CHILDHOOD IN ROLLESTON: EARLY READING—ADVENTURES IN LONDON
STREETS—A COMMUNITY OF DOLLS—BUCKINGHAM PALACE—LIFE IN
ROLLESTON—EDUCATION—BROTHER AND FATHER.
[Illustration: On a Letter to Ruskin.]
When Kate was midway between five and six years of age, the family
moved into a larger house and shop nearer to Highbury. Here they fairly
established themselves, and here was the home of her recollection when
she looked back on her childhood.
Then a new world opened to her, a new, boundless world, unfenced about
with material walls, illimitable, inexhaustible—the world of books and
measureless imagination. Of a sudden, to her mother’s and her own great
happiness and surprise, she found that she could read! First came the
two-a-penny Fairy Tales in coloured paper covers. There were larger
ones for a penny, but the halfpenny ones were better. _Pepper and Salt_
was one of the most enjoyably and delightfully afflictive. Who that has
read it in tender years can ever forget how the Cruel Stepmother kills
Salt and buries her, or the mysterious voice that chanted—
‘She drank my blood and picked my bones,
And buried me under the marble stones.’
Kate never forgot them, as, indeed, she never forgot _Bluebeard_, or
_Toads and Diamonds_, or _Beauty and the Beast_. But, although she
never forgot them, she never remembered them too well. The delicious
excitement could always be renewed. A hundred times she had heard
Bluebeard call in his awful voice to Fatima to come down. A hundred
times Sister Ann had cried her shrill reply: ‘I see the sky that looks
blue and the grass that looks green.’ A hundred times the little cloud
of dust had risen, and the brothers had come in the nick of time to
save her. But, at the hundredth reading, Kate’s fear was as acute and
her relief as great as at the first.
Other favourites were _Frank, Harry, and Lucy_, _The Purple Jar_, _The
Cherry Orchard_, _Julianna Oakley_, _The Child’s Companion_, and _Line
upon Line_.
Then there were the verses of Jane and Ann Taylor, rendered especially
delightful by Mrs. Greenaway’s dramatic rendering at bedtime—‘Down in
a green and shady bed,’ ‘Down in a ditch, poor donkey,’ and ‘Miss Fanny
was fond of a little canary.’ The last harrowed Kate with an intense
sorrow, as indeed it did to the day when she set to work to illustrate
it for the joy and delight of a later generation in a volume dedicated
to Godfrey, Dorothy, Oliver, and Maud Locker.[2] Others which she could
never hear too often were ‘Greedy Richard,’ ‘Careless Matilda,’ ‘George
and the Chimney-Sweep,’ ‘Dirty Jim,’ ‘Little Ann and her Mother,’ and
‘The Cow and the Ass.’
‘Take a seat,’ said the Cow, gently waving her hand.
‘By no means, dear Madam,’ said he, ‘while you stand.’
Then showing politeness, as Gentlemen must,
The Ass held his tongue that the Cow might speak first.
But one book there was which, whilst it delighted the rest, depressed
little Kate horribly and miserably, though she would never confess it,
partly out of loyalty to her father and partly from shame at what she
felt might be regarded as a foolish weakness. This was a book of rhymes
for which Mr. Greenaway had engraved the wood-blocks. It contained the
‘Courtship, Life, and Death of Cock Robin and Jenny Wren’; ‘The Three
Bears’; ‘The Little Man and the Little Maid’; ‘The Wonderful History of
Cocky Locky, Henny Penney, and Goosey Poosey’; and a story of a Goose
and her three daughters, Gobble, Goosey, and Ganderee, which began
A Goose who was once at the point of death
She called her three daughters near.
These seemed to her tender heart cruel and terrible tales, and their
funny names and affectation of gaiety in no way palliated their
brutality or comforted their little reader.
Other books over which she would pore were the Plays of Shakespeare,
illustrated by Kenny Meadows, all of which she managed to read before
she was many years older, two large volumes of the _Illuminated
Magazine_, an odd volume of the _Illustrated Family Journal_, and
a monster scrap-book of coloured and uncoloured prints, collected
probably by her father in the course of his occupation. One dreadful
print there was among the last which had for her a horrible
fascination. It was the etched plate by George Cruikshank from
Ainsworth’s _Tower of London_—‘The Burning of Edward Underhill on
Tower Green,’ where, according to Reid’s rather lurid description, we
see ‘the victim losing self-command in his horrible sufferings, and in
agony plunging his hands into his flesh.’ It is easy to realise the
effect of such a scene upon a child so sensitive that she could not
bear to dwell even upon the sufferings of Gobble, Goosey, and Ganderee.
And yet, terrible as it was, she would not, had she wished, escape
from its dreadful attractiveness. Into the victim’s stricken face she
would gaze and gaze until she trembled with horror. Then seizing it and
shutting her eyes, she would frantically hide it away in a cupboard
filled with copies of the _Illustrated London News_, slipping it
blindly in amongst the reams of printed paper, half hoping never to see
it again. Then would pass an interval of relief, only to be followed as
certainly as night follows day by an irresistible craving to look upon
the awful thing again, a frantic search, another horrified glance, and
again a hasty but not a final occultation.
