HOME LIFE
The word “home,” albeit of Teutonic origin, has in great measure
outlived the conception it was designed to express.—DR. DIVES: _Life
of Malthus_.
And now it is high time that I returned from my political reminiscences
to the chronicle of our simple life at Greylands. After all, what
historians will value (if they value anything!) in such a book as this
is not the record of great public events, even when these can be
narrated by one who took part in them; but the story of how we lived,
what we thought about, what were our daily cares and interests. One of
the happiest recollections I have of those days is that of our iron
wedding in ’54. It was not at that time customary to hold the religious
ceremony over again, with a formal renewal of consent; but we made merry
on the occasion, entertained our friends, and, of course, received
presents. Our friends were extremely generous on this occasion, and I
was especially touched by the letter with which Archie Lock enclosed his
cheque: “Really, you are one of the most economical friends I have in
the way of wedding presents! Look at Cynthia Stockdale[11] now—she gets
married so often that I’m thinking of making out a banker’s order for
her.” Still more did I appreciate a flitch of bacon, bought and
addressed at Dunmow, over the Essex border, “with respectful compts from
J. Hodges.”
The accommodation at Greylands could be regal when it liked, and we
managed to put up no less than fifteen guests for the ceremony. Mrs.
Rowlands, rather sobered now by her experiences in a violent campaign
against the daily nearing menace of Disestablishment, had still enough
of her old spirit left to compose a special form of service for the
occasion. It began, I need hardly say, with “O God, our help in ages
past,” as a tribute to the long lease we had had of married life: then
there was a Psalm or two appropriate to extreme old age; then it strayed
off (as far as I could make out) into the Baptism of Adults and the Form
of Prayer to be used at Sea; then we had the prayer for the High Court
of Parliament. Then there was “Peace, perfect peace,” then an extremely
embarrassing sermon from Mr. Rowlands, who talked of our marriage as if
it was the one fixed landmark in a world of continual change and
progress; then a translation of “Ein feste Burg” in which the words “And
though they take our life, Goods, honour, children, wife, Yet is their
profit small” struck one as hardly felicitous. And finally the _Te
Deum_, with what Mrs. Rowlands called “the characteristically mediæval
parts” left out. Juliet Savage asked Mrs. Rowlands whether she couldn’t
have put in “My old Dutch,” but this was lost on her—Mrs. Rowlands did
not read nineteenth century literature.
I remember Porstock, who had fortunately been able to get back from
America just in time for the ceremony, surprising us all by appearing in
the old opalescent suit, now ten years out of fashion, but, I am glad to
say, still fitting round the waist. I remember Lord Billericay telling
us in a speech that in his young days they didn’t have any iron
weddings; one wedding was iron enough for them. I remember Archie Lock
telling us about a man whom he congratulated on his future bride
answering “The same to you and many of them.” I remember my two sons,
one on each side of me, doing good work with the champagne, and Juliet
telling me that I looked like the mother of the Bacchi. I know I cried a
great deal, but I seem to remember only the things which made me laugh.
The education of our two children was now a constant care to us.
Francis, though never a strong child, was already at his multiplication
table (not mine!), and even little Gervase was learning his alphabet.
Their names were down for Eton, since the Education Act made it
impossible for them to be brought up at home. We were, I think, strict
parents; Francis, for example, to the day he went to Eton was never
allowed to take the helico out except in fine weather; neither was given
permission to smoke till the age of twelve, and they were made to go out
for a walk on Sunday afternoon if they had not been to church. A still
more unusual embargo—neither of them was allowed to come into the
boudoir except to ask a question or make a request of myself or some one
else who was there. The difficulty of this was that they were not easy
to find when visitors came to tea, until I arranged that they should not
go out in the afternoon without the portable wireless: on receipt of the
call “CD” (“company downstairs”) they had to come back at once to the
house, and if there was a further call “CC” they went up to put on clean
collars. Then they had to burst into the boudoir saying, “Mummy, may we
go and shoot the gold-fish?” or some such formula, to which I would
answer, “Not just now, dears, come and look at some pretty pictures.” It
was thus always possible to show our family treasure to visitors without
the appearance of any unnecessary restraint.
