Tempestuous Petticoat

03 304

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Public Library

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D QODl

Petticoat

Other books by CLARE LEIGHXON*

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CLARE LEIGHTON

Tempestuous Petticoat

The Story of an Invincible Edwardian

RINEHART & COMPANY, INC

New York Toronto

1947

Passages liave been quoted from the following*
iooks by permission of the publishers:

Hawthorn and Lavender by William Ernest Henley, Harper &
Brothers, New York.

Collected Works of A* C. Swinburne, Harper & Brothers, New
York.

The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke # copyright, 19x5,

Mead & Company. Used by permission of L>odd Mead &. Com-

pany, New Yoik, and McClelland and Stewart, J-,ta* a Toronto.

End papers and title page by the Authw

1047,

Printed in the United $tat<$ of America,
by the Ferris Printing Company f

All Rights

Foar Cttajrlotrte stncl

rnil& m& z&>rit& this book*

Contents

1 The Study Table 3

2 St. John*s Wood 23

3 Mother's Old Men 38

4 From the Nursery Window 53

5 TAtf Annual Exodus 75

6 JLijfe <z the Seaside 91

7 Flowers and Feathers 112

8 T*A? Leightons 126

9 Uncle Jack 146

10 -4s tf&e JDtfflr Canon Said~~- 158

11 Education for the Leighton Children 181

12 -4 Afetc; Center of the Universe 202

13 W0r Years 223

14 T&tf jLotf Edwardian 251

Delight

A. s*weet disorder in tJhe dress
Kindles in olotHes a. ^wantonness r
A la.wn aJboxit tHe slaox7,Iders
Into a, fine distr^totiorx :
AJGL erring la.oe^ -wlalcH Here and
3Bntlxra,ls tHe criacrxson stomacHer 5
A. cuifBE" neglected, a.nd tlxereHy"
to jB.o\v oonf xzsedly :

\va.ve 3 deserving note,
In tte tempestxaoias pettlcoa.tr
A ca.reless sHoe-strln.^ In v/Hose tie
I see a. %vild civility:
H>o xn.ore foew^itcH nne
Is too precise in every part.

Petticoat

i. The Study Table

I rememter peeping through the banisters of the nursery stairs.
Up from the kitchen came the smell of food. I was hungry.

"Come here, Miss Clare/* my nanny whispered, as she carried
me back to the nursery. "And don't you dare to make no noise.
You just sit quiet, or you won't *ave no dinner at all today."

"Shall I poison him?" My mother's voice came up from the
study below, "I shall have to get lid of him soon. Or do you think
it would be better if I set fire to the house and let him get burnt to
death? I can't make up my mind.' 1

Nanny went on with her sewing as though nothing unusual were
happening.

"Listen to me, Robert/ 9 the voice continued. "You really must
help me. I'm stuck. I've **ot to get him out of the way in a hurry,
before EllaHne is forced to marry him."

All I could hear in answer was a low mumble. My father never
paid much attention to my mother when she asked him questions
like this. He was thinking about his own work. While she was plan-

4 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

ning murders and arson, he roamed the prairies of Canada, among
the Indians.

My mother and father were both writers. My mother wrote the
melodramatic serials that appeared in the English newspapers owned
by Lord Northcliffe, and my father wrote boys* adventure stories.
The entire household revolved around my mother's writing, for It
was the large sums of money she earned that supported us. My
father's work was not supposed to matter nearly as much, because he
earned far less*

The melodrama of my mother's stories seeped into our daily life,
and even upstairs in the seclusion of the nursery we three children
were made aware of the urgency of her work.

Down in the hall sat the messenger boy from the Daily Mail.
He had been sitting there patiently on the oat settle when we went
for our walk that morning. He was waiting for Ac overdue manu-
script as we returned home. Now, with the hour of the midday meal
long overdue, he sat there still.

Mother could not seem to find an exciting enough ending*
The household routine was suspended, and a hush lay over us
all A desperate cook downstairs in the darkness of our basement
kitchen looked with despair upon the spoiling meal- Upstairs in the
nursery the old nanny stopped our noisy games and whispered to m
to keep quiet.

"If s vary near three o'clock already/* die told us. "And you
know perfectly well the messenger boy is still down there in the 'ail
waiting, and they do say the DaUy Mail can*t appear till your
mother's sent in *er instalment. And just now, as I crept past the
study door to try to find out 'ow long we'd *ave to wait for our dinner,
I 'card your mother teU your father that it was no good, she just
couldn't seem to think of a way to 3ave the *eroine. Now if you don't
keep quiet and let your mother do *er work without any of your
noise you won't *ave your dinner till teatime, and you know that
perfectly well What a life, as I always says. What a fife."

THE STUDY TABLE 5

But we were growing very hungry. Never have noses been flat-
tened against a windowpane with more impatience than were ours
as we waited for the figure of the messenger boy to bear the bright
green envelope, lavishly decorated with red sealing wax, down the
garden path to the gate. That figure meant food. Immediately he
had left, the dinner gong would sound, j

This was no unusual occurrence. Our mother worked hard three
hundred and sixty-four days In the year. Christmas was the one
exception, and only on that day was she approachable as a human
woman.

**But I get so bored with people pitying me because they think
I work too much/ 9 she would say as she sat opposite her secretary,
dictating an instalment at seven o'clock in the evening, dressed still
in her nightgown beneath a pink satin peignoir. "Sometimes it seems
to me that the world is getting soft and self-indulgent. Now, look at
me. Just because Fm a married woman people expect me to feel
faint and tired at times. I remember how worried the editors were
whenever I was in a certain condition. But Lord Northcliffe put
them in their place. 'Nonsense,' he told them. 'Mrs. Leighton could
go on just the same even if she were about to give birth to triplets
the very next day,* And he was perfectly right"

My mother was proud of the fact that during the months of her
pregnancies she was writing instalments each week of three separate
serial stories.

**I shall never forget how I had to rush to get my heroine married
to my hero just as the first labor pains were beginning," she laughed.
"Ifs aU nonsense this morning sickness and such. Leave that to the
women with no work to do,"

Hearing this, I remembered how Grandmamma had once told
me that I was almost born into the inkwell, and that it was only
becatisc the nurse practically carried my mother upstairs that I first
saw the light of day as a self-respecting human being should, from
the comfort of a double bed.

6 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

Because Mother and Father were always working, the most
Important room in the house was the study* It was filled with the
material for her stories and for my father's boys 1 books. The enor-
mous table in the middle of the room was cleared one day a year ?
so that on Christmas Day it might be used for a family party ? as the
dining room would be too small Only then was it possible to brash
and shake the twelve months* dust from the crimson tablecloth. No
servant was ever allowed to touch that table over the rest of the
year, and even when we went to the seaside for the summer my
mother and her secretary draped a dust sheet over what was left
behind upon it.

On Christmas Eve everything was carried into the dining room*
covering all the chairs and the floor* This always took the day s

and dinner had to be eaten up in the nursery* My mother
on moving her precious bundles hereclf , for she would them to
no one.

These bundles were the most important things in the house,
They contained the outlines of the serials she was writing^ and if
anything were to happen to them she would be unable to remember
what she had planned for her villains.

She was never long separated from her bundles. They
to be an extension of her own person, and 1 think I would have con-
sidered there was something indecently naked about her if she had
walked around without holding one of them in her before her*
She held it as most women hold a baby, and with the of

devotion. So precious were the bundles that, because of her terror of
fire, she carried the most recent one with her even when she went
to her bedroom to tidy her hair, or took it down to the basement
Htchen when she paid her daily visit to the cook* "to keep her in
a good humor.**

"It's aU very weE to call me fussy/' she would say. 4 *But who,
I ask you, can be perfectly sure that a spark woa*t leap the fireguard
in the study during the few minutes in which I am away from

THE STUDT TABLE 7

the room? People arc so unimaginative always. They can never
see a thing until it -has happened. And then, of course., it's too
late/'

I often wonder how she ever brought herself to go from the house
and leave the bundles behind her* She did, I remember, surround
them with dampened cloths, and during the winter she would pour
water on the study fire before she went out.

Her bundles were fascinating things. Like the layers of refuse
left in France by the people of the Cro-Magnon culture, they were
an index to my mother's mind and interests. The base of a bundle
was always a spread-open Daily Mail Upon this were scattered
numberless unpaid bills. One or two receipted bills were sprinkled
among these as a token of her fundamental good faith; but they
were usually very old and torn.

* **You*ll always find that it's the lower classes who rush to pay
their bills the moment they arrive," she remarked as she tossed the
latest plumber's account into her bundle. "This excessive desire to
pay promptly is a sign of lack of breeding. The sensible, aristocratic
thing is to wait, and only to pay them when they are accompanied
by County Court threats."

The main bulk of the bundle was composed of the outlines of her
stories. They were written in longhand with a coarse quill pen, in
letters about one inch in height; nobody had ever been able to per-
suade my mother to write with a steel tip* The outlines were deco-
rated with great blots of ink from the over-charged goose quill, and
written on the cut-open paper of brown shopping bags, for Mother
had her pet economies. Willingly she might pay twelve guineas for
a Paris hat, but she would balance this by saving on paper. And then,
because after all she was a woman, among the cumbersome outlines
of her stories lay designs for dresses torn from the Daily Mail These
she encircled with a thick blue pencil

During my childhood there was a fashion artist called Bessie
Ascougk Each day one of her sketches appeared on the woman's

8 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

page of the Daily Mail My mother loved these and

saved practically every one.

"They have/' she said, "both style and romance. And that com-
bination is unusual. One day, when I have the time, I shall have all
of them made for me by Madame Louise Freeman/ 5

But the designs lay there in her bundks, month after month.
They were not being wasted, though, for at odd moments, as she
paused in dictating her stories, my mother might be seen gazing
through a chipped magnifying glass at any one of the sketches that
had happened to work its way to the surface of the bundle. In imagi-
nation she clothed herself in these wonderful dresses, and even went
to the trouble of pasting together the pieces of newspaper upon which
the designs were printed, as they grew torn with age,

One day the bundle would become too unwieldy. And then il was
placed in a corner of the study, upon a pile already high on the
floor, and old outlines, old bills, old dress design faded hair ribbons,
love letters from her many admirers, and even forgotten under-
garments that awaited mending, gathered the dust over the years.
The bundle did not reach this stage, though, until. Eke a double-
decker dub sandwich, it had the reinforcement of layers of opened
Daily Mails, each one of them covered with its collection of
treasures.

But it was not only these bundles that cluttered the study table*
In the very middle was the enormous Inkwell This needed to
be big, for my mother used so much ink with her thick quill pens.
The great wooden saucer surrounding the inkwell was heaped with
the remains of sticks of red sealing wast, because every envelope of
raucous green that the Daily Mail provided for her manuscripts had
to be sealed with dabs of wax along the back flap* And indeed, most
of the personal letters she wrote were also secured by a quantity of
scarlet wax. Accustomed to the ingenious wiles of her own villains,
my mother was melodramatically careful as to the astening of her
correspondence.

THE STUDY TABLE g

"People arc so casual about their letters/* she said. "They seem
to think it's enough merely to lick the gummed surface of the flap.
Now a letter to me is a thing of vital importance and so the envelope
must be pasted as well. Nobody shall ever be able to say they have
received a letter from me which is not properly fastened."

Not content with the paste, my mother always placed the letter
within the pages of a book. This book would then be slid between,
her body and the chair on which she sat, and she would rock upon
it for fully five minutes before she considered the envelope safely
sealed. But even then, if it were an especially precious and intimate
letter, she would look at it with a worried expression and, asking my
father for his box of matches, she would cover the entire back flap
of the envelope with sealing wax* It was a serious event for her to
send anyone a letter.

