn at evening, not the vulgar glare
of our modern electrics, but the old acetylene gas that was even then
going out of fashion, but used to shed, unless I deceive myself, a more
equable and a more desirable radiance.
But it must not be supposed, because I describe the downstairs rooms so
fully, that these were my familiar haunts. We were strictly brought up
in those days, and did not wander here and there, consorting freely with
our elders, as the young people do nowadays. No, at eleven every morning
I would be ruthlessly sent upstairs to change for my walk, nor was my
presence tolerated for more than half an hour or three-quarters after
luncheon: the real “children’s hour” was from half-past five in the
evening until, at half-past seven, I went up to dress for dinner. At
times other than these, I only had the liberty of one downstairs room,
where it was felt that I could not get in the way—the great library
where my father used to write his business letters. How I loved those
hours in the library; how I have regretted that, as fortune would have
it, none of my old childhood’s favourites were left to cheer me with
their memories in later life! “Alice in Wonderland,” with the original
Tenniel pictures, first editions of Beerbohm and Benson, books of travel
that thrilled you with discoveries at the South Pole or on Mount
Everest, histories of the Five Years’ War by men who had fought and
lived through it, quaint old sheets like the _Tatler_ and the _Sketch_,
_Punch_ with the old black-and-white drawings, atlases that still marked
the old boundaries of “Austria-Hungary,” and still put America on the
left-hand side of the world, not in the middle; books on foreign travel,
illustrated with the three-colour process; sermons of stout old
traditional Protestant theology by Inge and Temple and other preachers
of the day;—I might sprawl over these and such as these at my leisure,
understanding little except the pictures, yet vaguely drinking in the
atmosphere of that dead world to which I belong. I should explain that
children began their education much earlier in those days, and I had
learned to read by the time I was barely seven: at nine, I had a French
governess who taught me admirably in her own subject, though she was
not, of course, allowed to puzzle my little head with history or
science. I think that if I found myself superior in intellectual grasp
to many of my contemporaries when I came to face the world later, it was
this childish precocity which had laid the foundations of my knowledge.
But I have not yet taken you to the very hearth and centre of the whole
establishment, the nursery, I mean, and the nursery passage. Take my
hand, and let me pilot you carefully, for our way lies up the back
stairs, which are full of perils. That door we pass is the one room in
the house which children are not allowed to enter: that click-clicking
noise you hear is Daddy playing billiards, all in a great room that is
used for no other purpose. In front of us lies the linen cupboard, where
there is a bogy who jumps out if you do not run past it quickly. And
here (be careful!) the stairs are at their narrowest just where you can
reach the friendly aid of the banisters. Now, open the swing-door, and
there is the nursery passage in front of you! I would explain to you the
use of that “pogo-stick” in the corner if you were not already tired of
my _fin de siècle_ reminiscences.... Yes, that is a model of a Handley
Page, only it does not work now, and the split-nosed, pasty-faced pilot
sits there and will ever sit, looking a fool, in enforced inaction. The
badger in the glass case was caught on these grounds—a badger! You would
be no less incredulous if I had called it a hyena. That chart on the
wall was a picture of the “Western Front” in 1916—come away, you cannot
recapture the thrill of those old battles.... And here we are at the
nursery door itself.
Yes, that is my dolls’ house. No, there is no bath-room, no garage, no
electric light laid on. The front wall, I am sorry to say, opens all in
one piece, so that you cannot pay a call without discovering Esmeralda,
if luck will so have it, at her toilet upstairs. There is no lift, and
the staircase does not really pierce through the ground floor ceiling.
And yet, I do not fancy that I was very much less happy, or very much
less proud, when I showed off this thin-walled, vermilion-bricked affair
to my aunts than my friends can be when I inspect their more elaborate
and more realistic dolls’ flats. It is the spirit, after all, not the
apparatus that matters. And that is my toy train, running round the
ottoman. I do not know that its cardboard passengers wave their
cardboard hats any the less enthusiastically because it is only common
electricity, of an inferior voltage, that drives it round those
terrifying loops. That is a “Teddy” bear, named after a once great
predecessor of President O’Shaugnessy. But enough! I would not have
brought you to see my toys, so sacred are they, if I had known you would
curl your lip so disdainfully. Let me fish for a moment under the seat,
and bring out something that will make your mouth water and leave you
envious—yes, here it is ... the stamp album!