Their governor was a charming young Rhinelander called Schultz. He was
very highly recommended to me by friends; he had, they told me, taken a
particularly good degree at his University. When I interviewed him in
London I asked what he took his degree in, and he said very seriously
“Pædagogy.” I asked whether he could play the piano; he said no, he had
given all his time to pædagogy. I asked whether he knew French; he said
no, only pædagogy. I began to become interested in this curious subject,
and asked him what pædagogy was about. He brightened up at once, and
said, “It is very simple; you trust the child, he love you.” I wanted to
know how long his course had been; he said six years. I said that seemed
rather a long time; he said most unfortunately his course had been cut
short. I asked him what he would have studied if he had been able to
take a full course, he said pædagogy. I was beginning to get quite
hypnotized by this time, and hastily engaged him.
The boys, who were very high-spirited (taking after their mother, I am
afraid my readers will suggest), were not prepared to take him
seriously. Francis, who took the helico over to meet him at Broxbourne,
tried to frighten him by looping the loop as they came back; which was
very naughty of him, because he knew it was not allowed to loop the loop
even when by himself. Herr Schultz hung on grimly, trusting Francis,
which nobody who knew him would have done, for the boy was a very poor
driver. Next day I suggested an hour for lessons: “When they like,” said
Herr Schultz. I thought it might be well to neglect their likes and
dislikes in the matter, but this was apparently unpædagogic: “You not do
what he not wills; you trust him, he love you.” The boys decided to go
off to the pictures at Buntingford: Herr Schultz accompanied them, sat
behind them, and in a slow, level voice instructed them on everything
they saw. “It was worse than Mrs. Rowlands lecturing on Venice,” Gervase
said afterwards. Finally they broke away and went to the meet; Herr
Schultz followed, contributing a stream of information on the habits of
dogs. They went bird’s-nesting, and Herr Schultz proved intolerable on
the subject of ornithology. Next day the boys volunteered to have a
fixed hour for lessons on condition that Herr Schultz would leave them
alone the rest of the day, and he came to me beaming: “You trust them,”
he said, “they love you.” I am bound to say he was a most successful
teacher, using no threat to enforce discipline except that of his
company. They rather liked “old Stilts” too, after a time; and with his
quite unimaginative, wholly serious manner he became a general
favourite—only Lady Combe could not approve of him, because he was “a
Roman.” “And a German Roman, too, my dear”—as if that form of the
infection were more likely to be catching. They had no other governor
till I sent them, at the ages of ten and eleven, to a preparatory school
at Bournemouth.
I was induced to do this by hearing that Dr. Tulse, the head-master of
this establishment, was particularly successful in giving home-bred
pupils those instincts of discipline which would be expected of them at
a public school. His method was at the time an unusual one, though I
believe it has been imitated since. It was based on the well-known work
of Professor Krausenberg of Jena, “The Education Myth.” The thesis of
the book, it will be remembered, is that the motive-force of the
boy-mind is an opposition-loving reaction from the teacher-stimulus. Try
to get a boy interested in something and he will immediately become
interested in something quite different, to which his attention will
inevitably wander all through the hours of class. Our mistake, says
Krausenberg, has been that we always set out to teach the child what we
want him to learn, with the result that he always learns something else.
Fired with this discovery, Dr. Tulse started a school at which all
educating should be conducted by what he called “the indirect method.”