[Illustration: On a Letter to Ruskin.]
But such experiences were few and detached. The prevailing notes of her
life, she insists, were wonder and delight. How limitless, for example,
were the pleasures to be got out of the streets, where, with her
younger sister Fanny, she was allowed to roam, so long as she kept away
from the forbidden land which lay beyond Wellington Street on the one
hand and Barnsbury Street on the other. All else was out of bounds. Of
course, like all imaginative children, they played at the fascinating
game of ‘Pretence,’ merging their individualities in those of grand and
mysterious children whom, nurse-guarded, as the little Greenaways were
not, they met on their daily walks. Two there were in particular who,
they made believe, had their home in the sky, descending to earth daily
for their morning’s exercise. And surely there was nothing incongruous
or surprising in the fact that these celestial visitors should choose
Islington as the most eligible part of this best of all possible
worlds for the purpose. Where else could they see such fascinating
shops and such rustling, perfumed ladies? ‘Where else such a Fancy
Emporium into which you could gaze and gaze for ever (until driven
away by the owner) at the picture-books and puzzle-maps in the glass
case at the side of the doorway?’ And when chased away from there,
where such another print-shop with its coloured engravings after John
Martin—‘Belshazzar’s Feast,’ ‘The Great Day of Wrath,’ and ‘The Plains
of Heaven’?—pictures which Kate never wearied of, and which from their
wealth of detail could never be wholly mastered.
If variety of entertainment were wanted, was there ever such a
diversity of side-shows as the corner of Wellington Street, by great
good fortune just within bounds?—by good fortune, because Kate and
her sister, being out on parole, never dreamed of straying beyond the
permissible limit. Here one day would be found a sailor with one leg
real and the other of wood, appealing to the sympathetic passer-by by
means of a large and lurid picture of a ship overturned by a whale.
Another day the pitch would be taken by an impostor of the same
feather who set forth an equally lurid representation of a battle on
ship-board, with a cannon-ball exploding in the midst of a crowded deck
and dealing around all manner of grisly and impossible hurts. Impostor
he must have been, for no brave man ever hit out so viciously as he
did with his crutch at well-behaved children, directly he found that
no grown-up people were looking, just because he knew that there were
no coppers coming to him from that quarter. Again, there was the Punch
and Judy show. Hither at the first sound of the drum and Punch’s weird
screech the little Greenaways’ feet would be set incontinently running.
Arrived, with breathless interest they would follow the familiar
tragedy, thrill at the ghost, pity the poor trembling protagonist,
and follow the drama responsively to its close. But there were times
when their eagerness was cruelly balked. As the drama drew to its most
thrilling moment, there would fall a great despair upon the little
onlookers. Of a sudden the play would stop, and the stage manager,
stepping forward, would declare that the audience was not a paying
one, and that unless a certain amount of hard cash were forthcoming,
he couldn’t afford to go on. Now the little Greenaways never had any
money, so they were helpless in the matter, and, if the rest of the
audience happened to be in the same plight, as was not rarely the case,
there was an abrupt termination to the play for that day, and Punch
struck his camp for some less impecunious sphere.
But the corner was full of possibilities. As likely as not the
faithless Punch would be replaced in almost no time by the hardly less
fascinating Fantoccini—of which Mother Goose with her milk-pails from
which jumped little children, the skeleton that came to bits and joined
itself together again, and the four little figures dancing a quadrille
dwelt longest in the memory. Indeed, rarely was this wonderful corner
unoccupied, for, lacking the more regular entertainers, there was
always the chance of tumblers, or tight-rope dancers, or a Happy
Family. The last-named, by the way, not infrequently belied its
description, and had to be hastily curtained for the saving of its
impresario’s reputation. Such _contretemps_, it need hardly be said,
met with hearty appreciation from the audience, for children, like
their elders, bear with more than equanimity the misfortunes of others.
Again, there were dancing dolls which knocked each other about in very
lively fashion, a variety of peep-shows, and a delightful organ with
a scene of great ingenuity on the top, in which an executioner cut
off the head of a queen about once every minute, to the tune of the
‘Marseillaise.’
There was one dreadful day when there came something more than little
Kate had bargained for. In place of the looked-for entertainment, there
marched along a man dressed in skins, a modern edition of Solomon
Eagle, who blew blasts out of a great brass trumpet and announced in
a loud voice that the End of the World was at hand. The shock was a
terrible one. For months Kate went about haunted by the gloomiest
forebodings. Those gruesome pictures of Martin’s in the print-seller’s
window assumed a new significance. She began to guess at what we call
inexorable fate, to catch a glimpse of destiny. Nor was this all.