She used this same paste for her outlines and her manuscripts.
The cut-open brown paper of the shopping bags was stuck end to
end, as additional ideas came to her, till the length of some pages of
her outline would be fully two yards. These pages were folded over
and over again till they could lie within the boundary of their bundle.
They smelt always of this paste called Stickphast My mother and
the rest of the family loved the smell, which was like the cloves in an
apple pie*

* c l suppose some people would laugh at me, if they knew about
it," my mother used to say. "But the fact remains that I can't seem
to work properly unless I sniff at the Stickphast pot from time to
time* No amount of expensive perfume could ever take its place.'*

She could be seen with her nose deep into a pot, as she dictated to
her secretary. Perhaps it was this affection for the paste that made
her keep the empty pots. They lay around on the study table in all
positions and at all angles, with the little picture on the label of one
man trying to pull another man off a chair to which apparently he
had been stuck in error by this extremely adequate paste.

io TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

With her characteristic abundance my mother always used far
more Stickphast than was necessary, and we would find odd ribbons
and scraps of paper sticking by mistake to her envelopes, and even
to her outlines, where the paste had spread beyond its prescribed
limit. Sometimes part of a printed page adhered to the back of a
letter as she removed it from the book in which she had pressed it,
and the envelope would reach its destination with sentences from
one of my father's Wild West reference books plastered it

One day an especially warm letter from an admirer, that was
lying within her bundle, happened to touch a lavishly pasted
design from the Daily Mail that she had backed for strength with a
piece of manuscript paper. The love letter stuck to the dress design,
and it was only when she was leaving the design with her dressmaker
that she discovered what had happened. It was a predicament, but
she solved it like a lady and forewent the

My mother hoarded quill pens. She never threw away the dis-
carded ones when their tips broke, and the center of the table, around
the great inkwell, looked as though the geese in a farmyard had been
having a fight. The main reason she kept these quills was that she
grew attached to certain ones, for they served a dual purpose. Not
only did she write with them, but she had a passion for being tickled
down her back with the feather ends. We were made to sit for half
an hour at a time stroking the skin of her back, inside her dress, and
around her neck and ears. She closed her eyes in a dreamy manner
while this was going on, and, supposing she had fallen asleep, some-
times we would stop; but she always noticed this and made us con-
tinue. She said the stroking helped her to get the plots of her stories.

By the side of her main bundle, among the newspapers which
were never disposed of, nestled reference books about prison life and
a Manual of Medical Jurisprudence. Being a writer of melodramas,
my mother needed to know about all possible forms of crime and
poisoning. What she never did know was that my elder brother
Roland and I gathered our first knowledge of the facts of life from

THE STUDT TABLE u

the Manual of Medical Jurisprudence. When Mother and Father
were safely out of the house, we sneaked into the study and withdrew
the book carefully from its hiding place. And then we read about the
wildest sex outrages and abnormalities, supposing them to be cus-
tomary. But Mother never knew what conception we had of the facts
of life.

Our mother was not the only one to use this study table. To her
left, past a barricade of books, sat our father. His was no world of
heroes and villains. He lived among Wild West Indians and North-
west Mounted Police, boys* schools and dogs; Walled in, ever since I
could remember, by deafness, he was able to write his adventure
stories within touch of my mother; for he could not hear her as she
dictated her melodramas across the study table to Miss Walmisley,
the secretary. This suited him well, as he worshipped my mother so
much that he was never happy when she was out of sight. With his
minute, copperplate handwriting, so different from my mother's
enormous quill-pen scrawl, he covered sheet after sheet with blood-
curdling tales about Sergeant Silk of the Northwest Mounted Police,
and Kiddie of the Camp of Australia, and sea battles of the days of
Nelson.

My father's part of the table was piled high with the history
books and accounts of Indians and cowboys he needed for his stories.
Innumerable pencil scribbles of canoes and Indian chiefs and dogs
also lay around. For deep within my father was the yearning to be
an artist. Finding that my mother expected him to go on with his
writing, to help in earning the family income, he had tried to satisfy
this urge by encouraging me in my earliest enthusiasms.

"You've got to be an artist when you grow up," he would tell me.
"It's what I've always wanted to be myself more than anything
else, I shan't feel so bad about it, though, if I see you painting
pictures,"

And while I was still a very small child he bought me my first oil
paints. I was never given much chance to use them, for he was so

12 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

often up In the nursery with them himself, painting from monoiy
the little brown-sailed fishing smacks we watched in the summer on
the North Sea, or heads of dogs, or even, when he felt particularly
ambitious, scenes from his own Wild West stories*

Then the seat at the study table beside Mother was vacant for
hours at a time, and when Father returned to work Mother would
look at him with a cold stare, as though he were a malingerer. He
always supposed Mother had not noticed his absence* But he was not
really able to slip away unobserved, for this study table was so
crowded that any empty space showed up conspicuoudy*

Each morning my younger brother Evelyn and I were allowed
in the study for half an hour after breakfast, whEe the nursery win-
dows were flung open to air the room* Evelyn was placed on the oak
settle near the window and told not to move, whHc WaJmy as we
called the secretary- heaped up books and manuscript notes, to dear
a small space by her side where I might ait But the one stipulation
was that we should make absolutely no noise. For, though Mother
had not yet started her actual work, she must attend to the daily
housekeeping affairs.

As I sat at the table, before the piece of manuscript paper Walmy
had given me, silently drawing birds and "houses and dogs with a
large stub of the blue pencil my mother used to cross out the part of
her outline she had finished with, I would hear Mother dictating the
day's menu.

The menu was written in an enormous ledger, which contained
an account of the meals over many years* If this ledger were to be
read now it would give a typical picture of English foods in the early
part of the twentieth century. Potatoes and Yorkshire pudding, milk
puddings and suet roly-polys; the amount of starch we must have
consumed was prodigious*

"I beKeve in children being properly nourished/* our mother
always declared, "And you may say what you please about all these
new diet fads that are trying to undermine family life, but nothing

THE STUDY TABLE 13

takes the place of a good mutton chop and a thick slab of currant
suet pudding. I don't mean, of course, that you've always got to eat
just exactly this. It's every bit as good if you vary it with steak and
kidney pie and another kind of boiled pudding or even, if you
like, with roast leg of mutton and blancmange. The important thing
is the nourishment,"

And so that ledger would record our daily servings of potatoes
and meat. But it would also proclaim our extravagance in the matter
of puddings. There were always at least four puddings to choose
from. On Sundays the number rose to seven, or even eight, with
tempting visions of delight such as tipsy cake covered with blanched
almonds, looking like an albino hedgehog, or castle baskets filled with
whipped cream and cherries and decorated with handles made of
angelica stalks. But until we had grown older these were not for us.
Up to the nursery went the unvarying portions of milk pudding or
suet roll.

I had a special loathing for two things: batter pudding and the
skin on the top of tapioca. I refused to eat them. My mother was told
of this and on the days when either of these appeared on the menu
she sent my father upstairs with his work to sit in the nursery and
wait for me to eat the detested pudding.

"I shall stay here until your plate is empty," he always said, "And
if you haven't eaten it by five o'clock you will have nothing else for
your tea. n

We sat on opposite sides of the nuraery table throughout long
afternoons, Father writing his Wild West stories while I sulked in
front of a cold slab of batter pudding drenched in golden syrup.

Sometimes, if Nanny was a bit late in bringing us down to the
study, the housekeeping had already started, and timidly we crept
to our accustomed places, scarcely daring to breathe. When this hap-
pened, I found it hard to behave as I should, for the creative urge
within me was stronger even than fear of my mother. With little kicks
and pokes at Walmy under the table I tried to bring her attentiop

i 4 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

round to the fact that I lacked my piece of paper and my stub of
blue pencil. If this failed, I even risked Mother's anger by whispering
to Walmy: "Paper pencil paperpencil" Then my mother
stared at me harshly, and Walmy went on writing down ; "Cold roast
mutton. Mashed turnips. Potatoes baked In their jackets. Currant
suet pudding. Stewed rhubarb,"

If the household affairs had started, and I missed this chance to
get my paper and pencil, I was out of luck, as, before returning to the
aired nursery, I had to perform my daily ritual of washing the leaves
of the aspidistra. This plant stood on a square black table by the
window, in a Benares brass pot. Each morning I went along the
passage to the lavatory where, in the damp cold that on winter days
made my teeth chatter, I found the blue enameled jug to hold the
water, and the old rag with which to sponge the aspidistra. It was an
unpleasant job in the winter, for the cold water chapped my hands,
The old nurse was upset about this and warned my mother that I
would get chilblains; but Mother would not listen to her*

"Nonsense/' she said* "No lady ever gets a chilblain. It's only
common people who 'have them. Miss Clare is going to wash the
aspidistra every day, weather or no weather.**

There was an idea that the plant would thrive more if the
London smoke were removed from its leaves*

But this solicitude for the aspidistra was strangely out of keeping
with my mother's character, as she never really cared for things
around her. Bunches of violets shriveled and died as she forgot to
renew their water, and the washstand in her bedroom was littered
with discarded lemons which she had used to rub into her skin, and
which had turned all conceivable shades of blue and green mold,
This lack of care applied ako to her attitude towards her own clothes,
for the flannel vest she wore beneath her expensive evening
was often torn, and she held it together with safety pins, which as
likely as not fell bdow the edge of her short sleeve, to dangle
against her arm.

THE STUDY TABLE 15

Sometimes these torn flannel vests lay around on her bundles,
waiting to be mended* But no one considered this unusual, for there
was always a scattering of undergarments over the study. Should the
front door bell ring, my mother or Walmy would make a desperate
rush for the fireguard, upon which were hanging a few chemises and
several pairs of my mother's flimsy, lace-edged drawers.

"The surest way to catch pneumonia is to wear underclothes that
have not been properly aired/* my mother said as she turned some of
her lingerie the other way round, to get it evenly heated. "No flannel
petticoat should ever be worn until it has been in front of a fire for
at least twenty-four hours. And when it comes to things like chemises
and drawers, which go next to the skin, it's always on the safe side
to let them go on airing for the better part of a week."

And so the same garments draped the fireguard for days on end,
gathering dust and smuts, before they were considered aired enough
to be worn with safety. At the advent of an unexpected guest, these
chemises and drawera that were snatched up were generally placed
hurriedly under a pile of newspapers on my mother's chair. A lacy
edge otten hung below, for aU eyes to see. But sometimes, in her
rush, she inserted the undergarments into one of her bundles, where
they might be lost forever.

There was another place where my mother's chemises and
drawers could always be found. On the top of a sideboard at one
end of the study stood a gramophone; the polished oak trumpet
looked Eke the enormous flower of a brown morning glory. This
trumpet jutted out into the room, and it was not easy to avoid bang-
ing into it

"Mind the gramophone/* warned our mother whenever she
heard anyone opening the study door. This grew to be her form of
welcome, as other people might say "Come in" or "Good morning."
We were never allowed to touch the machine, lest we break it, but
though our mother treasured it so, she only played it on the most
rare occasions.

16 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

"Music/' she said, "is nothing to be treated casually. It should be
used to enrich a situation/*

And so, hearing the sounds of an especially passionate vocal
record some afternoon as we returned from our walk, we knew that
our mother was in the study, entertaining one of her adoring men
friends.

"It does George good to hear a love song from time to time/ 9
she remarked. "It counteracts the baleful influence of that depress-
ing wife of his. But then, there's hardly a man in this world who
isn't benefited by being warmed and stirred a little/*

In the same spirit, though with more mischief, my mother would
recite a disturbing love poem during a game of whist, in order to
distract a susceptible opponent, while my father, who in his deafness
did not hear what was going on, would wonder suddenly why hif
partner was playing the wrong cards,

But we were always afraid this great wooden gramophone trum-
pet might harbor dust, which would damage the instrument* The
only way to prevent this, we decided, was to stuff something
down it.

"Ordinary rags and dusters are far too rough/* our mother said.
"They might conceivably scratch the poBshu The safest thing I can
think of is my drawers. There's nothing so soft as silk or mercerised
lawn."

Into the gramophone trumpet went the aired drawers, and should
my mother be so busy that she did not play any records for some
time, there they stayed. But she was inclined to forget she had put
them there.