He would go into class and read out a funny story by Billman or Harcourt
Clynes, and his class would sit round him surreptitiously studying Dante
or Sophocles under the desk. At least he said they did. The walls of the
class-rooms were plastered with all sorts of useful information about
history and science; and Dr. Tulse’s assistants had orders to say at
frequent intervals, “Don’t sit there staring at the wall, look at your
books,” with the result that the pupils always stared at the walls,
“drinking in information,” the head-master would enthusiastically say,
“not through the œsophagus but through the pores.” Some particularly
instructive maps and plans were turned with their faces to the wall, and
there was a strict school rule against looking at them: on the subject
of these, one was told, any of the boys could have passed an examination
any day. In the library there was one shelf very high up on the wall, so
that you could only reach it by climbing on the chairs, which were
covered with a very delicate and easily-spoiled kind of silk. This shelf
contained Latin and French grammars, classical dictionaries, and the
like; and there was a label on it to say “No boy may touch these books.”
They were never out of circulation. Sometimes a master would come up to
a boy and whisper into his ear Boyle’s Law, or the rules for doing
conditional clauses in Greek, and tell him to be very careful not to
pass the information on, as it was strictly private and not quite
delicate. The whole institution would talk of nothing else for a week.
The discipline of the establishment was managed on the same lines as the
teaching. During play-time, no boy was allowed within a radius of half a
mile from the school, with the result that no boy ever strayed outside
it. All games were forbidden, and were played enthusiastically. You were
liable to be flogged if you were found in bed before ten: the masters,
creeping in on tip-toe, used to find all their pupils fast asleep by
half-past nine. Cigarettes were served out after all meals, and were
secretly thrown away by the boys, who complained of them in their
letters home as “filthy muck.” Very plain food was served to the
masters; but as the masters never came into the dining-room till a
quarter of an hour after the boys, this plain food had all disappeared
by the time they arrived, and they regaled themselves later on with the
masterpieces of a French _chef_, which the boys had contemptuously
thrown under their seats. The passages were wrapped in a cloistral
stillness; if any master heard so much as a whisper there, he would come
out and say, “Make more noise there, please,” and all would be quiet
once more. There was a large bath-room labelled “For the use of Masters
only,” from which sounds of splashing came all day long. If two boys
quarrelled, they were ordered to fight, and they immediately settled
their differences by arbitration.
I am glad to say that my own boys got very bad reports all the time they
were there. Again and again they were “swished” for going into the
Chapel, tidying their desks, opening their windows at night, wearing
black clothes on Sunday, touching their caps to masters, doing Swedish
drill before breakfast, taking books out of the classical library,
keeping silence in the dormitory, and otherwise breaking the rules of
the establishment. Once they very nearly got expelled for deliberately
mowing the lawn. It was a wonderful school. I am bound to say, on the
other hand, that they paid their pupils very little,[12] but high fees
were an advantage which Porstock and I could easily afford to forego.
It was just before Francis went to Eton that I lost my dear mother. Her
health had been failing for some time, and she had been obliged to go to
the Campagna, Sierra Leone and other health resorts under doctor’s
orders, but it was plain that she could not last long, and she came back
to Greylands to end her life quietly there. Towards the end her memory
failed rather, and she would think she was back in her childhood’s days:
she would walk upstairs without taking any notice of the lift, or take a
pen out of some old drawer and absent-mindedly begin writing her letters
by hand. Her end was a very peaceful one, and Mrs. Rowlands, who
attended her in her last illness, said she had never met such touching
faith. Our friends were very kind to me in my great sorrow, and two
Cabinet Ministers flew back behind her ashes from Golder’s Green to West
Mill.
Francis’ name had been entered for Mr. Townshend’s house at Eton. This
was in ’41, only three years before my marriage, so he was lucky to be
able to get in so early. Mr. Townshend was dead, and his successor, Mr.