From pondering, fearsomely, the world’s imminent destruction so
convincingly announced, she came to trying, in a hopeless, childish
fashion to hark back to the beginning of things. Driving herself
almost frantic with terror at the thought of burning worlds afloat
in space as dark as night, she would rack her brains as to what was
behind it all, until she faced the blank black wall of nothingness,
against which she was not the first to knock her poor little head. Then
baffled and despairing she would run away, she says, seeking relief and
forgetfulness wherever it might be found.
Fortunately she had not a few distractions. There were her dolls, which
ranged from the little giant ‘Gauraca’ (given to Kate for learning a
piece of pianoforte music so entitled, then in vogue), so huge—more
than a yard and a quarter long—that she could only be carried with
legs trailing on the ground, to the little group of Dutch mannikins
of which half-a-dozen could be grasped in one hand. By right of bulk
Gauraca claimed precedence. She wore the discarded clothes of brother
John, the tucks in which had to be let down to make them big enough,
and took full-sized babies’ shoes. She was a wonder, not indeed
altogether lovable; rather was she of value as a stimulator of covetous
feelings in others. Below Gauraca came dolls of all sorts and sizes,
too many for enumeration, but all of importance, seeing that on their
persons were performed those tentative experiments which were to colour
the work of twenty years later.
[Illustration]
On these dolls Kate dilates at some length, and the gist of her record
is this. Least in size though first in rank came the Royal group, with
Queen Victoria (who had cost a halfpenny) as its centre, supported
by Prince Albert (also a halfpenny) appropriately habited in a white
gauze skirt trimmed with three rows of cerise satin, and, for further
distinction and identification, a red ribbon tied across his shoulder
and under his left arm. These garments could only be removed by an
actual disintegration. The Royal circle was completed by the princes
and princesses at a farthing apiece. Their dresses were made from the
gauze bonnet linings just then going out of fashion, and such scraps of
net and ribbon as had proved unsaleable.
[Illustration: THE OPEN DOOR.
_From a water-colour drawing in the possession of Mrs. Arthur
Severn._]
The little Greenaways were profoundly interested in the doings of the
august personages who were their prototypes. They knew their names,
ages, and birthdays as well as they knew each other’s, and eagerly
studied their likenesses in the _Illustrated London News_. On great
occasions the children would be taken by Mr. Greenaway to peep in at
the gates of Buckingham Palace itself, and Kate wished and wished with
all her might that she might be driven through them, as an invited
guest, in a Royal coach. Little did she dream that thirty years later
would indeed find her an honoured visitor within the sacred precincts,
entertained by the Princess Royal (then Crown Princess of Germany),
and chatting on easy terms with the future ruler of the German Empire.
It was only when she was actually driving between those gates, not
exactly in a ‘Royal coach,’ that the memory of her ardent wish suddenly
recurred to her, for she had never thought of it since; and it filled
her mind as she entered the Royal presence. Then it was she learned
that, whilst she as a child had envied the lot of those within, the
Princess as a child had envied the freedom of those without, and that
a prison is none the less a prison because the bars are of gold. Here
also she had the privilege of meeting the Princess Helena (by that
time Princess Christian), who doubtless would have been highly amused
had she known how often the artless-looking little lady before her had
boldly represented her in bygone days when ‘pretending’ in the wilds of
Islington. How heartily, too, would she have laughed (nay, perhaps she
may laugh still) at the picture of the farthing wooden effigy which an
enthusiastic little loyalist had invested with her exalted personality
in those fast-receding days.
After the wooden dolls, with their crude and irremovable garments,
came the far more human-looking effigies in china, which populated
the cupboard in the little girls’ bedroom. Their clothes were all
exquisitely made by Kate, and were all removable. They took their walks
abroad on the mantelpiece. Their hats were made of tiny straw-plaits
trimmed with china ribbons and the fluffy down culled from feathers
which had escaped from the pillows. They revelled in luxurious gardens
made of fig boxes filled with sand collected on Sunday walks to
Hampstead Heath, and planted with the tiniest of flowering plants,
which often had to be replaced, as they would not thrive in the
uncongenial soil. Furniture was hard to come by at a farthing a week,
which was Kate’s income at this time, but twenty-four weeks’ saving
got a sixpenny piano, for the sake of which the sacrifice of other
expensive pleasures during that period was considered not unreasonable.
Once indeed Aunt Aldridge came to town and presented the dolls with a
work-table, but so great a piece of good fortune never again befell.
Later there were Lowther Arcadian dolls at fourpence halfpenny apiece,
but these like the royal group were short-lived and ephemeral. They
passed away so rapidly that memory lost their identity, whereas ‘Doll
Lizzie,’ made of brown oak, legless, armless, and devoid of paint, and
‘One-eye,’ equally devoid of paint, half-blind, and retaining but one
rag arm, were seemingly immortal, and were more tenderly loved than
all, notwithstanding the fact that their only clothing consisted of
old rags tied round them with string. These remnants went to bed with
the little girls, and enjoyed other privileges not accorded to the
_parvenues_.