Here are stamps—be seated, take it on your knees—issued by the last Tsar
of Russia. Here is the lost dominion of that Emperor William whom the
other nations of Europe brought to book. Here are the double eagles of
the old Austrian Empire. Here is a common English stamp with the
post-mark “Dublin.” Here are the pretty, fantastic devices turned out by
the short-lived commonwealth of Czecho-Slovakia. Here is France
represented in a cap of liberty, “that woman bowling a no-ball,” my
father used to call it, with no emblem of religion on the whole extent
of the paper. Here is the Crescent lording it over Macedonia, here is
republican Portugal, here is Iceland tributary to Denmark. What a
history lesson for you on these strangely-milled slips of gummed paper!
Yes, you may crow over me as you will, but you must envy me my stamp
album.
Am I wrong, or do the _events_ of childhood impress themselves less on
the mind than often repeated scenes and habitual occupations? For
myself, it is scenes that I can reconstruct rather than moments, habits
rather than incidents. I can recall, for example, as if it were
yesterday, the picture, annually viewed, of my mother making pot-pourri.
She moved like a priestess over a mystical circle of rose leaves, her
decoctions around her: I was allowed to hold the bottles, never to pour.
Cinnamon, and orris root, and oil of cloves, and vervein, and vanilla
were jealously dropped, to give the poor petals immortality. I will not
make pot-pourri any more, since a chemist, unworthy of the name, has
begun to deny knowledge of the very ingredients. Nor can I recapture
that lost fragrance which would bring back my mother to the mysterious
receiving-station of the senses; nor will anything make me buy the
pot-pourri they sell you nowadays, “an imposture, my dear,” a friend has
warned me, “which seems to be made of nothing but peppermint and
eucalyptus.”
My father, as is right, I recollect in sterner moods. Especially during
one difficult fortnight, when he had strained his arm through a fall
downstairs, and was confined, chafing, to the entourage of the house. It
was, I think, characteristic of the man’s energy that he should have set
about teaching me to play golf. I was five years old at the time, and a
pardonably unapt pupil. You must picture me on the “tennis-lawn,” with
an old putter swung over my shoulder, almost too heavy for my feeble
strength, while he encourages me to drive. “Feet square, confound you!
No, like this! Now, keep your eye on the ball; the end of the club will
get on all right without you ogling it, you minx! Good Lord! you’re
under it again ... there, there, don’t cry; replace the divot before
Mummy sees it.” He was an indulgent father, but he had no sympathy with
weakness of the moral fibre, and I sometimes think that it is to him I
owe, under Providence, the doggedness of character with which I have
heard my friends credit me.
Of daily pictures, the one I recall with most vividness is my
afternoon’s outing. I do not mean in my earliest years, when my nurse
would wheel me out (by hand, for this was before the days of
perambulators) down to the end of the drive, and pass the time of day
with the lodgekeeper; but in that prouder period, when I had already
passed my walking test, and was allowed to go out, as my Nurse said,
“like a little lady.”
Round came the motor, churning up the gravel, avoiding the beds as if by
a miracle; and there was our good old chauffeur, Masters, in his peaked
cap and double-breasted great-coat, holding open the door for us. There
followed, in early days, the starting of the car by a sort of winding
apparatus in front (unless my memory deceives me): I always felt a
certain sense of ceremonial deficiency about the “self-starter.” Then
down the broad sweep of the drive, with the giant araucarias on either
side, under the lichenous stone archway of the lodge, and all Somerset
was before us. The apples tugged at their overloaded branches, the cows
stood patiently regardant in the water-meadows, the forester’s axe
clicked on the hill-side, the old church-towers beckoned and were
swallowed up behind us, sun-bonneted old dames slipped, curtseying, into
the hedgerows—what better fate could a fairy enchanter bring us, than to
be always at the springtime of life, and always at the autumn of the
year?
