Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 Read online

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  Not only in its name, Glen Bank, and its white-painted semi-detachment, but in its hunting pictures and Marcus Stone engravings, its plush curtains, its mahogany furniture and its scarcity of books, our Macclesfield house represented all that was essentially middle-class in that Edwardian decade.

  Following the long-established example of my father’s parents, we even had prayers before breakfast, during which performance everybody - from my mother, who perturbedly watched the boiling coffee-machine on the table, to the maids who shuffled uneasily in their chairs while the postman banged at the front door and the milkman thundered at the back - presented an aspect of inattentive agitation. The ceremony frequently ended in a tempestuous explosion on the part of my father, since Edward was almost always late, and could never say the Lord’s Prayer as rapidly as the others. As a rule he was still patiently pleading with the Deity to lead him not into ’tation, while the rest of us were thankfully vociferating ‘Amen’.

  Although my father, as a self-willed young man in his thirties, was somewhat liable to these outbursts of irritation, they never really alarmed me, for he was always my champion in childhood, and could be relied upon as a safe bulwark against the bewildering onslaughts of his practical-joke-loving younger brothers and sisters, who regarded a small girl as fair game for their riotous ingenuity. Far more disturbing to my peace of mind was the strange medley of irrational fears which were always waiting to torment me - fears of thunder, of sunsets, of the full moon, of the dark, of standing under railway arches or crossing bridges over noisy streams, of the end of the world and of the devil waiting to catch me round the corner (this last being due to a nursemaid who overheard me, at the age of five or six, calling Edward ‘Little fool!’ and immediately commented: ‘There, you’ve done it! Now you’ll go to hell!’).

  Parents and nurses had by that time outgrown the stage of putting children into dark cupboards as a ‘cure’ for this type of ‘tiresomeness’ - an atrocity once perpetrated on my mother which adversely affected her psychology for ever afterwards - but such terrors did appear to them to have no other origin than a perverse unreasonableness, and I was expostulated with and even scolded for thus ‘giving way’. There seemed to be no one to whom I could appeal for understanding of such humiliating cowardice, nobody whom I instinctively felt to be on my side against the mysterious phenomena which so alarmed me. Since I thus grew up without having my fears rationalised by explanation, I carried them with me, thrust inward but very little transformed, into adulthood, and was later to have only too good reason to regret that I never learnt to conquer them while still a child.

  On the whole, in spite of these intermittent terrors, the years in which life is taken for granted were pleasant enough, if not conspicuously reassuring. For as long as I could remember, our house had always been full of music, never first-rate, but tuneful, and strangely persistent in its ability to survive more significant recollections. To the perturbation of my father, who never really cared for music in spite of the early singing lessons, there was always much practising of songs, or pianoforte solos, and later of violin exercises, and in Macclesfield my mother gave periodic ‘musical evenings’, for which Edward and I, at the ages of about seven and nine, used to sit up in order to play tinkling duets together, or innocuous trios with our governess.

  My mother, who had an agreeable soprano voice, took singing lessons in Manchester; at musical parties, she sang ‘When the Heart is Young’, ‘Whisper and I Shall Hear’ or ‘The Distant Shore’ - a typical example of Victorian pathos which always reduced me to tears at the point where ‘the mai-den - drooped - and - DIED’. I was much more stimulated by ‘Robert the Devil’, and whenever my mother, her back safely turned towards me, trilled ‘Mercy! Mercy! Mer-russy!’ in her ardent soprano, I flung myself up and down upon the hearthrug in an ecstasy of masochistic fervour.

  My first acquaintance with literature was less inspiring, for in Macclesfield the parental library consisted solely of a few yellow-back novels, two or three manuals on paper-making, and a large tome entitled Household Medicine, in which the instructions were moral rather than hygienic. Lest anyone should suspect the family of being literary, these volumes were concealed beneath a heavy curtain in the chill, gloomy dining-room. My father was once told by a publisher’s traveller that the Pottery towns held the lowest record for book-buying in England. Being a true son of his district, which has an immense respect for ‘brass’ but none whatever for the uncommercial products of a poetic imagination, he remained faithful in Cheshire as in Staffordshire to his neighbourhood’s reputation.

  When I had exhausted my own nursery literature - a few volumes of Andrew Lang’s fairy-tales, one of which was punctiliously presented to me on each birthday, and some of the more saccharine children’s stories of L. T. Meade - I turned surreptitiously to the yellow-back novels. These were mostly by Wilkie Collins, Besant and Rice, and Mrs Henry Wood, and many were the maudlin tears that I wept over the sorrows of Poor Miss Finch and Lady Isabel Vane.

  It was not till later, at the age of ten, that I discovered the manifold attractions of Household Medicine. The treatment of infectious diseases left me cold, but I was secretly excited at the prospect of menstruation; I also found the details of a confinement quite enthralling, though I had never shown that devotion to dolls which is supposed to indicate a strong maternal instinct. The whole subject of child-birth was completely dissociated in my mind from that of sex, about which I knew little and cared less. I was particularly impressed at the time by the instructions given to the child-bearing woman in the final stage of labour, though I can now only remember that she was advised to braid her hair in two plaits, and to wear an old flannel petticoat under her nightgown.