One afternoon a friend seemed duU and depressed*

"What you need, Humphrey, is Caruso's *Cdeste Aida/ * my
mother told him. "That wiE put fire back into your blood. Nothing
changes a mood like playing exactly the right music/ 1

She selected the record and wound the machme. But only a

THE STUDY TABLE 17

thin little sound emerged from the trumpet. She looked at it in a
state of bewilderment,

"That's funny/' she said. * C I can't think what has happened.
This record is generally so loud that even Robert hears it. Something
must be wrong. 9 *

Suddenly she burst out laughing.

"Of course," she gurgled. **How stupid of me/ 1

Completely unabashed, she plunged her hand down the trumpet
and pulled out one pair of pink drawers, one pair of black, and a
cream silk chemise*

Lest i should give the impression that my mother completely
dominated the study, I must not forget to mention the dogs*

My father was an authority on dogs. Not only did he write books
about them, but he also judged them at shows. Consequently, he
was always being given presents of dogs by people who hoped thereby
to gain his favor* Out in the compound in the back garden were the
kennels, where countless litters of puppies would be born. But some
of the dogs lived with us in the house. Tita, the favorite Skye terrier,
followed my mother from room to room, and Selina, the Scottish
deerhound, lay on an oak bench in the study with her long legs
sticking straight out bsfore her, catching against everyone who
passed that side of the room* Kelpie and Roy, two male Skyes, lived
under the study table, where sometimes they started fights in the very
middle of my mother's work hours. And then Walmy grew frightened
and wanted to leave the room.

**Now look here, Miss WalmMey,** our mother would say, inter-
rupting her work for a moment to chide her terrified secretary, "it's
perfectly absurd for you to go and get disturbed and frightened.
Kelpie and Roy are far too much interested in fighting each other
to want to waste time and energy over snapping at your legs. . , ,
Where were we in the dictating? . * , Oh, yes: 'As he lay in the
prison cell, sick with despair, John found himself remembering with

x8 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

longing the days before the shadows closed in upon him/ Next
paragraph . . . Kelpie, lie down . . . It*s all right^ Miss Walmis-
ley, don't think about the dogs/*

But the fight was getting worse* Even my mother grew concerned,
"Robert/ 9 she shouted to my father, who was blissfully writing
at her side, in the shelter of his deafness^ "I think you'd better set
to the dogs. They're fighting/'

My father jerked himself back from his Indians in Canada and
dived under the study table.

When the females came into heat and the had to be sepa-

rated, Peggy and Pixie went under the study table and Kelpie and
Roy were dispatched to the garden kennels. Our were chiefly
Skye terriers because that breed was supposed to have been the
favorite of Queen Victoria, for whom my mother had had a great
respect.

"Skye terriers are aristocrats/* she said. "You can always tell the
class of a person by the breed of his dog. Most people are only suited
by such commonplace dogs as fox terriers or Irish terriers. You have
to be a gentleman to carry off a deerhound or a Skye,"

This indoor kennel was fairly easy to manage until a cat
the window. The Leighton dogs were allowed to chase cats. When
we went on our walks with tie dogs, these cat hunts were one of our
most exciting diversions-

"Catch *em, Tital Catch *em, SelinaP we would call; and the
Skyes and the deerhound tore up the road in wild pursuit of a poor
little tabby*

The glass of the window, though, was a tantalizing obstacle
when the dogs were back in the study. They could not then reach
their prey. Suddenly, into the midst of my mother's love scene
between her hero and heroine, the most terrific barking and baying
started up. Up to her hind legs leapt Selina, as she clawed the win-
down, her hefty tail slashing the aspidistra, and against the lower

nart of tin*

THE STUD I TABLE 19

was completely undisturbed, and the love scene continued, with the
passionate avowals shouted loud enough to be heard by Walmy
above the din of the dogs, till my deaf father turned to my mother
and asked : *' What was that you said, Chummie?**

My mother wasn't even much put out when Selina was dis-
covered sometimes stretched over the study table, with her front
paws scrabbling among the precious bundles, The keen-nosed deer-
hound had smelt cold bacon and buttered toast, and was desperately
trying to reach it. My parents had a habit of bringing away from
the breakfast table slices of bacon, fitted on to neat triangles of
toast. My father delighted in shaping the little triangles, as an act
of devotion to my mother.

"This is for you, Chummle," he said each morning of his life.
"This is to give my Ghummie strength for her writing.'*

The snacks were generally placed on the back of some envelope
that had arrived in the morning's mail, and stood around on the
study table in readiness for any sudden hunger that either might feel
in the middle of the morning's work. Apparently they rarely remem-
bered to eat them, for the toast and bacon slipped under layers of
the bundles, or into odd corners beneath the goose quills, where they
remained over many weeks, to be joined by halves of Osborne bis-
cuits, or lumps of sugar that my mother intended to put into her
handbag, lest, when she was out somewhere, she should suddenly
get a severe fit of coughing.

I never understood why our study table wasn't overrun by mice.
Undoubtedly there were mice in the house, We caught them in the
nursery in traps baited with cold bacon. They haunted the drawers
of the washstand in my mother's bedroom. They abounded in the
basement. The many dogs In the study must have kept them away.
The mice would, eke, have had a wonderful time on that table.

One day the study became still more crowded. My father's desire
to be an artist grew so strong that he persuaded my mother to give
him as a Christmas present a box of oil paints. It was the most won-

so TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

derful thing. It had three layers of tubes, and dozens of brushes, I
would gaze at it in envious awe. Into one comer of the already filled
room went an easel, and the boys* stories were abandoned while my
father painted a big picture of a beautiful Indian girl in scarlet attire,
her black hair streaming behind her, an arrow whisking past her, as
she escaped in ft canoe at the edge of some rapids. "

But my mother was not happy over this*

"You know perfectly well., Robert, that I have no objection to
being the member of the family to earn most of the money/ 1 she told
him, "That is as it happens though sometimes, I must admit, I do
wonder what it would feel like to be a kept woman* But if Fm to
slave away all my days on these potboEers and never have the time
to write the real literature and the poems that are inside me, the very
least I can ask of you is that you also work, instead of enjoying your-
self with these pictures.**

My father's passion for painting would not be checked. He
moved the easel into the unheated back drawing room where, dressed
ia a muffler and an overcoat, he hoped to be able to paint unnoticed.

But there was trouble ahead* Out of devotion to his Ghummic,
Father wished to do a portrait of her with Ms new oils* Yet she would
not pose for him. She was honeycombed with superstitions, as could
be expected from her Cornish and Irish ancestry. One of the strong-
est of t&ese superstitions was a fear of being painted or photographed.

"If you allow yourself to be reproduced you will surdy die/* she
declared. "Even the Bible carries this out when it commands: c Thou
shalt not make to thyself any graven image/ I*d do many things for
you, Robert; but In this case I must even save you from yourself.
What, I ask you, would you do if I were suddenly to die? You*d be
in a bad fix, I can tell you. No; most certainly 1 wffl not pose.**

But in spite of aE this, my father meant to paint the portrait

Over many months, as he sat beside Ms Chummic at the study
table, he would turn Jm head cautiously towards her, trying to im-
print upon his visual memory the shape of her ace. Then he would

THE STUDT TABLE 2I

slip from the study, to put down upon canvas in the back drawing
room what he had been able to remember*

The several large portrait of my mother he managed to get
painted were pathetically bad. But when I remember the difficulties
under which poor Father, with no training whatsoever as an artist,
worked, I have to admit that they were amazingly good likenesses.
I can see one of them now, with Mother staring fullface out from
the picture, a large spray of lilac in her straw-colored hair, a purple
velvet tunic low over her deep bosom. It was garish yet it gave some
impression of her fair beauty and a Mnt of her wfldness, which made
her look Eke the queen of a Border Ballad. Even in the other portrait
that I remember, where she is wearing a pink and white boudoir
cap and an intimate, low-necked, frilly morning jacket, and holding
a pink carnation in one hand, my father managed to show this
proud wildness.

For a long while she never knew these portraits were being
painted. She rarely went into the back drawing room, and my
father would take them off the easd and place them against the wall,
behind the piano. She had supposed he was wasting his time with
more pictures of Wild Wot Indian girls, and never troubled to
question Mm. But one day he was working so fondly at this painting
that he forgot to look at the dock, and the dinner bell rang without
his hearing it. Looking everywhere for him, Mother finally opened
the drawing room door, and found herself face to face with the
portrait For many long weeks she went about in fear of sudden
death, I think she never quite got over the way her pet superatition
let her down.

Though tie portraits did her no bodily harm, my father dared
not go on with them*

"I may scon to have been able to avoid death this time, 1 * our
mother admitted after several months of bouncing health, "but that
'doesn't mean my luck won't diange. You must take this escape,
Robert, as a kindly warning from Fate. I shall exact a solemn

22 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

promise from you that never again will you tempt Providence by
doing even a pencil scribble of my face.**

My father promised; but sometimes 1 would see Mm standing
in front of a half-finished canvas in the drawing room obviously
wanting to take up a paint brush.

For several weeks his spirit was crushed, and he sat closely to his
work at the study table, beside my mother, turning out his boys*
adventure stories. But it was not very long before he began to slip
upstairs to the nursery, and I discovered that his frustration was a
great help to me, for he grew even more insistent that I should one
day become an artist.

Unfortunately, the things I wanted to paint didn't coincide with
what he wished. About this time, when I was six years old* I had a
passion for mythological subjects. My father wanted me to paint
landscapes or dogs or pretty faces, whereas I struggled stubbornly
with a design of Andromeda chained to a rock* Soon he must have
realized there wasn*t much satisfaction to be found in vicarious
painting, for he returned to his writing in the study* Once again that
room in St. John's Wood was normal, with its full congestion of
workers and bundles, undergarments, aspidistra, gramophone, easel,
and dogs*

2. St. John's Wood

The fields from Islington to Marylebone,
To Primrose Hill and St John's Wood,
Were builded over with pillars! of gold,
And there Jerusalem's pillars stood.

^-William Blake

We lived in a part of London called St, John's Wood. The actual
neighborhood can still be found on the map, just beyond Baker
Street and Regent's Park; but its spirit vanished many years ago. For
St. John's Wood belonged to the age of Romance.

"You have to be worthy of living here,'* our mother used always
to say, "And that is not a question of money or fame. I can think of
many very rich and important people who would be incapable of
understanding the spirit of the place. They might have heaps of
money, but nothing on earth could ever make them belong."

It was a world of individual seclusion- Houses stood hidden be-
hind high garden walls* Garden walls were dwarfed by massive trees.
Whatever might take place within these walls was shielded from the

24 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

eyes of the public. This privacy satisfied our Auntie Polfie's defini-
tion of a perfect garden.

"It should be a place," she said, "where you can wash your feet
without being seen."

"I entirely agree with you/ 8 answered our mother, **But I
would go even further, and say that in a perfect garden you ought
to be able to walk about completely naked without being seen* And
that, of course, is the charm of St. John*s Wood. For actually it
wouldn't really matter if someone did happen to see you. Even if
you chose to walk along the roads in your nightgown no real St
John's Wood inhabitant would comment upon it"

Our house, which had the romantic name of Vallombrosa, was
satisfactorily invisible from the road* The solid garden gate and
the high brick wall were topped with pieces of broken glass bottles,
to prevent burglars from scaling them. Against the entire length of
this wall grew a row of linden trees. We were proof against the vulgar
gaze of passersby* Nobody could know of our tMrty~six lilac bushes,
or the apple tree in the back garden that blossomed each spring, or
the straggly grapevine that draped the wall at the far end of Vallom-
brosa,

"But then, nobody has any right to know what goes on inside
one's garden gate," our mother said* **I have no patience with people
who need to live in public. You can always teU than by a certain
flat look in their eyes. They have no magic about them. Ifs as though
their outlines end where they end, instead of being surrounded by
an aura of glow,"

In the St. John's Wood of my childhood most of our neighbors
had this "glow*" For we lived In the sacred innermost circle, which
housed the writers and painters, the actresses and singers, and a few
romantic minded but impecunious retired Army officers*

This circle also housed a generous sprinkling of the most sdect
type of "improper ladies." As we went for walks with our nurse we
would see male members of the British aristocracy stepping with

ST. JOHN'S WOOD 25

caution from hansom cabs, In front of closed garden gates. We used
to wonder who they were and what they were doing; for they seemed
afraid of being noticed.