I cannot remember much of the friends who called or came to visit us. My
mother’s family was represented by an old, angular Miss Linthorpe, and a
married sister, Lady Trecastle. Miss Linthorpe, an aunt of my mother’s,
already belonged to an older generation. You could tell it from the big,
tortoiseshell-rimmed lorgnettes she wore (these were a kind of
spectacles held in the hand by a stem, more for the purpose of staring
your _vis-à-vis_ down than for any assistance they gave to the
eyesight). You could tell it from the way she dropped her final g’s, and
said “What?” suddenly, without meaning to ask a question, at the end of
the sentence. You could tell it, above all, from a curious dignity she
had, a dignity which seemed to sit upon her as of right _because she was
a woman_, that I have never known except in my earliest memories. She
was very brusque with my mother, especially about my own education. On
one occasion, I remember, I had torn a rather pretty fan of my mother’s,
because she had refused to grant me some trifling request. My mother,
instead of passing over the incident as a modern mother would, was
endeavouring to make me say I was sorry. When Miss Linthorpe came into
the room, and the situation was explained to her, she asked, as if it
was the most natural thing in the world, “Why don’t you send the little
hussy to bed?” My mother explained that, according to the latest
educational theories, sending children to bed early when they were young
was likely to lay up the seeds of insomnia for them in early life.
“Insomnia?” said Miss Linthorpe, “so much the better; she won’t inherit
Blisworth’s gross habit of snoring.” “But, Aunt Adela, I daren’t; I
don’t know what her father would say.” “Blisworth,” said the
imperturbable old lady, “is a fool.” “Hush, aunt dear!” expostulated my
mother; “you mustn’t say such things before the child.” “Why not?” was
the answer. “I shan’t be the last person she hears calling (she
pronounced it “callin’”) Blisworth a fool, unless she grows up deaf.” I
liked Miss Linthorpe, in spite of her brutal manners, and never dreaded
the prospect of her visits.
Lady Trecastle lived in Ireland: at least, she used to spend about three
weeks of the year at her Irish house before the Free State was declared
in 1922, and after that never went near it at all, but filled in her
time complaining of the “rebels,” as she called them, for making it
impossible. Her visits to us were rather lengthy, and I have heard my
father speculate whether he could not bribe the “rebels” to lure her
back to Ireland and kidnap her. The fact was, I suppose, that English
families had become so accustomed to playing the rôle of a governing
race in Ireland that they found it hard to be tolerated as foreigners.
It is difficult now to imagine the feeling that was excited then over
the “Irish question.”
Of our neighbours, our most frequent callers were a certain General
Lestrange and his wife, whom I used to think very old-fashioned because
my nurse told me they believed in ghosts. I imagine they were really
bitten by that curious wave of occultism that made itself felt in
English society at the beginning of the century. But I am afraid this
undistinguished record will become wearisome if I prolong it. My father
had long since given up political life, finding, no doubt, that it
unduly cramped his energies: “It’s all very well,” he would say, “but
you can’t really do two things at once”: consequently, the political
life of the period passed us by, and we rusticated amidst a small
coterie of country squires, who still (Heaven knows how) kept their
estates and their large houses going. But my father’s inattention to the
drift of the world around him was to have more fatal consequences. When
I was only just fifteen, there came a black day on which he appeared
gloomy and preoccupied, and I must not disturb him because he was
“worried about business.” He spent all day at the telephone, and we all
knew that something must be seriously wrong: indeed, they rang up from
the club-house to know whether he was ill. It proved in the end that,
through mismanagement on the part of others, he had lost far the greater
part of his money, and it would be necessary in future to live in a much
smaller house and sell Barstoke to anyone who would offer. By great good
fortune, we managed to find purchasers: some Benedictine sisters, who
had outgrown their previous accommodation, were willing to pay a good
price for it. We were equally lucky on the other side, and secured a
comfortable, though far from luxurious house, at Beaconsfield, just
opposite the fourth tee.
I have visited Barstoke again not very long since, and the good sisters
were very kind to me. They had turned the billiard-room into a chapel,
and broken up many of the larger rooms, so that I could hardly recognize
them; but it is something to feel that the shell of the building
remains, and is likely to remain, intact. And yet I could not be
altogether at my ease there, for we like our earliest memories to remain
undisturbed: and for me, though I have lived long since then and seen
many cities and travelled far from my startingpoint, nothing will ever
appeal again as the park did, and the lodge-gates, and the unwieldy
tower of the village church beyond them, and the trees of Barstoke, and
its fruit garden.