  I must have been about eight when two solitary classics - probably neglected Christmas presents - found their way on to a whist table in the drawing-room. One was Longfellow’s Complete Poems, bound in a bilious mustard-brown leather, and the other a copy of Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum. I soon had Longfellow’s poems - including ‘Tales of a Wayside Inn’ and ‘The New England Tragedies’ - almost by heart, and even now, when I am searching through my memory for an appropriate quotation, ‘Life is real, life is earnest’, and ‘Hadst thou stayed I must have fled!’ will insist upon ousting A. E. Housman and Siegfried Sassoon. But I found Sohrab and Rustum even more entrancing than Longfellow, and over and over again, when I was sure of having the drawing-room to myself, I indulged the histrionic instinct which had derived so much satisfaction from ‘Robert the Devil’ by imitating in dumb show the throes of the unfortunate Sohrab,

  Lovely in death, upon the common sand.

  My mother did her conscientious best to remedy the deficiencies of our literary education by reading Dickens aloud to us on Sunday afternoons. We ploughed through David Copperfield and Nicholas Nickleby in this manner, which perhaps explains why I have never been able to finish anything else by Dickens except A Tale of Two Cities. Far more effective as compensations for the lack of external stimulus were the five ‘novels’ that I wrote before I was eleven, on special books patiently constructed for me by a devoted and intelligent governess out of thick waste paper from the mills, and the exciting legends of a mythical community called ‘The Dicks’, which from my bed in the night nursery I used to relate to Edward across the passage in the day nursery after we were both supposed to be asleep. I was always the inventor and he the recipient of these enthralling communications, which must have begun when I was about six, and continued until I reached the mature age of eleven and went to school.

  Edward was always a good listener, since his own form of self-expression then consisted in making unearthly and to me quite meaningless sounds on his small violin. I remember him, at the age of seven, as a rather solemn, brown-eyed little boy, with beautiful arched eyebrows which lately, to my infinite satisfaction, have begun to reproduce themselves, a pair of delicate question-marks, above the dark eyes of my five-year-old son. Even in childhood
we seldom quarrelled, and by the time that we both went away to boarding-school he had already become the dearest companion of those brief years of unshadowed adolescence permitted to our condemned generation.

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  When I was eleven our adored governess departed, and my family moved from Macclesfield to a tall grey stone house in Buxton, the Derbyshire ‘mountain spa’, in order that Edward and I might be sent to ‘good’ day-schools. His was a small preparatory school of which a vigorous Buxton man was then headmaster; mine inevitably described itself as ‘a school for the daughters of gentlemen’. My brother’s school, which certainly gave him a better grounding than I received from mine, will always be associated in my recollection with one significant experience.

  Soon after Edward went there I happened, on my way to the town, to pass the school playground at a time when the boys were uproariously enjoying an afternoon break. Seeing Edward, I stopped; he called several of his newly made cronies, and we spent a few moments of pleasant ‘ragging’ across the low wall. I felt no consciousness of guilt, and was unaware that I had been seen, on their return home along an adjacent road, by my mother and an aunt who was staying with us. At tea-time a heavy and to me inexplicable atmosphere of disapproval hung over the table; shortly afterwards the storm exploded, and I was severely reprimanded for my naughtiness in thus publicly conversing with Edward’s companions. (I think it was the same aunt who afterwards informed me that the reason why our letters had to be left open at my school was ‘in case any of the girls should be so wicked as to write to boys’. Probably this was true of most girls’ schools before the War.)

  The small incident was my first intimation that, in the eyes of the older generation, free and unself-conscious association between boys and girls was more improper than a prudish suspicion of the opposite sex. It aroused in me a rebellious resentment that I have never forgotten. I had not heard, in those days, of co-educational schools, but had I been aware of their experimental existence and been able to foresee my far-distant parenthood, I should probably have decided, then and there, that my own son and daughter should attend them.

  I do not remember much about my day-school except that when I first went there I was badly bullied by two unpleasant little girls, who soon tired of the easy physical advantage given them by their superior age and stature, and instead endeavoured to torment my immature mind by forcing upon it items of sexual information in their most revolting form. My parents, who had suffered such qualms of apprehension over my entirely wholesome friendliness with Edward’s riotous companions, remained completely unaware of this real threat to my decency and my peace. I never mentioned it to them owing to a bitter sense of shame, which was not, however, aroused by my schoolfellows’ unæsthetic communications, but by my inability to restrain my tears during their physical assaults. So ambitious was I already, and so indifferent to sex in all its manifestations, that their attempts to corrupt my mind left it as innocent as they found it, and I resented only the pinchings and wrist-twistings which always accompanied my efforts to escape.

  Though my school took a few boarders, most of its pupils were local; in consequence the class-room competition was practically non-existent. At the age of twelve I was already preening the gay feathers of my youthful conceit in one of the top forms, where the dull, coltish girls of sixteen and seventeen so persistently treated me as a prodigy that I soon lost such small ability as I had possessed to estimate my modest achievements at their true and limited worth.