"And that was the Duke of So and So/* Nanny sighed, as an
especially dignified gentleman alighted before a blue door in Elm
Tree Road. "And *Im with such a beautiful wife, too as I've seen
from their photos in the papers* Upon my word, when you think of
what the world's coming to it's about time for the Lord God to
descend in the terror and glory of the Judgment Day.'*

But we never dared to ask what any of it meant, for our nurse
wore a forbidding look upon her face.

According to our mother, the outer drde of St. John's Wood
started some few streets away from where we lived.

"And it is not imagination on my part that says it is an entirely
different world/ 1 she contended* **You*ve only got to walk about
fifteen minutes and you'll get into the cirde of the Vould-beV , The
people who live there want to look as though they are bohemian.
You'll notice that the houses are much grander and they've got more
money than we have; but they don't belong to our world. And have
you ever remarked how keenly they watch us? They are trying to
leara the secret of our magic. But they'll never manage it* You see,
they aren't f$<d They don't work. 1 *

Our mother was right in what she said. The true St. John's Wood
was no romantic setting for the false bohonian. If the "would-beY*
could have known how regular our lives were and how hard we
worked, they might have been disappointed These bosky gardens
protected houses where pictures were really painted and books were
actually written. Artists* models disappeared each morning into
garden gates. Hansom cabs arrived each evening to convey celebrated
actresses to West-end theatres. Wafted by the breezy from some
open window, came the sound of a anger practising his part at
Covent Garden. From time to time, during the day, these wrkera
emerged to take the air. They walked with their dogs and their

26 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

simmering ideas, round the blocks of houses, and round and round
again; but they hardly noticed where they walked. In their minds
they were the heroes of a book, or the figures in an oil painting, Mimi,
or Hans Sachs. And then, their bodies perfunctorily exercised, they
returned to the seclusion of their homes, behind the garden walk, to
continue working.

But there was yet another circle in St John's Wood. It was the
outermost circle of aH Nobody with any possible sensitivity or under-
standing lived there. Within that circle lay the waste lands of Maida
Vale and Kilburn, Camden Town and Haverstock Hill.

"And I won't even let Nurse take you for walks in thcwe districts/'
our mother told us. *Tou see, though most people seem to overlook
the fact, there is every bit as much risk of contaminating the spirit as
there is in exposing the body to infection* People who would be
scared to death of going anywhere near a case of measles or scarlet
fever never think twice about the possible effect of soordid, common-
place atmospheres upon their minds and spirits* I refuse to let my
children catch this disease of mediocrity.**

Though we were not allowed into these outer regions, we knew
a great deal of what happened in our sacred innermost circle. On
the daily walks with Nurse there was not much that dipped our
notice. And what we didn't know, we guessed, or imagined. For*
from our earliest days, we had heard tales of the romance behind
these high garden walls with their dosed gates.

But these gates were not only guardians of privacy* They pre-
supposed clandestine inclinations. They were often fitted with tiny
grilles that could be slid back, so that the owner of the house could
put an eye to the opening and examine his vMtor without himself
bring seen. This was supposed to have been especially useful to my
mothers fatter.

Having sold his commission in the Syth Royal Irish Foot, and
thereby sacrificed his pension, Captain James Valentine Nenoja
Connor and his family lived in a dramatically alternating pattern of

ST. JOHN'S WOOD 27

poverty and riches. Whenever a wealthy relative died and left them
some money, my mother and her parents moved to Maidenhead,
a romantic, fashionable little pkce up the Thames, which was no-
torious for illicit honeymoons. There Grandpapa indulged his extrav-
agant taste for sailing and horses until the legacy had been used up,
and so many debts contracted that it was necessary to flee. And then,
in the intervals between deaths, the family retired to a miniature
house in St. John's Wood, where my dandified, Thackeray-like
grandpapa washed the dishes and avoided contact with his creditors.
It was here that the little grille came in useful, for at the ring of the
bell Captain Connor would go down to the garden gate and
slide the shutter just far enough open to let him see who wanted
him.

"Captain Connor?" queried the butcher or the baker.

"Captain Connor is not at home," came the reply.

"But you are Captain Connor/' insisted the creditor, recognizing
the voice.

"Captain Connor is not at home," came the answer. And having
satisfied his curiosity, Grandpapa slid back the shutter and returned
to the house,

Rmembering this tale about our grandpapa, who had died
before we were bom, we used, on our daily walks with Nanny, to
watch for one of these grilles to slide open as we passed. But it
never happened. We even planned to ring a door bell in the hopes r
of seeing a ferocious eye appear at a grille- The strict old nurse,
however, gave us no chance to do this*

On these same walks we also expected at any moment to see
King Edward the Seventh. Had we not been brought up on the
legends of our mothers childhood, when the Prince of Wales, as he
then was, might be seen disappearing into a garden gate in St John's
Wood, while visiting one of his lady friends?

Our mother was deeply devoted to King Edward the Seventh.
No Prince Charming in a fairy tale could have held more magic.

2 8 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

He combined the awesome divinity of a king with the glamour of a
passionate lover.

"I honestly believe you think more of that coirfounded King
Edward, whom you will never have the chance to kiss, than you do
of any of us who really love you,* 1 one of her admirers told her in a
fit of jealousy.

Our mother turned to him with a sanctified smile*

"Oh, but you forget/* she answered, **Or perhaps you don't
choose to remember that I have as good as beea kissed by him. Never
shall I see such a light in any man's eyes as in his. You know per-
fectly well, George, that I've told you about it many times. Here
you keep on saying that you love me so deeply that you'd even die
for me, but when I think back to that evening in May I realize that
you haven't even the faintest conception of what passion and
love really mean."

<4 To hell with him/* shouted the jealous admirer*

My mother was deeply shocked.

"You've no right to say that about a Airajj/* she reproached
him. "But above all, you've no right to say it about King Edward
You happen not to be a woman, so you can't possibly understand.
But I tell you, he had everything a woman could want in a lover.
There I was, a young girl of about sixteen, walking along Acacia
Road by myself, and quoting Byron and dreaming about love, whoa
this hansom cab passes by. I remember it happened near a garden
with the lilac in bloom I shall always think of him when I smeE
the fragrance of lilac. Something made me look up as the hansom
drew near. And there was the Prince of Wales himself, going to see
one of his ladies. He leaned forward in the cab, looked me straight
in the face and smiled, and sweeping off his silk hat, he kissed his
hand to me.'*

"Nonsense/* snorted the jealous George,

"Oh, you may well say 'nonsense 1 / 1 sneered tny mother. "But
yon weren't there and so you can't possibly know what took place.

ST. JOHN'S WOOD ^

Of course I smiled back to him. And then he made a movement
towards the little trap door, in the ceiling of the hansom, to tell the
cabby to stop; but it was too late. The cabby whipped up his horse,
and the next thing I knew I was standing aU alone in Acacia Road,
against the lilac bushes, with nothing but my dreams."

"tfrn. That cabby was probably preparing for his reward in
Heaven/* said the wounded admirer.

But many years later we were made to suffer for King Edward's
gallantry. When he died, our mother felt her grief to be so personal
that she put her little children into full mourning for nearly a year*
As I played on the beach that summer in my sunbaked black frock,
I decided with resentful defiance that never, in all my life, would I
be loyal to a king. It was all right to have had to wear black the year
before, when Grandmamma died; I had known and loved Grand-
mamma. But I hated to wear it for someone I had never met.

My mother, though, had other views. She was even convinced
that I had seen him.

"As you go through life/* she told me, "I want you always to
remember Kong Edward and to be proud of having seen him at his
funeral It will give you richness of spirit and glamour."

I did not feel either pride or glamour as I fell asleep during the
procession. We had been wakened before dawn, to occupy our seats
at the window in Edgware Road, above a pawnbroker's shop, for
which our mother had paid an exorbitant price. All I can remember
across the years is a flag-draped gun carriage and frightening
crowds.

I was wrong, though, in feeling I had never known King Edward.
My earliest childhood was saturated with him, for he was my
mother's idol. It was as if this romantic figure lurked in the thicken-
ing Mlac bushes in spring, or hid in the blue dusks of early winter. We
might see Mm coming out of a garden gate. He could be within a
passing hansom cab.

"I saw him again this afternoon/* our mother said with a mys-

3 o TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

terkras little smile, when she came upstairs to remove her furs and
unpin the Parma violets from her muff, "It was just as I turned the
corner of Melina Place. He was going in at that plum-colored garden
gate just near the almond tree. He had a bunch of stephanotis in his
hand. His back was turned, else I know he*d have smiled at me."

We did not need to ask her who the "him** was. The particular
quality of our mother's proud smile told us everything. We grew
excited ourselves. At any moment we, too, might meet him on our
daily walks.

This world had an atmosphere of misty romance which seemed
to belong to London, with its violet twilights and the saffron^colored
fogs that almost blanketed from sight the gas lamps in the streets.
And as it was a world of blurred edges, so it was perhaps inevitably
an age of hints and sighs, of clandestine meetings and lingering
sentiment Our mother was a product of this age,

"Don't forget that emotion is nourished by the imagination
rather than by actual surrender,'* she told me as I grew older. "And
let me warn you that the rising generation is losing a great deal these
days, for there is more romance and passion to be felt in the
imagination of an impossible kiss than in all the weekends you young
people indulge in. The more you think about sex the less chance
there is for romance to enter your life and color it And without
romance, I ask you, what is life worth?"

Our mother lived upon romance, and wove it into her most
prosaic daily duties. It was not something to be put aside for special
occasions. As she washed her face, or dressed to go out, she quoted
poems from W* E, Henley's Hawthorn and Lavender.

There was no Mss that day * * *

She paused to splash cold water on her neck for never in her
whole life did she use warm water or soap, believing than to be
injurious to the complexion and then, as she rubbed the juice of a
lemon into her skin, she finished one poem and started another.

ST. JOHN'S WOOD 31

A sigh sent wrong,

A kiss that goes astray,

A sorrow the years endlong * w *

She was growing so emotional that her voice quavered. Tears
ran in rivulets down her cheeks and mixed with the dry oatmeal she
applied now to her complexion, till her face became covered with
fawn-colored paste. But at this point she looked in her glass and saw
that she was crying, and* turning her head from me as I sat on the
bed waiting to read to her while she dressed, she suggested that we
go on with the French play we were in the middle of, while she
brushed her hair.

W E* Henley and King Edward the Seventh were the symbols
of my mother's world, against a background of the dop-dop of han-
som cab ponies, and flower women by the pavement's edge, selling
tightly bunched violets to be pinned on furs, and the sound of the
lampHghte/s quick step as he walked down the road at dusk with
his long pole. It seemed to be a changeless, secure existence, un-
troubled by outside events. But we three children were not satisfied
with this. We felt cheated at having been born in such a time, and
wanted something to happen that would be considered important
enough to be written into a history book. Our mother's world of
melodrama was having its effect upon our minds.