London, as we see, was now the home of Kate Greenaway, but fortunately
there was Rolleston and the country always in the background as a
beautiful and fascinating possibility; and it was rarely that a year
passed without a visit, though now and again not enough money had been
saved to make the thing feasible.
In Kate’s own simple words:
In these early days all the farm things were of endless interest to me.
I used to go about in the cart with Dadad, and Nancy to draw us. He
thought wonderful things of Nancy—no pony was like her. I shared his
feeling, and when my Uncle Aldridge used to inquire how the high-mettled
racer was, I felt deep indignation. There was no weight Nancy couldn’t
draw—no speed she could not go at (if she liked), but there was no
need on ordinary occasions—there was plenty of time. The cart had no
springs—it bumped you about; that didn’t matter to me. Sometimes we
used to go to Southwell to get malt. This was a small quiet town two
and a half miles off, and the way to drive was through green lane-like
roads. It took a good while. Nancy went at a slow jog-trot; I didn’t
mind how long it took, it was all a pleasure. There was an old
cathedral called Southwell Minster, with quaint old carvings in stone
and old stained-glass windows which they said were broken and buried in
Cromwell’s time so as to save them. Southwell now possesses a Bishop,
but it did not then. Then we used to go to the ‘Plot,’ where all the
cottage people had land, to get potatoes or turnips. At hay-time and
harvest the cart had one of those framework things fitted on, and Nancy
fetched corn or hay.
I had a tiny hayfork, a little kit to carry milk in, and a little
washing-tub, all exactly like big real ones, only small. I washed dolls’
things in the tub, and made hay with the fork, and carried milk in the
kit.
Then, besides Nancy, there were the three cows, numerous calves, two
pigs, two tortoiseshell cats, and a variable number of hens. Variable,
for barring ‘Sarah Aldridge,’ the tyrant of the yard, their lives were
sadly precarious, and the cooking-pot insatiable. ‘Sarah Aldridge,’ so
named after the giver, was a light-coloured, speckled, plump hen with a
white neck—a thoroughly bad character, a chartered Jezebel of a fowl,
bearing a charmed and wholly undeserved existence. She took, says Kate
Greenaway, the biggest share of everything, chased all the other hens,
and—_crowed_.
Stowed somewhere in Mary Chappell’s memory was the old proverb—
A whistling woman and a crowing hen
Are neither good for God nor men.
‘Sarah Aldridge’ crowed. And when she crowed Mary became strangely
moved with mingled rage and fear. She would fling down whatever she
was doing. She would fly after ‘Sarah’ breathing dreadful threats.
She would run her well-nigh out of her life, nor desist until she was
compelled for want of breath. Then she would fall into an awe-stricken
state, which she called a ‘dither,’ convinced that because of this
monstrous breach of nature some terrible thing would be sure to happen.
But, notwithstanding her superstitions, Mrs. Chappell was a truly
worthy woman,—one of the noblest. Indeed, Kate Greenaway always
insisted that she was the kindest, most generous, most charitable, the
cheerfullest, and most careful woman she had ever known. To quote her
words, ‘in all things she was highest and best.’ She meant nothing
derogatory to her husband when she told every one before his face that
he was a ‘poor creature.’ He entirely agreed. There was no hint at his
being ‘wanting’ in any particular, but rather that Providence was at
fault in not vouchsafing him a full measure of health and strength.
Indeed, he felt rather distinguished than otherwise when his wife
drew attention to his infirmities. He was one of those who thoroughly
enjoyed his bad health.
It was a rule of life with Mrs. Chappell never to speak ill of her
neighbours. ‘Ask me no questions and I will tell you no stories,’ was
the letter always on her lips, and the spirit of charity was always
in her heart. She combined the utmost generosity with a maximum of
carefulness. She did not know how to be wasteful. She had a merry
heart, and Kate always maintained that it was through her that she
learnt to be in love with cheerfulness. So that more than one unmindful
generation has since had cause to bless the memory of Mary Chappell.
Her real name was Phyllis, Phyllis Barnsdale, previous to her marriage.
Before going to Rolleston she had been in service with a Colonel, a
friend of Lord Byron’s and a neighbour of his at Newstead Abbey. Of
her reminiscences Kate retained just two things. Of Byron, that his
body was brought home in spirits of wine. Of the Colonel, that he was
so short-sighted that the groom only rubbed down his horse on the near
side, secure that the half-heartedness of his service would never be
discovered.
[Illustration: MRS. CHAPPELL, DRESSED FOR SUNDAY, TAKING HER USUAL NAP
AGAINST THE COPPER.]
Coming to Rolleston, Phyllis Barnsdale entered the service of the
Fryers, farmers and butchers. Mrs. Fryer, to whom she was devoted,
was very severe, a violent-tempered woman but very kind-hearted. Here
Phyllis stayed until she married, doing unheard-of quantities of work,
up at half-past two in the mornings, or three at the latest, doing all
the domestic work of the farm-house, and washing the clothes of her
master, her mistress, two girls, and ever so many boys. Work was her
business in life and she didn’t care how much she did. One condition
only and there was nothing she was too proud to put her hand to. In
one thing was she unyielding. She must have the highest wages in the
village. These she _would_ have, not because she loved money but just
because her pride lay that way.