  When I first went to the school, it was in charge of an ancient mistress who was typical of the genteel and uncertificated past, but soon afterwards a new Principal was appointed with an unimpeachable Degree acquired from Cheltenham. In Buxton this was regarded as quite a remarkable qualification for a headmistress, and in those days my parents’ standards of scholarship were almost as unexacting. They had never, indeed, had much opportunity to become otherwise, for my mother had received a very spasmodic and unorthodox education, while my father, after reacting with characteristic if pardonable obstinacy against the rigours of Malvern in the eighteen-seventies, had been sent to the High School at Newcastle-under-Lyme, where the boys’ only consistent occupation was a perpetual baiting of the much-enduring masters.

  During my father’s uproarious days at Newcastle High School, a Hanley boy, two or three years his junior, named Enoch Arnold Bennett, was more profitably pursuing his studies at the Middle School in the same town. There was, needless to say, very little communication between the pupils from the Middle School, and the domineering young tyrants at the High School. Even after the author of The Old Wives’ Tale had won his lasting place in English literature, my relatives still thought nothing much of the Bennetts, whom they characteristically described as ‘very ordinary people’.

  The education given to my parents, in both quality and quantity, was of a type at that time shared, and considered quite adequate, by almost the whole of the provincial middle-classes. Its shortcomings were in no way compensated by the superior attainments of their friends, for throughout my childhood in Macclesfield and Buxton, I cannot remember that anyone ever came to the house of more interest to me than relatives, or mentally restricted local residents with their even more limited wives.

  These families were typical of the kind that still inhabit small country towns; the wives ‘kept house’, and the husbands occupied themselves as branch bank-managers, cautious and unenterprising solicitors, modest business men who preferred safety to experiment, and ‘family’ doctors whose bedside manner camouflaged their diagnostical uncertainties. Schoolmasters were not encouraged, as my father found their conversation tedious. Always a staunch Free-Trader, he was ready to join issue against any supporter of Joseph Chamberlain in the topical controversy of Free Trade versus Tariff Reform, but he did object to being diverted from the enthralling discussion of paper manufacture to subjects of such remote interest as the bombardment of Port Arthur, the Turkish atrocities in Macedonia, or the policy of the Russian revolutionary party which was bloodily agitating for the establishment of a Duma.

  To my own immature ears, hardly an echo of these or other far-off and rather more divine events ever succeeded in penetrating; even the elements of fiscal argument, though respectable enough, were regarded as beyond a schoolgirl’s understanding. I suppose it was the very completeness with which all doors and windows to the more adventurous and colourful world, the world of literature, of scholarship, of art, of politics, of travel, were closed to me, that kept my childhood so relatively contented a time. Once I went away to school, and learnt - even though from a distance that filled me with dismay - what far countries of loveliness, and learning, and discovery, and social relationship based upon enduring values, lay beyond those solid provincial walls which enclosed the stuffiness of complacent bourgeoisdom so securely within themselves, my discontent kindled until I determined somehow to break through them to the paradise of sweetness and light which I firmly believed awaited me in the south.

  I often wonder how many of my present-day friends were themselves limited by a horizon as circumscribed as that which bounded my first thirteen years. Up to the time, indeed, that I was twenty-one, my sole contacts with life outside England were confined to a Cook’s tour to Lucerne, where I developed mumps immediately on arrival and spent the rest of the fortnight in a sanatorium, and a brief visit to Paris, during which my father was knocked down by a taxicab and promptly insisted upon all of us returning to Buxton.

  I believe that it is Albert Edward Wiggam, the American author of The Fruit of the Family Tree, who has calculated that half the world’s distinguished men and women are produced by only one per cent of its population, and that all the teeming mediocre millions of the rest of mankind are required to contribute the other half of its leaders. But when I consider - and in my later teens I often used to consider - the incalculable advantages of heredity and early environment that are involved in merely being born a member of such families as the Huxleys, the Haldanes, the Frys
, the Darwins or the Arnolds, what really seems remarkable is not that the undistinguished residue produces only half the sum of human talent, but that those who belong to it ever emerge at all from the blackest obscurity.

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  At the age of thirteen, small for my years and still very much of a child in spite of my mature Fifth Form associates, I was sent away to school at the recently founded St Monica’s, at Kingswood in Surrey - a safe choice, because the eldest and ablest of my mother’s sisters was one of the two Principals. Her partner, Louise Heath Jones, a brilliant, dynamic woman who had been educated at Cheltenham and Newnham, alternately inspired and intimidated both girls and mistresses by her religious idealism and the strongly individual quality of her teaching. The tempo at which her ardent spirit caused her to live wore out too quickly her fragile constitution; a premature breakdown led to her early retirement soon after I left the school, and she died in 1931 after many years of illness.

  My aunt, level-headed and self-reliant, remained in charge from 1914 until the end of 1930, and though she possessed neither college degree nor technical training in education, her personal dignity and her natural gift for organisation soon raised St Monica’s to a high position, with a refreshingly enlightened and broad-minded regime among girls’ private schools. It has recently passed out of this category into the hands of an exclusively masculine committee, and now ranks as a public school.