"You don't underetand how very lucky you are to be living in
these days/* she reproached us, "It's a pity you didn't all happen to
have been born before the Old Queen died. And it's a pity, too, that
you missed the glory of the Boer War. But all the same, you are
tasting the fruits of England's greatness, and you should realize that
you are very fortunate Mttk children* Why, you might just as easily
have been born French, or Italian, or any other of the Europeans, 9 *

Our sheltered, secure world was dominated by class feeling, But
because both of our parents were writers, it was a very special, pecul-
iar class feeling* It had none of the rigid standards of the "huntin*
and shootin* ** aristocracy, even though that had been our Grand-

32 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

papa's background. It was a snobbishness that included the cele-
brated poet or the knighted sculptor. For these were the days when
Art was highly paid and romantic, and so long as the artists were
successful, the doors of Society were flung open wide to receive
them. Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, R.A., lived in a mighty mansion
with marble pillars, in Grove End Road, which was every bit as
magnificent as the marble backgrounds to his own extremely popular
paintings; MacWhirter, another Royal Academician, earned enough
with his enormous Scottish landscapes to afford an imposing house
with elaborate wrought-iron gateways, and Sir George Frampton,
the sculptor, worked on his statue of Peter Pan for Kensington Gar-
dens in a studio that was almost like a palace. Not only this, but these
artists were visited by members of the Royal Family,

"I've had the shock of my life/ 9 our mother said, as she came
back from a round of visits on Studio Sunday, when all the artists
kept open house before sending their completed pictures to the
annual exhibition of the Royal Academy* **I fully expected to see
Royalty in quite a number of the studios I was in this afternoon, but
never did I suppose that timid Httle Jimmie Faed would have man-
aged to get the Princess Royal along to see those deadly dull land-
scapes of his. Yes, I tell you, the Princess Royal And what do you
think he did? Why, instead of letting her see how much honored he
was, he stood in front of his easel, all homesick for that Scotland of
his, and murmured, over and over again: *Aye, the moor. Aye, the
moor/ But the strangest thing of all was that the Princess Royal
bought the dull landscape. But then, I suppose Royalty has got to
play safe. They mustn't be seen buying anything that might conceiv-
ably look fast or wicked.'*

Though the family lived among writers and artists, our mother
was determined that we should be brought up most correctly. No
hint of anything risqu must be allowed to reach our eyes or earn

"I do not intend my children to become bohemianjs/* she told
Grandmamma. < Qare worries me by showing symptoms of wanting

ST. JOHN'S WOOD 33

to be an artist; but I shall stop that all right, If she had wanted to
be a writer it wouldn't have been so bad, but no woman is a lady
by reason of being an artist* Only with difficulty can she be a lady
in spite of it . . * And, by the way, Mamma, let me tell you that
I simply will not have you exposing my children to the risk of meet-
ing that Maude of yours* I mean this. It's nothing to do with me
what you may choose to do yourself, but you have got to promise me,
here and now, that never, under any circumstances whatsoever, will
you even let than catch sight of her/*

Overhearing this, we were, of course, deeply curious about
"Maude," She became one of the chief mysteries of our childhood,

I ilever did catch sight of Maude that is, not face to face. The
nearest I got to seeing her was when a shadowy figure slipped out of
the back door of Grandmamma's house, just as we were let in at the
front door. Grandmamma kept her promise to our mother, though
we were tantalized by continual references to the lady,

"Maude came along yesterday in the most marvelous new furs,**
our grandmamma said with a wink, as she appeared herself in what
looked like a brand new sable coat. "And because she can't raise the
money to pay my rent this month she handed me over this coat,
instead* It's rather nice, mtt it? And It's worth far more than the
rent."

My mother tried to look shocked,

"Of course, Mamma, I know it's nothing to do with me who
your tenants are, but I do think you might be just a little less obvious
about it all."

"Nonsense, Pattie/* answered Grandmamma. "Since when have
you gone and got m proper? You're jealous of the jewels Maude
gives me, if the truth ware only known* You'd like some of them
youraelf, wouldn't you? The way you go on, you'd think Maude was
an ordinary sort of 'improper lady/ whereas she's at the height of
her profession, and decidedly particular. She has only a very few
gentleman friends, and those are, she assures me, of the aristocracy*

34 ' TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

And after all, as you yourself have just said* what difference docs it
make to you who my tenants are?"

Grandmamma toyed with the pearls around her neck, and the
rings that sparkled upon her fingers. Judging by the splendor of
these substitutes for rent, Maude must have had great charm.

"And when all's said and done, owning house property in St.
John's Wood isn't the surest way of earning a steady income,"
Grandmamma continued. "If I didn't have someone like Maude as a
tenant, I'd most likely have an impecunious artist or poet who would
never be able to pay the rent So what are you to do?**

u The one thing you can do is to be a little more discreet in
talking about her/* our mother said* **I wouldn't be surprised if
Clare hasn't overheard quite a great deal of what you've been say-
ing. And remember this; I intend Glare to grow up correct and
strait-laced. I do not mean her to know about pem>ns like your
Maude."

But some years later Maude's name turned up once again in the
family. By that time Grandmamma had died, and Maude was
nothing more than a memory.

"It was the queerest coincidence, said my mother with delight
"But it only goes to show that real life is every bit as fantastic as the

stories one writes* 1 *

It seemed that one Christmas, in aa unusual rush of maternal
exuberance, Grandmamma had given my mother a beautiful sap-
phire ring. My mother knew perfectly well it had been Maude's
equivalent for rent Only rardy did she wear it, because It was both
conspicuous and valuable. One day an important Anglo-Indian gov-
ernment official visited us. As my mother had an engagement later
that afternoon, she asked him if he would not like to come part of the
way with her in her cab. Pulling off her glove to rearrange the
violets on her muff, she was surprised to hear a stifled ; "My God!"
beside her. She turned round, to see the strong, silent, military face
an ashen white.

ST. JOHN'S WOOD 35

"What's the matter? * she asked him. a Are you ill?" .

But he shook Ms head*

"Let me look at that ring/* he begged. And taking her hand, he
examined it lengthily. "Yes/* he said, "there's no doubt about it.
Absolutely no doubt Ifs been in my family for a very long while.
But where did you get it? Tell me where it came from,"

"Oh that/* said my mother, "that was a Christmas present from

Mamma*"

"Impossible/* he moaned, ^Impossible. Many years ago I gave
that ring to a woman I loved. I would know it anywhere. She was a
beautiful woman, I remember, and I was passionately in love with
her. Her name was Maude/*

It seemed as though he were going to turn reminiscent, but then
he thought better of it, and straightened himself as he whispered :

"I can't for the life of me see how it got into your mother's pos-
session, but for pity** sake don't ever mention this to my wife,"

In spite of our mothers intention of bringing her children up
with the utmost strictness and moral rectitude, there was one way in
which she actually encouraged us to sin. She was an ardent suffra-
gette. To our terror she even consorted with women who were plan-
ning to kill Cabinet Ministers. TMs made us afraid she would one
day get sent to prison, and we hurried past every policeman we
met on our walks, imagining they might be on their way to arrest

her.

"Sometimes I get rather worried over Bessie," she confided to our
father about a friend of hen. "It seems she has absolutely sworn to
kiU the Prime Minister, and there's no persuading her against it
Would you believe it? She's the wildest of the lot, in spite of looking
* such a mouse. Didn't I always teE you that appearances are decep-
tive?"

But overhearing this, my little brother and I grew scared, for we
often saw this friend in the neighborhood. When it happened, we

36 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

would use every possible device to get our nurse to cross the road,
rather than meet her face to face. We suspected that she always car-
ried a bomb with her, and feared it might accidentally explode while
she was talking to us,

"But though I don't exactly hold with killing/* our mother
told us, "I do believe in Women's Suffrage enough to do quite a few
violent things. And this is where I would Hke you children to hdp
me. You can manage it quite easily when you go for your walks. Just
get Nurse to take you along Greville Place, where J, L, Garvin, the
editor of the Observer, lives. You know his house. Yvt pointed it out
to you. He's been writing against the Cause lately in his paper and
it's time somebody did something about it. Now, if you did happen
to have a spare stone in your pockets, and if you did chance to throw
that stone into the windows of his house as you passed, I wouldn't
punish you. In fact , . ."

And our mother looked at us with a warmth that was unusual.

We developed a sudden fondness for taking walks along Greville
Place. When nobody was looking, we stole some stones from a road-
mender's pile. Day after day, walking demurely on each side of the
old nurse, we fingered these stones in our overcoat pockets. We
loitered behind her, each waiting for the other to throw the first
missile. But something always seemed to hold us back, and with
immense relief we would see Nanny turn her head towards us, or
notice someone coming down the road; for now it was impossible.
We would have to wait till another day*

The stones were never thrown.

This sympathy with Women's Suffrage was an inconsistent thing
in our mother's character, for actually she had a contempt for her
own sex.

"No woman is really worth talking to if any man happens to be
near/ 3 she said. "Women, you see, discuss personalities, whereas men
talk either about ideas pr the work they are doing. You might con-
ceivably say this is the result of education, but I don't believe it would

ST. JOHN'S WOOD 37

make a scrap of difference. Education for women is a sheer waste of
money and time/*

But in spite of these views, our mother continued to support the
Cause. It was, she held, a sheer matter of principle. The gardener
had no right to the vote which was denied to the lady of the manor.

"Why should I want a vote, though?" she asked on her return
home from marching through the London streets in a procession of
suffragettes. "As it is, I hold the power to control the votes of six
no, eight men. All of these men will vote as I want them to, to
please me, for they think of me as a woman; but directly I get the
franchise my power will be taken from me. I shall have become a
rival voter, and I shall control one vote only, and that is my own."

Our mother did not belong to an age of sex equality. Hers was
the power behind the throne, in a world where women schemed, and
the strength of passion lay in its being illicit. St. John's Wood, in
Edwardian days, with its misty twilights and the high garden walls,
was her rightful setting.

Mother's Old Men

"Never give yourself to a man/* my mother told me when I was
growing up. u And I say chis to you without any thought for morals.
I say this only out of wisdom. A man wants most what he cannot get.
That is why the girl in the convent has a glamour and a glow about
her that none of you brazen young moderns will ever manage to
achieve. And so, if you really want your man, keep everything veiled
and hinted at, but not proclaimed/*

My mother's greatest wisdom lay in her dealings with men. All
men f eU in love with her, and she was able always to hold their love.
I never knew a man who forgot her, or forsook her, or who managed
to free himself from emotional slavery to her. As I began to wonder
what the secret of her power was, I decided that it lay, as she said, in
the mist of romantic inaccessibility with which she surrounded her-
self. She was always unattainable, and consequently always to be
desired.

"And there's something else I'd better tell you/* she added, feel-
ing it was her duty to instruct me about men. **If s what your grand-

38

MOTHER'S OLD MEJV 39

mamma once told me, 6 My child/ she said to me many years ago,
*I have only one small piece of advice to give you, but if you obey
it there's nothing you can't achieve with a man. My advice is: Fly
and they follow. Follow and they fly. 3 "

I never noticed that my mother did any of the flying she advo-
cated; but then, I was up in the nursery most of the time and knew
little of what went on downstairs. I was aware, though, of the irre-
sistible flutey note that came into her voice when she talked with any
of her adorers, and I often wished she would use the same warm tone
when she spoke to us children*

During the years of my early childhood there were, apart from
my father, three men who persistently loved my mother. "Mother's
Old Men" Roland called them. Their devotion continued faithfully
through to their death, and they followed her movements so closely
that one of them even took to living in a caravan, that he might pitch
his tent as near to her as possible. Behind the wall of his, deaf ness my
father adored her, and, by reason of being a great deal older than she
was, had something of a cherishing, paternal attitude towards her.
If he felt even mildly jealous of these three men he never showed it.
My brothers and I did not know that there was anything out of the
ordinary in this multiple devotion. Had not our mother been in love
ailherHfe?

"I had my first love affair when I was ten," she told us. "He was
a window cleaner in a green baize apron, with a family of eight chil-
dren, whom I met on my walks in St John's Wood, and I spent my
days quoting Byron to myself about him. Pretty soon we were writr
ing to each other, and he placed his letters in the box attached to the
garden gate, and so that my family might not see them through the
glass opening he covered the envelopes with a piece of green baize
from one of his aprons. This went on unnoticed for quite a long
while, when one day Papa happened to look more closely at the
letter box as he went out at the garden gate. And there he found a
package enclosed within the disguising green baize."