When Kate first went to Rolleston the Fryers’ farm had passed into
the hands of a married daughter, Mrs. Neale, whose husband, an idle,
good-natured, foolish man, smoked and drank whilst the butcher-business
slipped through his fingers. In Kate’s earliest days they were
seemingly prosperous enough, and one of the first things the little
Greenaways had to do on arrival at Rolleston was to make an odd little
morning call at ‘The House,’ where they were regaled with cowslip wine
and sponge-cakes. This was the etiquette of the place: it was the
respect due from Cottage to Farm.
The Fryers’ garden was, in Kate’s own words years afterwards, ‘my loved
one of all gardens I have ever known,’ and that was saying a good deal,
for it would be hard to find anywhere a greater lover of gardens than
she was. It was her real Paradise. Round the windows of ‘The House’
grew the biggest and brightest convolvuluses in the world (at least in
the world she knew)—deep blue blossoms with ‘pinky’ stripes and deep
pink blossoms with white stripes. Her intimacy with them told her every
day where the newest blooms were to be found. Across the gravel path
on the left as you emerged from ‘The House’ was a large oval bed, with
roses, pinks, stocks, sweet Sultans, the brown scabious, white lilies,
red lilies, red fuchsias, and in early summer, monster tulips, double
white narcissus, peonies, crown imperials, and wallflowers. Indeed,
all lovely flowers seemed to grow there. And the scent of them was a
haunting memory through life. Then there were the biggest, thickest,
and bushiest of box borders, nearly a yard high, so thick and solid
that you could sit on them and they never gave way. These bounded the
long gravel walk which led straight down to the bottom of the garden,
and along which grew flowers of every lovely shape and hue. Beyond
them on the left was the orchard—apples, pears, plums, and bushy
filberts; on the right the kitchen garden—currant bushes with their
shining transparent bunches, red and white, gooseberries, strawberries,
feathery asparagus, and scented herbs such as good cooks and housewives
love. It was an enchanted fairyland to the little Londoner and had
a far-reaching influence on her life and work. Later on her letters
teemed with just such catalogues of flowers. So great was her love for
them that, next to seeing them, the mere writing down of their names
yielded the most pleasurable emotions.
Another thing which greatly appealed to her was the spaciousness
of everything—the great house seemingly illimitable in itself, yet
stretching out farther into vast store-houses and monster barns. For
those were days when threshing machines were unknown and corn had to
wait long and patiently to fulfil its destiny. Indeed, people took
pride in _keeping_ their corn, unthreshed, just to show that they were
in no need of money. Then large bands of Irishmen wandered over the
country at harvest-time, leisurely cutting the corn with sickles, for
the machine mower was at that time undreamed of.
At the Neales’, too, there were birds innumerable—peacocks strutting
and spreading their tails, guinea-fowls, turkeys with alarming voices
and not less alarming ways, geese, pigeons, ducks, and fowls. All these
things were in the early Rolleston days, but they did not last.
By degrees, through neglect and carelessness, the business drifted away
from the Neales into more practical and frugal hands, and in the end
they were ruined—wronged and defrauded by the lawyers, the Chappells
believed, but in reality abolished by the natural process of cause
and effect. Anyhow, the Chappells acted up to their belief, and with
unreasoning loyalty gave them money, cows, indeed everything they had,
until they were themselves literally reduced to existing on dry bread
and were involved in the general downfall. In this Mary Chappell was,
of course, the moving spirit, but her husband agreed with all she did,
and took his poor fare without complaint.
But before the crash came there were many happy days and lively
experiences. There was Newark market on Wednesdays, to which Mary
Chappell always went with Mrs. Neale, sometimes, but rarely,
accompanied by the latter’s husband. On special occasions Kate went
too. Fanny, the brown pony, drew them in a lovely green cart. When Mr.
Neale went, Mrs. Chappell and Kate sat behind. When he didn’t, Kate
sat behind alone and listened to the two ladies talking about Fanny
as if she were a human being, discussing her health, her likes and
dislikes of things she passed on the road, in full enjoyment of the
never-failing topic of ‘the old girl.’
There was a good deal of preliminary interest about these expeditions.
There was the walk up to ‘The House’ with Mary Chappell heavily laden
with baskets of butter on each arm. Mary was no ordinary butter-seller.
She would no more have dreamed of standing in the butter-market to sell
her butter than she would have dreamed of selling it to the shops
to be vended over the counter like ordinary goods. Only people who
did not keep their pans properly clean would stoop to that. No, she
‘livered’ her own butter. She had her own regular customers who had
had her butter for years, and they always wanted more than she could
supply. The making of good butter and cheese was part of her religion.