Cubitt, had retired, but I was told that the spirit of Mr. Frodsham’s
house (as it then was) remained excellent. Although it could not compete
with the classical tradition of Downside, and had yielded to Tonbridge
the palm of merely numerical superiority, Eton was still the premier
school of England. The reputation which it had enjoyed under “flogging
Headmasters” like Lyttelton had not deserted it in our more humanitarian
days. I was a proud mother when I went down for Francis’ first Fourth of
June! Old Lord Billericay, I remember, was with me, and it was
interesting to note all the changes that had happened since his time,
and the indignation which they provoked in the breast of that unbending
old Conservative. I remember, for example, that “Pop” were now allowed
to wear calf shoes; that notices were put up in the right hand as well
as in the left-hand window of the School Bookshop; that the counter in
“Little Brown’s” had been moved back six inches in order to make more
room for customers; that the boys were allowed to wear “change” at
“absence”; that the railings round the statue of the Founder in School
Yard had been renewed; that the procession of boats started a quarter of
an hour earlier than it used to; that the façade of the School Hall (a
fascinating building, in the florid style of the early days of this
century) had been cleaned; that the choir boys no longer dressed in Eton
suits; that the old “danger signal” for motors on the Slough Road had
been removed—and so on: none of these symptoms failed to confirm in Lord
Billericay the gloomy presentiment that “the place was going to the
dogs.” I confess that for myself, in spite of the great changes which
had swept over it, Eton remained a link with the distant past, and the
mellow brickwork of the Warre Schools seemed to breathe out the
enchantments of the Middle Age. We went to “Speeches,” of course, and
these had a wonderfully old-world atmosphere about them—the
knee-breeches and silk stockings of the performers, the immemorial dust
of the School Hall, the selections for recitation (including a scene
from “You never can tell” and a Maeterlinck piece whose name I have
forgotten) all conspired to make you feel as if you were back in the
nineteenth century. I think the most modern poem that was recited was
Edgar Pirbright’s Hymn to the North Sea, written when the first
tide-trap was opened, the one that begins “Now, you damned scrimshanker,
get a move on,” and I suppose Edgar Pirbright was dead before Wallace
K.S. was born!
Both my boys were very happy at Eton. Many old Etonians were anxious
about the future of the place at the time; for Dr. Sandridge had only
just assumed the Headmastership, and his was said to be a reforming
temperament; there was a rumour that he intended to abolish “Sunday
Questions” and to shorten early School by five minutes—proposals which
put everybody in arms against him. But the school seemed to prosper none
the less. Both my sons (who were said by my friends to take after their
mother in an extraordinary way) became good footballers, and Gervase
only just missed his Eight.
Meanwhile, Greylands, though I suppose I ought not to boast of it,
became famous for its hospitality. More than one Conference with foreign
diplomats has been held there, and from Saturday to Monday we nearly
always had a full house. I have, curiously enough, a complete record of
our visitors, for my Mother, among her old-world habits, retained a
great devotion to the principle of “The Visitors’ Book,” in which our
guests were expected to write, not only their names, but some quotation
from a favourite author, or, if they preferred it, some original
composition. Artists would occasionally draw pictures in it. I have the
unwieldy volume before me now: let us take a peep through the pages of
it. Here is an original drawing by Lennox the Futuribilist, “Lady
Porstock’s new helico.” The machine is, of course, represented just
after a bad crash—no, this is the right way up to hold it—and the
mechanic is seen as a confused mass of drapery a few yards away. Those
who only know Lennox as a painter of the _macabre_ would be surprised at
this revelation of what he could do in his lighter vein. And a few pages
on, strange contrast! there is one by Charmant in the neo-classical
manner, “Lady Porstock as Artemis”—not drawn, I am glad to say, from the
life. Visitors’ Books make strange bedfellows.
Then here is poor Cynthia de Brignard’s[13] quotation, such a sad one!
“All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.” I see that she came back
again later after she had married that American man, Tarporley: she
seems to have been in a more cheerful mood then, for she writes, “If at
first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again.” Then there is Archie
Lock, not in his best form, but the helico was waiting, I remember, as
he wrote it:
This is (please do not get a shock)
The signature of Archie Lock.
If you forge it on a cheque,
You will get it in the neck;
Nothing causes so much rancour
In the bosom of my banker:
“Cheques,” he says, “we cannot pass; it’s
No dam use; there ain’t no assets.”