4 o TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

"What happened then? 5 we always asked, for we loved hearing
this story.

"Oh, well, of course there was a terrible row/* our mother smiled.
"And I had to confess. The poor window cleaner was threatened by
the law, and my parents sent me off to a convent in Northern France.
They thought Fd be safe there, but actually I proceeded to faU in
love at one and the same time with the Mother Superior and the
priest, and ended up by becoming a devout Catholic,**

But our mother's luck was against her. Her parents thought there
was something strange in the tone of little Battle's letters, and paid
her an unexpected visit to France, They found her dressed in black,
from head to foot, looking, as her father said, ic like a crow in
mourning." She was busy doing penance for her sins, and starving
herself as well, because she thought thereby to bring herself more
closely to the state of grace of the adored priest. The cross Channel
steamer. next day carried back to England a brokenhearted little
girl who spent the time in one of the ladies* lavatories, on her knees,
praying to the Virgin Mary that the ship might go down and drown
her, so that she need not return to infidel England.

Brought up on these legends of our mother, it was no wonder
that we took her adorers as a matter of course. Indeed, we should
have felt that there was something wrong if they had fallen away.
Adoration was her due.

Of these "Old Men," the one we were most aware of was the
novelist who visited our mother three times a week, aU the days of
our childhood. At exactly three o'clock there was a ring at the front
door bell and we rushed to the nursery window to see Mr* Bowles
arrive. So punctual was he that you could have set your dock by Mm,
A dapper little figure in a grey overcoat and a top hat, wearing a
bunch of violets or a carnation in his buttonhole^ and invariably
carrying a neat umbrella on his arm, he came up the garden path to
the steps with the walk of a little bird- and waved to us at the nursery

MOTHER'S OLD MEN 4*

window. He never failed to wave, and even on rainy days he would
slant his opened umbrella to the side so that he might see iis.

He was the one we were fondest of, for we were not afraid of
him as we were of the other two. Monday, Wednesday and Friday,
year in, year out, he arrived, Thus he had arrived before even my
elder brother was born. He sat by the hour, adoring our mother,
while they talked together about the literary world of London. My
mother had very little respect for his brain, and she considered the
books he wrote completely worthless and deplorably thin,

"Why anybody takes the trouble to publish them," she said, "is
a mystery to me. Ninety-two novels he has written, and if you were
to boil the whole lot down into one book you might manage to make
something just worth reading while you were waiting at a station
for your train on a rainy day. But then, I am always forgetting that
most people in the world can only understand trivial books. And any-
how, George doesn't expect me to read anything he writes, so why
should I bother my head about it? What matters far more is that he
has the most perfect mouth I have ever seen in a man. It's a com-
plete Cupid's bow* No wonder so many women fall in love with
Mm. 5 '

She insisted that she was not one of these women,

"And that's why he is so faithful to me," she added. "What did
I always tell you? No man wants a woman who runs after him. It's
when she has no feelings for him that he prostrates himself at her
feet There isn't any romance for me about George. He's just a com-
fortable IMe cock robin with pink cheeks and this perfect mouth, to
whom I can confide my upset inside, or a chill on the liver. But he
loves me so much that I think I could even let him see me if I had
a pimple on my nose. Besides, he's very valuable to me, for there's
nothing he doesn't seem to know about literary gossip,"

And so they sat together through the afternoons, while my deaf
father worked steadily at his boys' stories in his chair at her elbow.

42 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

Time passed, and outside, in the blue dusk the Italian organ-grinder
stopped opposite our garden gate, gave a piece of banana to his
monkey, and ground out his unvarying II Trovatore or Cavdleria
Rwticana. A little later, as the dusk deepened, the lamplighter swung
down the road with little hurried steps. If it were winter, we would
return from our walk with Nanny just after the magic moment when
the gas lamps in the street were lit, and Mr, Bowles 1 top hat and over-
coat hung on the oak stand in the front hall, while from the study
as we passed on our way to the nursery there came a muffled
sound of intimate, warm voices. We would make a noise, hoping
Mr, Bowles might hear and call us to come in and see him.
But this did not often happen, as he was afraid it might displease
our mother. We reached the nursery with the sense of every-
thing being as it should, for it would have seemed strange and wrong
if that top hat and overcoat had not been hanging there Mondays,
Wednesdays and Fridays.

Or if it were late spring, just before we left London for the house
in East Anglia, the lilac was in bloom in the garden and it was day-
light as we came home to tea. The seasons might change, but that top
hat would still be there in the front haU, three afternoons a week,
and from the study would come a comfortable sound of soft voices,
and the smeU of hot buttered toast

There was a pleasant warmth about Mr. Bowles. He seemed
genuinely fond of us, and even took the trouble to come up to see us
in the nurseiy. When he came we had a wonderful time, for we
made him tell us about the habitants of Canada. We even forced
him to play at Wild W^ft Indians. He had lived in Canada and had
seen real live Indians in full war paint In our minds I'm afraid we
contrasted this with our father who, though he wrote about these
Indians, had never seen them and knew only what he had been able
to read in books.

We also liked Mr. Bowles because we were proud of the way he
trusted us. It made us feel we were being treated like grownups.

MOTHER'S OLD MEN 43

For Mr, Bowles was married.

"Don't ever forget/* our mother would say to us, "don't ever
forget that if Mrs. Bowles asks you if you have seen him lately you
must say No- You must never teU her he comes to the house. She's
a puny-minded woman, and she wouldn't understand. If she knew
about it she'd only make it uncomfortable for Mr. Bowles, and you
wouldn't like that, would you?'*

But the entire family hated this wife, and so it wasn't difficult to
keep the secret. Mr, Bowles* honor was safe.

Although Mr. Bowles was the most frequent of the three adorers,
the other two equalled Mm in fervor. One was a remarkably fat old
judge who lived near our seaside house at Lowestoft. We had never
seen anyone so enormous, and Evelyn and I delighted in counting
his chins, His nose was red and swollen as though it had been stung
by a bee. His hands were Eke a bunch of pink sausages. He seemed
to us completely unromantic, and we squirmed when we heard him
calling our mother his "Beloved Beauty."

Our mother^ though, did not seem to object. She went for
tedious walks with him along the Front, while he poured out his
heart to her. She sat with him for hours on end in the garden at
Lowestoft, listening to his romantic philosophy of life. And always
it seemed to us that he must be boring her to death; but
always she turned to him '"'* one of her very special smiles.
There must, we felt, be something to him that we did not under-
stand.

Whereas the winter was more generous to Mr. Bowles, the sum-
mer was kinder to this obese judge. It is true that during the winter
he often came to London, to see my mother, but it was not possible
for him to visit her so frequently then as during the summer months
when we Hved near to Mm. He was a devout Catholic. His tiny, thiii
Httle wife was an even more devout one and acquiesced in his stray-
ing fancies as only a woman who feels sure of her husband in the
next world can.

44 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

There was one thing about him that distressed us. He was always
making awkward statements in a voice that everyone could hear.
I remember one day walking along the Front at Lowestoft with
Nanny, and seeing the old judge before us, hobbling beside our
mother. For he was lame, as well as enormously fat. Suddenly he
stopped and, leaning on his thick stick, shouted out loud:

"One hundred of them, my dear. Exactly one hundred women
Fve loved in my lifetime. And not one of them is fit to touch the little
toe of your right foot/*

A respectable old couple that was passing at that moment looked
round in surprise, hardly able to believe what they had heard. They
stopped and stared at this bulky Don Juan, while we blushed with
shame for our mother's sake.

Occasionally the old judge took us to parties, for, he said to our
mother: "If I love you, my dear, I love your children for your sake/'
But, though he was generous and kind, we never really enjoyed
these parties because he always made himself so conspicuous that
we felt awkward and shy. Sometimes he arrived in the open carriage
he hired each day to drive up to see our mother, and, his trembling,
podgy old hand taking a cigar from his slobbery mouth, shouted
that he had come to take us to an open air Catholic service. We went
with him to a convent garden, smelling of incense and lilies, where
little girls in white dresses sang hymns to Mary, and the poor old
judge, once on his knees, had to be helped up by my brother and me
to join in the procession. We felt embarrassed by this, and although
we loved the sinell of the incense, we would escape from him if we
could before he had forced us into the carriage*

Judge Talbot, as he was called, was detennked to educate his
"Beloved BeautyY 1 children. Once, while I was still very small,
Ellen Terry came to 'Lowestoft to play, in Bernard Shaw's Captain
Brassbound's Conversion.

"When you are a grown woman I want you to be able to tell
people that you have seen Ellen Terry act, 15 the old judge said to me

MOTHER'S OLD MEN 45

in his loud voice. "There won't be any more actresses as fine as she
is, with everything getting so commonplace and unromantic. Good-
ness alone knows what sort of a world you children will have to
live in-"

And I was taken to the theatre by him and his frail little wife.
But it was long past my bedtime, and I grew more and more sleepy,
till I began to confuse Ellen Terry with my Aunt Lexy.

"Look at her subtle majesty," the judge shouted to me, as my
head began to nod. "That's a woman for you, that is. Look at the way
she walks across the stage, Clare, you must remember this all your
life. The Lord knows, if I weren't so much in love with your mother
that I can scarcely keep my mind free of her even when I'm at Mass,
Fd be following Ellen Terry to the end of my days,"

The audience hissed at him to keep quiet. But his shouts must
have crossed the footlights to the ears of Ellen Terry herself.

The thing that vexed me most about this old judge was the way
he encouraged my mother in bringing me up strictly,

"It doesn't matter what sort of morals the men of a country have,
so that only the women are innocent as doves," he would say, as he
advised her about my education.

Having himself, as he openly declared, loved one hundred
women, he was a great romantic on the subject of the purity of
woman* I overheard him one day telling my mother, in that huge
voice he seemed unable to subdue, that if she were wise she would
never teH me anything about the facts of life,

"A woman should come to her husband as innocent as a wild
rosebud, my dear," he said. "It is for the man to tell her what he
, wishes to. That way there is real romance."

And then he quoted, as if to reinforce his opinions, what he con-
sidered the finest definition of a woman. It was a poem written, he
said with a strange Ettle laugh which I could not see the reason for,
by Oscar Wilde. I remembered it over the years, and held it
responsible for many severities that were handed out to me.

46 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

Lily-like., white as snow
She hardly knew
She was a woman
So sweetly she grew,

"And if 7 don't know what I'm talking about, Pd Eke to know
who does," shouted Judge Talbot. "When I come to think back to
the barmaids and chambermaids I've been to bed with n

"Hush," said my mother. "If you talk so loud Glare will hear

you."

"But I'm not talking loud," bellowed the judge* "As I was say-
ing, if anybody on this earth knows what a pure woman is, It's I.
Not that a pure woman is as interesting to go to bed with as the other
kind. I wouldn't say she is. You take Kate, my wife. I low her deeply.
The dear Lord Jesus and our Blessed Lady know I love her. But if
you think I've ever insulted her by making a hack of her "

"Why can't you talk more softly," pleaded my mother. "If you
go on like this even Robert wiU hear you* And then he'll imagine all
sorts of things that aren't true."

But the old judge was fully launched now into his romantic
reminiscences, and my mother knew that nothing could stop him.
She shut the study door, and in a few minutes I heard the loudest
record we possessed being played upon the gramophone. My mother
was going to have her own way. Not even the old Judge could drown
"Vesti la Giubba" sung by Caruso.

I wonder whether children have a keener sense of smdl than
grownups, or whether they merely lack social reticence in their
minds. I know that I shall always think of my mother's three faith-
ful adorers by their individual scents. Mr. Bowles had a smell of
moustache wax and Turkish cigarettes. There was even a slight scent
of pomade and shaving soap about him; he seemed always so
polishedly clean, and his face shone pink and smooth. It was little
wonder that he was nicknamed "Cupid/* for he truly looked Eke a

MOTHER'S OLD MEN 47

cherub. Judge Talbot smelt of warm flabbiness, expensive cigars
and Harris tweed suits.