She would drop her voice and speak only in whispers of people—half
criminals she thought them—whose puncheons were not properly cleansed,
whose butter might ‘turn’ and whose cheese might ‘run.’
Arrived at ‘The House,’ they would find the green cart waiting before
the door. Then a farm hand would stroll leisurely round with Fanny
and put her into the shafts. Everything was done slowly at Rolleston,
and bustle was unknown. Next would come Sarah Smith, the maid, with a
basket after her kind. Then a help or out of-door servant, with another
after his kind. A minute later some one bearing ducks or fowls with
their legs tied. These went ignominiously under the seat, and took the
cream, as it were, off Kate’s day. Their very obvious fate made her
miserable, but she cajoled herself into something like happiness by
imagining that someone might buy them ‘who didn’t want to eat them and
would put them to live in a nice place where they could be happy.’
[Illustration: MRS. NEALE.]
As the prospect of starting became more imminent, Mrs. Neale would
arrive with the whip and a small basket. Then Mr. Neale, and the two
young Fryer nephews who lived with them, would stroll round to see them
off. At the last moment would arrive baskets of plums, apples, pears,
and, perhaps, sage cheeses, and a start would then be made.
The five miles into Newark, through Staythorpe, Haverham, and Kelham,
where the Suttons, to whom nearly all Rolleston belonged, lived at ‘The
Hall,’ was a progress of great enjoyment and variety, for they knew not
only all the people they met on the road, but all the animals and all
the crops, and these had all to be discussed.
Arrived at Newark, Mrs. Neale was left at the inn, whilst Mary and
Kate went their rounds with the butter. All the customers got to know
Kate, and the little girl received a warm welcome year after year in
the pretty red-brick, green-vine-clad courtyards with which Newark
abounded. When the butter was sold the shopping came, and when all the
necessary groceries and supplies had been laid in, a stroll through
the market-place, where peppermints striped and coloured like shells
were to be got. Why people bought groceries when they could afford
peppermints Kate didn’t know.
In the market of course everything was on sale that could be imagined,
from butter to boots, from pears to pigs, from crockery to calves. But
it was the crockery that had a peculiar fascination for Mary, and many
an unheard-of bargain made a hole in her thinly-lined pocket. These
pots were from Staffordshire and became Kate’s cherished possession in
after years.
At last there was the weary return to the inn-yard to find Mrs. Neale,
who might or might not be ready to go home. Anyhow Fanny and the cart
were always welcome enough when the time came to exchange the confusion
and hubbub of the town for the quiet country roads again.
It didn’t matter what time they arrived home, Chappell would always
be found watching for them at the gate. Tea was ready and they were
hungry for it; Chappell, too, for he spent the whole afternoon on
market days leaning over the gate. It was his one chance in the week of
seeing his acquaintances as they passed to Newark, and it was his one
chance of buying pigs. He had a weakness for pigs, and he would stop
every cart that had a likely one on board. Sometimes he would have out
a whole load, would bargain for half-an-hour, and then refuse to have
one. Time was of no consequence to him, but the owner’s wrath would
be great, for all the pigs that were wanted in Newark might be bought
before he could arrive there. Then the cart would be driven away to a
blasphemous accompaniment, leaving Chappell blandly smiling, placid and
undisturbed. This would be repeated many times until the pigs arrived
which took his fancy.
On great and rare occasions, Kate would go to market with Aunt Aldridge
in a high dog-cart behind a spanking horse named Jack. Then she would
have a taste of really polite society, and would be taken to dine in
a big room at the chief inn with the leading farmers and their wives.
For in the Nottinghamshire of those days the farmers were in a large
way, prosperous and with plenty of money to spend. It was quite a shock
and surprise to her in after life to see farmers in other parts of
the country little better than labourers. For this reason she never
cared for Thomas Hardy’s books; she never could get on terms with his
characters. But with George Eliot’s it was quite another matter. Mrs.
Glegg, Mrs. Tulliver, Mrs. Poyser, and the rest, she had known all her
life. They were old friends and she felt at home with them at once.
[Illustration: ‘DADAD’ AND ANN GOING TO CHURCH.]
Kate was present at two great events at Rolleston—a fire and a flood.
Here is her own account of them:—
The fire happened in a cottage joining Mrs. Neale’s farm. It joined the
kitchen. It was a blazing hot day in August, in the morning, about 11
o’clock, when suddenly there were loud shrieks of ‘Fire!’ and I saw Ann
rushing to the gate shouting out ‘Fire!’ at the top of her voice, quite
unconscious of what she was doing. It was far off us. But the danger was
to Mrs. Neale’s. They all started off except Ann and me. Then groups of
people went rushing by to help; by and by came my Aunt Aldridge and my
sister Lizzie and all the work-women and servants that could possibly be
spared. The small fire-engine was miles away at Southwell, so the men
and women were formed into a long line from the house to the nearest
point of the stream, and passed buckets of water from hand to hand (they
could hardly use their hands for days afterwards). But the cottage was
burnt down and a bit of the roof of Mrs. Neale’s kitchen. Fortunately
it stopped there, but they moved all the things out of the house for
fear it should not be saved. The best bedroom floor of polished oak was
so slippery the men could hardly walk about to move the things. Some of
the men behaved disgracefully, tapping the casks of wine and beer that
had to be brought out into the yard. I shall never forget my terror and
fright of this day, and to ‘Mamam’ it was as the end of all things.