Georgina Grosheim, of course, tried to be funny and pretended that we
were a village inn: “Have no complaints. The cooking is all that can be
desired, the attendance excellent, and the management kind and
thoughtful. Shall come here instead of Margate next year.” That is just
on the opposite page to a very heavy quotation put in by Lady Pulbrooke:
“Philosophers are for ever asking what is the true basis on which the
welfare of a commonwealth depends. They fail in their search because
they do not look near enough. The welfare of a commonwealth depends upon
the qualities of its citizens, on kind hearts and honest faces.” I
suppose it must have been Juliet Savage who wrote “My dear Holmes! How
on earth....” at the tail of this quotation; she was always “ragging” my
Visitors’ Book. Then there is Lord Billericay in his sportive vein—it
must have cost the poor old gentleman a sleepless night, for humorous
verse was not his natural medium:
There was once a good fellow called Porstock,
Who had of misfortune a poor stock,
He’d an excellent life,
And a rattling good wife,
And a safe so full up that the door stuck.
It was a pity that Canon Dives should have been our next guest, but of
course he had to take his turn, in spite of a slight change of note: he
put in an extract from one of his own sermons: “Hospitality is enjoined
on us, as we know, in the Scriptures. We even read that through its
exercise some have entertained angels unawares; and though it is
probable that the word here translated ‘angels’ should be more correctly
rendered ‘messengers,’ the point of the aphorism is the same. Duty is,
however, a word which has tended to fall out of our modern vocabulary,
perhaps unfortunately, for after all the life which has no guiding
principle is a tedious and frequently an ineffective one. But, my dear
sisters and brothers, if we cannot cultivate hospitality as a duty, at
least let us cultivate it as an act of politeness, or shall we not
rather say, of friendship. After all, there is one hostelry which awaits
us all alike at the end of our long journey.” Juliet Savage, I see, has
appended the words “Dives, when you and I go down to Hell,” a quotation,
I think, from Belloc. And next to that is Blanche Engelheim’s charade:
My third is a wife makes her husband my first
And keeps him away from my second:
My whole is a town, though with Temperance cursed,
Where wives by the dozen are reckoned.
Then there is a characteristic scrawl: “Thank God, they taught me how to
write at school. Otherwise I should be in a hole. Tommy Lieberts.” But I
must not go on wearying my readers with all these trivialities. Let me
finish with Lord Hopedale’s quotation, some clever lines from
Mainwaring, a poet who was hardly known at the time when they were
copied in my Visitors’ Book.
The world goes on; whither, we do not know;
Whence, we’ve forgotten, it’s so long ago:
Scientists ask “Since when?”; the Blessed cry
“Till when?”—God knows, and only God knows why.
Or, stay, there is one other extract I must record, if only to show that
my roof has housed an Archbishop of Westminster. Cardinal Smith came
just after Lord Hopedale, and he wrote what I think he said was the
motto of some Elizabethan Catholic: “Praeterit figura huius saeculi;
fides Catholica manet.”
It was on the 18th of June, 1963, that my great loss fell upon me—so
great, that I do not even yet know how to write about it. My dear
husband set out on his helicopter for France, expecting to be absent for
about a fortnight. The day was somewhat threatening, and in the
afternoon a thunderstorm, which in some unaccountable way had not been
predicted by the Weather Office, swept across the Channel. It must have
interfered both with his engines and with his wireless; and no doubt the
descending apparatus, which in those days was very imperfect, was
unreachable or unworkable. No word was ever heard of him, no trace ever
found of his descent. I felt inconsolable in my loss. In all the
nineteen years of our married life my husband had never been away from
home for more than six months at a time; I had depended, perhaps more
than I knew, upon his strong presence and his unfailing interest in my
affairs. He left behind him two sons, neither of them destined by
Providence to survive the Great War. When these were taken from me I
was, I thank God, in a better position to bear the blow: I knew more, by
that time, both of what is meant by suffering, and of what God meant a
man and a woman to be to each other. _Beatus vir qui implevit desiderium
suum ex ipsis_—if I had known that, I might have children now to comfort
my grey hairs.