But it was the third adorer whose scent I chiefly remember. And
I remember it with distaste* He seemed to smell of moth balls
mingled with a whiff of Scotch whiskey. He always wore Highland
kilts. He had two sets winter weight and summer weight and
because the dark green tartan of the Gordon clan didn't show the
dirt, they were rarely cleaned. The set that was not at the moment
in use was laid by in dozens of moth balls, which were supposed to
have a purifying quality to them. Stuck into one of his woolen socks
was a great horn-handled knife which terrified us, for we always
imagined he might draw it from its scabbard if we displeased him
too severely. In the winter, as a concession to the cold weather, he
threw a fringed tartan shawl across his shoulders, and held it in
place with an enormous cairngorm pin. Below his kilts his knobby
knees were so white that they seemed bloodless.

He wore these kilts in the streets of London, though sometimes,
when he was going to a fashionable gathering like the Eton and
Harrow cricket match at Lord's, he would compromise with custom
by wearing a top hat as well. He never seemed to know how
ridiculous he looked.

This Scotch adorer was a wild creature* Evelyn and I were ter-
rified of him because he spoke with such a thick Scotch accent that
we could never understand him, and whenever he asked us any
question we couldn't know how to answer. He was a retired Naval
surgeon and, like my father, he wrote boys' adventure stories. Also
Uke my father, he wrote about dogs; he took his huge St. Bernard,
Lassie, with him wherever he went, as though she were an emblem of
his trade* I can see Mm now, coming down our road in St. John's
Wood in fuU Highland dress with his shawl floating out upon the
air behind him, a top hat oja his head, a bunch of red roses for my
mother in one hand, and this enormous dog straining at the leash

48 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

that he held in the other hand. As he passed us with our nurse, he
gave me a bang on the head with the bunch of roses, called me
"Bonnie wee lassie," and hurried along to his "Mea/ ? as he had
named our mother.

I often used to wonder what my mother saw in him. He was a
far more insistent adorer than Judge Talbot or Mr, Bowles, but he
had neither graciousness nor tact. It is no wonder my father hated
him. Perhaps his violence compensated my mother for the timid cau-
tion of Mr. Bowles. He carried around with him the impression of
imminent danger.

"But you can never go by outward appearances,** my mother
said, "Alexander is really the most obedient and amenable of the
three. There is nothing, in fact, that he won't do for me, if I ask
him."

He was a thorough romantic. Letters and poems came from him
each day, in an illegible handwriting and purple ink. My mother
would put her broken little bit of magnifying glass up to her eye
for her sight was bad, and yet she refused to wear glasses as she
deciphered with difficulty the latest poem he had written to her.

In order to follow my mother in her movements, Alexander took
to living in a caravan. No sooner had our family made its annual
move to East Anglia, than the breakfast bell rang violently one
morning around seven o'clock. We knew then that he had arrived.

"Mea," his husky voice called up the stairs* "Mea, I have come
to greet you. I have come to see you while the morning dew is still
upon you. 5 *

And the tones of a Scotch love song reverberated through the
house. Nothing and nobody could keep him out He forced himself
past the housemaid and the cook. As we turned in our beds, wakened
by this noise, we knew that back somewhere in a field in the Gorton
Road he had pitched his caravan, and that he would pester the
family until we returned to London for the winter.

Once or twice a year my brothers and I were invited to tea in

MOTHER'S OLD MEN 49

the caravan. It was a superior affair of polished brown wood, and
looked somewhat Bee a yacht that had been grounded at low tide.
But this was no gypsy existence* The Scotchman saw to it that he
had everything to make life comfortable and easy. Were he living
now he would have had a luxurious trailer, but in those days he had
to rely for transportation upon a horse. As a child I used to picture
this horse drawing the caravan all the way across England from the
Thames Valley to the shores of the North Sea, Actually both the
caravan and the horse came by train, though the caravan was horse-
drawn from the Lowestoft railro.. J station to its resting place in the
field in Corton Road. It moved slowly up the middle of High Street,
and the municipal trolley cars accumulated in an impatient line
behind it, clanging their bells for this strange obstruction to move
out of their way. But the irate old Scotchman leant from the opened
half-door at the back of the caravan, and blasphemed into the face
of the nearest trolley car driver*

"What blankety-blank damn business have you to frighten my
horse with this hellish noise? 1 he shouted, looking like an infuriated
be-kilted Don Quixote with his long moustaches waving in the
wind. Once, when the trolley car driver dared to swear back at him,
he withdrew into the caravan and reappeared with the horse whip.
He even started to brandish it at the driver, but the wise old horse,
aware that her master had seized hold of the whip, imagined it to
be for her benefit, and broke suddenly into a quick trot, so that the
Scotchman was out of reach of the tolley car driver. If the natives
of Lowestoft had any doubt as to whether the Leighton family had
arrived yet for the summer, they were made certain of it by the sight
of this caravan with its blaspheming owner moving slowly up the
middle of the town. It was as much an annual event at Lowestoft as
the arrival of the first Scotch fishergirls in the fall for the gutting of
the herrings, or the Firework Display on August Bank Holiday at
the local Yacht Club.

But the Scotch adorer was not alone. He brought with him always

50 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

a widowed sister and her pale, pimply daughter Maggie, These two
women cooked for him and tended him and lived together within
the caravan itself. He slept in a tent at the side of the caravan, with
his St. Bernard. The old horse Queen was tethered at night to one
end of the caravan, so that she might not be stolen; but during the
daytime she cropped quietly on the grass of the field where the camp
was pitched.

On the rare occasions when we were invited to tea, we used to
take sugar and apples for the old horse. We never really got to know
the sister and her daughter. They were very shy and completely
repressed. They did not visit our house, but sometimes, on our walks
in town, we saw the Scotchman strolling along the street with his
pimply niece.

"Maggie is the most unattractive young woman IVe ever seen,"
our mother said. "There's nothing to do but despise her.**

But I was scared of her, because she never spoke, and I used to
wonder what she did all the day long, within the confines of the
caravan.

These rare visits to the caravan were not happy times for me.
Knowing I was terrified of insects, Roland always took me to a cer-
tain big brick that was placed against one of the wheels to prevent
the caravan from rolling away. Taking this brick up, he forced me
to gaze at the swarm of wriggling earwigs beneath. I was especially
frightened of earwigs.

"Let me tell you, Miss Clare," my nurse's words rang in my
head, "you'd better be careful of earwigs. It's not for nothing those
horrid insects have got that name, for if they creep into your ears
they'll nibble at your brain, and you'll go mad,"

I suffered on these occasions. Perhaps my fear of the old Scotch-
man was unfair. It was most certainly tied up with the thought of
earwigs.

Although we did not like this Scotchman, we yet worried about
him when the nights were wet. For the little tent in which he slept

MOTHER'S OLD MEN 51

seemed as though it could not keep out the rain. We were always
relieved when, next morning, the breakfast bell rang around seven
o'clock and his loud voice sang its Scotch love song, to waken our
mother; we knew then that he had not been drowned.

Life wasn't easy for my mother at Lowestoft, for there was always
the risk of Alexander meeting the old judge. They detested each
other, as all rivals do. Even we children were drawn into the prob-
lem of keeping them apart, and very often we were sent out to the
carriage in front of the house, to occupy the attention of the waiting
judge while our mother got rid of her Scotchman.

"If that damn scoundrel in his kilts is there I'm not coming in,"
bellowed Judge Talbot towards the windows of the house. "But
neither am I going to leave," he went on. "I shall stick here in this
victoria until the way is dear. If he thinks he can deprive me of my
necessary daily sight of my Beloved Beauty's face, he's mistaken.
Damn his scraggy bones and his swishing kilts. Damn them, I say."

If these two did happen to meet, they were capable of the
meanest and most childish tricks. I remember once how the old
judge came to the house and found the Scotch gentleman's top hat
out in the hail for he wore it occasionally to impress my mother,
even though this was not London, but the seaside. With all his
excessive weight he sat on it, and bashed it in. We delighted in this,
if we were able to keep far enough away. But sometimes life became
very difficult. That was when Mr. Bowles came down on a visit.
Then there were three adorers to keep disentangled. I often won-
dered how my mother managed it. It could scarcely have been worth
all the trouble, unless she enjoyed the exhilaration of being fought
over.

Alexander had one most vexing habit, which may have been
what caused his wife to leave him. From time to time he took to
drink. He took really to drink, until the room was filled with snakes
and all creepy crawly creatures, and he sat up in bed with a pistol in
each hand, ready to fire at anyone who approached.

5 s TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

This took place only during the winter, when we were back in
London and he did not see my mother so often. When it happened
his widowed sister sent my mother a telegram. I can see her face as
the message was brought to her in the study* "Alexander is at it
again/' she told my father with a sigh, handing the slip of paper
over to him. And even though she were busy with her work, she
would go upstairs and put on her coat and hat and take the first
possible train to the country, where he Hved. For in these attacks she
was the only person who had any power over him, and without
flinching she went in to him and took the pistols out of his hands
and let him sob upon her bosom.

4* From the Nursery Window

Most of what we knew of life was learnt from the nursery win-
dow. We looked down upon the world, and nothing could be hidden
from our sight. We saw the buds swelling upon the trees and the
birds nesting in spring ; but we saw, also, the cook slinking out to
meet her lover*

We were especially fortunate. Many of the bigger houses in St.
John's Wood boasted a separate small entrance for the servants, but
Vallombrosa had only one garden gate. This meant that we could
see everything that happened, for towards this gate converged the
paths from the front door and from the kitchen door. There were
two bells on the garden gate: one with Visitors engraved around its
rim, and the other with Servants. Luckily for us, both these bells rang
loud enough to be heard in the nursery, and we could drop our toys
and rush to the window in time to see who was arriving. We could
hear, too, the slam of the front door, and watch who was leaving
the house. So, with our long hours of childhood leisure, we fol-
lowed the pattern of life downstairs*

53

54 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

In this way we knew things our mother had neither time nor
opportunity to learn. For she spent almost all her waking hours
within the four walls of the study. Even when she was not actually
working, she stayed there with her adorers. Absorbed always In her
own world of romance, she was not aware of the drama around her.
It was left to us in the nursery to watch the ritual of the days and the
activities of servants, relatives and admirers.

Our day of watching started early. We knew the exact moment
after breakfast, while Nanny was making the beds in the night
nursery, when Dolly, the crippled kitchen maid, would appear with
her paU and her kneeling mat, to wash and whiten the step and
polish the brasses on the front door. Down each step she moved on
her knees, till finally she reached the tessellated pavement of the
garden path. This pavement that led from the bottom of the front
steps to the garden gate was a geometric design in browns and reds
and slate-greys. It always seemed beautiful to us, but during the short
moment when it was wet the colors glowed with a magic richness
that only we, looking down from the nursery, knew- The grownups
did not dare to walk across this pavement until it was dry, lest their
feet got wet and they caught a chill. And that was why it had to be
washed as early as possible in the morning, before anyone needed
to go out of doors; for our mother had a special terror of wet feet.

"It's the surest way to catch pneumonia," she declared; "I'd
rather do almost anything in the world than get my feet wet. Exactly
forty-eight hours later I would most certainly begin to sniff, and fed
a roughness in my throat. It never fails. Now if we had a gravel path
leading to the gate, instead of this paved one that dries so quickly,
I would have to stay indoors most of the winter, because of the
puddles. As I told your father at the time, it was the tessellated pave-
ment that decided me in taking Vallombrosa/*

Evelyn and I must have been heartless little creatures, for we
never reflected how the damp cold must have penetrated Dolly,
on biting mornings in winter. Rarely did she cross our paths, for she

FROM THE NURSERY WINDOW 55

spent her Hfe in the darkness of the basement, helping the cook,
where, for five shillings a week, she slaved throughout her days like
a drudge in a fairy tale.