One summer when we went down—the day was pouring wet, it had been
very rainy—I went to the Chappells’, Lizzie to Aunt Aldridge’s. When
I got up the next morning I found a great event had taken place in the
night—the floods were out—rose in the night. They (the Chappells)
were called up about 11 o’clock and had to get up and go off to save
their animals, which all had to be brought home. Fortunately they were
in time to save them all—others were not so lucky. The house and the
next house and the croft were high and dry. The croft was filled with
animals—sheep and calves. When you looked out at the front gate, each
way you looked you saw a stream of muddy water rushing across the road.
There was a tendency to floods at Rolleston, only not bad like this.
Both Trent and Greet overflowed and met and then flooded all over the
country. No houses at Rolleston were washed away, but the lower parts of
the houses were flooded, cellars and drains were filled up with water,
the contents floating on the top. The people used to wait at the end
of the street where the water rushed over, and people who were passing
in carts would drive them through the water, and boys crossed over in
washing-tubs. A great many animals were drowned. The Neales lost a great
many sheep. After some days the floods began to subside and you could
begin to get about, and then my sister could get down to see me, for we
were quite separated for days. After the water had all gone the country
was horrible, covered with mud and dead worms, and it smelt dreadfully.
I stayed some weeks, and before I left it had returned pretty much to
its old look again. This was the only time I was ever there in what they
called ‘the waters being out.’
[Illustration: THE CHAPPELLS’ COTTAGE, FARM, AND CROFT AT ROLLESTON.
_Drawn by Kate Greenaway when a young girl._]
Next we have a glimpse of Kate making triumphant progresses in the
corn-waggons and hay-carts as they rattled back empty to the fields.
The corn-waggons, it must be admitted, had a drawback in the little
dark beetles—‘clocks’ as the waggoners called them—which ran about
and threatened her legs. But these were soon forgotten in the near
prospect of a ride back perched high on the Harvest Home load, decked
with green branches, while the men chanted—
‘Mr.—— is a good man,
He gets his harvest as well as he can,
Neither turned over nor yet stuck fast,
He’s got his harvest home at last.
Hip, hip, hip, hurrah!’
And she loved to sit on the stile watching for the postman. In earliest
days ‘he was an imposing person who rode on a donkey and blew a brass
trumpet. If you wished to despatch a letter and lived alongside his
beat you displayed it in your window to attract his attention. When
he saw a letter thus paraded, he drew rein, blew a blast, and out you
ran with your letter. If you lived off his route you had to put your
letter in somebody else’s window. So with the delivery. Aunt Aldridge’s
letters, for example, were left at the Chappells’ and an old woman got
a halfpenny a letter for taking them up to the Odd House.’ In those
days the postman was clearly not made for man, but man for the postman.
Once and once only Kate went fishing at the flour mill, which had its
water-wheel on the Greet. She sketches the scene vividly in a few
words. How lovely it all was, she tells us—the lapping of the water
against the banks of the reedy river, the great heaps of corn, the
husks, the floury sacks and carts, the white-coated millers, the clean
white scent, and, above all, the excitement of looking out for the
fish! What could be better than that? It was about as good as good
could be, when of a sudden all was changed. There was a jerk of the
rod, a brief struggle and a plunge, and there lay a gasping fish with
the hook in its silly mouth, bleeding on the bank. What could be worse
than that? It was about as bad as bad could be. The sun had gone in.
The sky was no longer blue, and misery had come into the world. She
loathed the task of carrying the poor dead things home to be cooked,
and she refused to partake of the dreadful dish. It was all too sad.
The pleasant river and the bright glorious days were all over for them
and she was not to be comforted. And that was the end of Kate’s single
fishing experience. Surely fate was in a singularly ironical mood when,
in later years, it brought her a letter of hypercritical remonstrance
because of her supposed advocacy of what the writer considered a cruel
and demoralising sport!
Indeed, we have only to read her rhyme of ‘Miss Molly and the little
fishes’ in _Marigold Garden_ to realise that her sentiments as a child
remained those of the woman:
Oh, sweet Miss Molly,
You’re so fond
Of fishes in a little pond.
And perhaps they’re glad
To see you stare
With such bright eyes
Upon them there.
And when your fingers and your thumbs
Drop slowly in the small white crumbs,
I hope they’re happy. Only this—
When you’ve looked long enough, sweet miss,
Then, most beneficent young giver,
Restore them to their native river.
In this fashion the little ‘Lunnoner,’ as she was always called,
got her fill of the country, and her intimacy with more or less
unsophisticated nature—a love which was her prevailing passion
throughout her life.
Her early education was alike unsatisfactory and varied, for at
that time it was extremely difficult to find girls’ schools at once
convenient of access and reasonable in price, where the teaching was of
any value. After leaving Mrs. Allaman’s, of whom mention has been made,
Kate was handed over to a Miss Jackson, where she remained only a few
days. Thence she went to a Miss Varley, but here also her career was a
short one. She soon fell ill, ‘under the strain,’ said Mrs. Greenaway,
‘of impossible lessons,’ and was promptly removed.
Then a trial was made of some ladies named Fiveash. Here again Kate’s
health flagged. She herself was inclined to put it down to the fact
that Miss Anne Fiveash, of whom she was otherwise fond enough, had a
cross eye, which filled her with terror. At any rate, the new scheme
succeeded no better than the old ones, and this for the time being was
an end of school. Henceforward the child’s education was continued, if
it could properly be said yet to have begun, by a lady who came two or
three afternoons a-week to give lessons (very bad ones they were) in
French and music. This arrangement lasted for several years; at the
end of which time Kate went back to Miss Fiveash’s, where she remained
until she left school altogether. During all this time she was drawing
as much as she could in private.
[Illustration: THOMAS CHAPPELL (‘DADAD’).
_Drawn in his old age by Kate Greenaway._]
When Kate was six years old her brother John was born; and of course
she remembered to her dying day all the clothes he ever had, and all
those which she and her sisters had at the same time; and she notes the
details of three of his earliest costumes which she remembered to good
purpose. First, a scarlet pelisse, and a white felt hat with feathers;
next, a drab pelisse and a drab felt hat with a green velvet rosette;
and thirdly, he was resplendent in a pale blue frock, a little white
jacket, and a white Leghorn hat and feather—all of which afterwards
found resurrection in the Greenaway picture-books.
There was always a deep bond of sympathy between Mr. Greenaway and his
little daughter, whom, by the way, he nicknamed ‘Knocker,’ to which
it amused him to compare her face when she cried. Her devotion to
her father doubtless had far-reaching results, for not only was Mr.
Greenaway an accomplished engraver, but an artist of no mean ability.
And there was a fascination and mystery about his calling which made
a strong appeal to her imagination. On special occasions he would
be commissioned to make drawings for the _Illustrated London News_,
and then Kate’s delight would be unbounded. The subject might be of
Queen Victoria at some such ceremony as the opening of Parliament; or
sometimes of some more stirring occurrence—such, for example, as that
which necessitated the long journey into Staffordshire to make sketches
of the house and surroundings of the villainous doctor, William Palmer,
the Rugeley murderer, an event which stood out in her memory as of
supreme interest and importance.
Mr. Greenaway’s office, as long as Kate could remember, was 4, Wine
Office Court, Fleet Street. There most of his work was done; but when,
as frequently happened, there was a scramble to get the wood blocks
engraved in time for the press, he would have to work the greater part
of two consecutive nights. Then he would bring portions of his blocks
home, distributing the less important sections among his assistants, so
that the whole might be ready in the morning.
These were times of superlative pleasure to Kate. She would wake up
about midnight and see the gas still burning outside in the passage.
This meant that her father was hard at work downstairs. About one
o’clock he would go to bed, snatch an hour or two’s sleep, and be at it
again until it was time to be off to the City. This was his routine,
and Kate quickly planned how to take advantage of it.
Waiting till sister Fanny was asleep, she would slip out of bed, hurry
into her clothes, all except her frock and shoes, and, covering them
with her little nightgown, creep back into bed again. Thus prepared
for eventualities, she would fall asleep. But not for long. Somehow
she would manage to wake again in the small hours of the morning and
see if the light of the gas jet in the passage still shone through the
chink of the door. If it did, she would climb with all quietness out of
bed, doff her nightdress, slip into her frock, take her shoes in her
hand and creep softly down to the drawing-room, where her father was at
work. Then he would fasten her dress and she would set to work to make
his toast. And so the two would breakfast together alone in the early
hours with supreme satisfaction.
* * * * *
Here Miss Greenaway’s autobiographical notes come to an abrupt
termination, save for a sheet of memoranda which stimulate but do
not satisfy curiosity. How, we may ask, did the ‘Fear of Water-taps’
take her?—a fear which lasted all her life. What confessions did she
contemplate under the heading ‘My Religious Fit,’ and ‘My Fight,’ and
what episodes would have grouped themselves under ‘Pincushions’?
[Illustration: EXPLANATORY SKETCH OF ROLLESTON COTTAGE FARM.
Gate to Our Bedroom. Mamam’s Bedroom.
Gate to Croft. Cart Shed. Garden. Kitchen. House. Parlour.
Road.
]
[Illustration: JOHN GREENAWAY (FATHER OF KATE GREENAWAY),
WOOD-ENGRAVER, AT WORK.
_Pencil Drawing by Birket Foster, R.W.S. In the possession of John
Greenaway, Esq._]