But then, we were not supposed to be aware of the servants as
human beings. Their personal life was hidden from us, and if we
happened upon it we were careful to keep silent. And so when, one
morning, it was Albert the knife boy who appeared in a sacking
apron to whiten the steps, we feigned surprise. Mother never knew
that Dolly's romance had been discussed at length in the nursery.
We had listened to the letter she sent to the matrimonial agency, and
looked at the photograph of the nice young farmer in Alberta who
had written in reply and asked her to come to Canada and be his
wife. And when, a month or two later, Dolly reappeared, we kept it
quiet that we had watched her sobbingty teH Nanny how the immi-
gration officials in Canada, seeing she was crippled, had turned her
back at the docks.

We were ashamed of feeling tender towards poor Dolly,

But once a year our mother treated the servants as human beings.
She considered Christmas Day the occasion on which to break down
class barriers. The staff appeared then in a "Peace on earth, good-
will to men" atmosphere, to take turns at extracting one of the small
gifts from the bran pie. Our mother would not let us have a Christ-
mas tree, lest the candles should topple over and set the house on
fire. The bran pie was our festive substitute. The tub stood in the
middle of the back drawing room on a large sheet, to prevent the
bran from getting trodden into the pile of the carpet We dived into
it, to draw out a present disguised in shape under many wrappings of
brown paper* Wahny had been allowed to spend an afternoon and
a great deal of money at Shoolbred's, in Tottenham Court Road,
buying these gifts. For it was an understood thing that not even my
mother and my f ather must know what lay hidden among the bran.

The ceremony took place at the end of the day, after we had
finished opening the countless presents our mother lavished upon us.

56 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

"Some people have called me extravagant, giving you chUdrea
so many expensive toys for Christmas," she once unexpectedly con-
fided to me. "But, you see, I still retain that uncomfortable thing
called a conscience, and I know perfectly well I am inclined to
neglect my family emotionally over the rest of the year. I simply
can't help that. I've got too much work to do* And so aU these
presents are a sort of salve to my conscience."

Even the servants were included in this extravagance, and re-
ceived elaborate dresses and hats*

These servants now trooped in at a given order. They stood in a
row, in strict precedence: the old nurae, the cook, the parlormaid,
the housemaid, the undernurse, and Dolly the kitchen maid,

"Minnie," my mother commanded. And Minnie,, the fat bosomed
parlormaid who was engaged to the butcher, stepped forward in her
frilly starched cap and apron, to draw a shaving set from the
bran pie.

"Emily," my mother called next, a sudden sternness in her
voice. She imagined my father felt too much tenderness towards this
little red-haired housemaid, and as Emily tripped forward to secure
her inappropriate gift, my mother gave her a piercing stare, and
turned her head immediately then towards my father, to see if he
were watching. But my father was gazing with emphasis at the far
end of the drawing room. Recently he had been seen coming from
the direction of the linen closet, where Emily was arranging the
returned laundry; and her face had been crimson, and her red hair
disheveled Or so Walmy had reported. And Walmy, said, my
mother, had the unerring eye of a hawk. Even Evqlyn and I knew
that if Emily didn't soon fix the date of her wedding to the plumber,
and leave of her own accord, she would be dismissed. For Mother
was deeply suspicious*

Actually we saw more of the servants than our mother knew, or
would have permitted. Often they sneaked up to gossip with Nanny.
On occasions they came to look out of the nursery window.

FROM THE NURSERT WINDOW 57

Obliquely opposite our house was a big Jewish synagogue. From
time to time grand weddings took place there. Early in the morning
the palms and potted plants appeared. Then the undernurse was
sent down to the kitchen, to inform the staff. This had to be done
immediately, in order that the cook might hurry with the prepara-
tions for the dinner,

For on these wedding days the kitchen clock was put forward.
I have even known the grandfather clock in the hall to have its
hands shifted a little, so that my parents should not realize exactly
how much too early the gong sounded for the midday meal I wasn't
supposed to know about it, but one day I saw Minnie closing the
glass upon the face of the clock and noticed that the mortiing was
decidedly later than I had thought. I was amazed at her daring to
do this, aa our father never allowed anyone but himself to touch it.
He alone might wind it every Saturday, and a special cloth was
placed that day on the study table, so that he could dust the clock. It
was his dearest possession, an heirloom from Jacobite ancestors. He
boasted that Bonnie Prince Charlie had once been hidden inside it,
though how anyone could have been squeezed into that space always
puzzled me.

Mother had very little patience with this reverence.

"History is something to be created rather than remembered/*
she told Father. "If only you had done something in your life that
would have made the world proud of hiding you in some grandfather
dock, instead of swelling with pride because Bonnie Prince Charlie,
so long ago, happened to be hidden in this worm-eaten old clock
your Campbell ancestors owned, it would have enriched the world."

My mother was always mischievous on Sundays and on the
cook's day out. She watched for any excessive punctuality of the mid-
day dinner, and delayed her appearance at the table. But she did
not seem to notice the tridb played on these wedding days. And we,
more loyal to the domestic staff than to the grownups, never told.

Immediately after the dining room table had been cleared, the

58 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

servants crept up to the nursery, and grouped themselves around the
window. Within their breasts stirred romantic longings.

The Abbey Road Synagogue was supported by the rich Jewish
community of South Hampstead. South Hampstead was merely an
extension of St. John's Wood, but spiritually it was as remote as if it
had been Timbuctoo. We were brought up to hold it in contempt,
for its values in life were considered false by the creative inhabitants
of our part of London. The people who lived there were supposed
to think too much about money.

But this was no disadvantage when it came to watching their
weddings. Everything was excitingly luxurious.

Along the road came the carriages, with white ribbon bows upon
the whips. The horses' tails were decked with white. Any carriage
might contain the bride. We held our breath. We were watching
romance.

And then she came in a carriage and pair. The horses were
white. Long white streamers floated from the coachman's whip.

The bride looked exactly Kke the bride in a fairy tale. She also
looked like the descriptions of the brides in my mother's serials.
There seemed little I did not know of brides and bridegrooms, for I
was always hearing about them as I washed the leaves of the
aspidistra.

Parlormaid and cook, housemaid and nurse, they leanecf forward
to the window in their excitement, tiU Evelyn and I were nearly
crushed against the wall. But we kept silent. Chivalry demanded
that we did not complain. At this very moment our mother might be
in her bedroom opposite the nursery, planning the love story of her
heroine.

From these virgins now came hushed "Coos" and "Qohs," Our
nurse told them to be quiet and stop their nonsense. She reminded
them that she had managed to go through her long life without a
man, and that it was all a matter if whether you loved the dear
Lord enough to live as He would have wanted you to.

FROM THE NURSERY WINDOW 59

"This marriage and sex/ 3 she whispered, thinking we couldn't
hear her, "it's all just what you make of it, m'say. And there's not
much as I don't know of it, single though I am. I tell you, I've seen
so many women carrying unwanted babies that it's very near enough
to turn me from men/*

The satin-clad bride had disappeared into the synagogue. We
must wait until the marriage ceremony was over. And now Nanny
had something important to teU the servants. During the spring
cleaning of my mother's bedroom some of her books had been placed
in the nursery for safety. Among these was a set of affectionately in-
scribed health books written by her Scottish adorer, for in addition
to being a retired Naval surgeon, Alexander contributed popular
health and beauty notes to the daily papers. These had been col-
lected and published, and the Leighton family used the general
volume on sickness whenever anything went wrong with us.

But it was The Wife's Book of Health and Happiness that con-
cerned our Nanny now* Out from the third drawer of the mahogany
chest that covered almost the entire width of one of the nursery walls,
she extracted this volume.

"I think it*d be a most useful thing if you two was to read it,"
she whispered to the brides-to-be, Minnie and Emily. U I keeps it
'idden always from that there Miss Clare, for it'd never do for *er to
poke *er nose into it/*

She did not bqiow that I had already discovered it, beneath
several layers of flannel petticoats and vests, and knew all the
symptoms of pregnancy and parturition, as well as the necessary
facts about the nursing of a baby and the care of the breasts. At the
age of nine I could have put these women servants wise about their
forthcoming morning sicknesses and qtuckenings, and told them the
signs by which they could be certain that they had conceived.

Weddings were not the only things we watched. Lovemakiikg
could be seen from the nursery window.

6o TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

True St. John's Wood inhabitants had a scorn for blocks of
flats. It was worse than a scorn. It was a frightened revolt, for we
knew that these edifices of communal living endangered the char-
acter of the neighborhood. We were a close society, and would have
fought the rest of the world for our right to Individual seclusion.
The high garden walls were no mere idiosyncrasy. They were the
symbols of our philosophy. And so we condemned all flats, and,
though they were beginning to appear in our most cherished roads,
we refused to acknowledge their existence.

"The chief thing I object to about flats is that they are immoral,"
Mother said. "Immoral, I insist, and not romantic. And they are
immoral because everything you do can be seen and known by
your neighbors. I always say that the distinction between immorality
and romance lies entirely in this : nothing is immoral which is secret,
and consequently hurts no one else. I remember how Papa would
say with a little laugh that the most important of the Command-
ments was the eleventh one: Thou shalt not be found out.* But he
meant this quite seriously. And there was a great deal of truth in it.
And so, you see, with the public staircase or lift, where your lover
can be observed by everybody, it would be quite impossible in a
block of flats to have any true romance.'*

Obliquely opposite us, at the other end of the road from the
synagogue, was one of the few blocks of flats that had been erected
those days in St. John's Wood. Our family had the utmost con-
tempt for the building, and decided that only the most common*
place people would dwell in such a barracks.

"No writer or painter or poet or singer could live there," our
mother said. "They'd be stifled to de^th in their souk"

To our amazement we discovered that Dame Clara Butt, the
famous singer, actually lived in one of the flats. But even this did not
make my mother change her views. She turned, instead, against
Clara Butt.

"After all," she said, "y u can't expect anything better from

FROM THE NURSERY WINDOW 61

anyone who sings in such dull, heavy, tedious and unromantic things
as oratorios/'

But despite my mother's opinions, I was about to discover
romance existing in a block of flats. If you peered out of the nursery
window, well towards the right, you could just see the windows of
these flats. When the lights came on at night, you could even see
into the rooms. On a level with the nursery window was a room with
no blinds or curtains. I never knew why this was, but I took it as a
gift to me from the gods, for I should not, else, have learnt all I #id
at that tender age of the art of making love. What I saw was not
described by my mother in the stories she dictated. Her heroes and
heroines went no further than a passionate kiss. I never heard her
say that they took off their clothes.

I have no idea if the lovers in the room across the road were
lawful man and wife* or whether I was watching what Mother
would have called "true romance," In either case, I believe it must
have been very passionate, though I don't think I understood a
quarter of what was happening. Standing between the lowered blind
and the window pane, to watch it, I did not hear Nurse call to me
that it was time to go to bed. But even the spankings she then gave
me seemed worth while.

One night the room was in darkness. I was desolate, for I had
identified myself so completely with these lovers that it was as if my
own love Hf e had been cut off. I did not see them again. But the block
of flats was surrounded for me by a halo of romance. After that I
never quite understood why my mother objected so violently to flats.

It was not nearly as exciting to look from the nursery window
for my mother's admirers to arrive. Compared with the lovemaking
I had watched, this seemed strangely dilute. But sometimes there
were embarrassing happenings, for we would see when the visits of
these admirers overlapped* One was never sure when this might take
place, as, though Mr. Bowles was regular in his arrival as night and
day, yet sometimes Judge Talbot or Alexander would suddenly

62 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

decide that they could not stay away from our mother any longer,
and arrive unexpectedly upon the scene. This was before the days of
the telephone, and unless they sent a telegram there was no way in
which they could inform her of their urgent need to see her.

Then, too, there were occasional "also-rans/* as Roland chose to
-call them, knowing that our mother was not greatly interested in
these gentlemen. The front door bell would ring, as the various un-
welcome admirers arrived and walked up the garden path. We
knew them all.

There was a certain astonishingly handsome retired colonel.

"But his looks are very little use to him," I overheard my mother
say to my father, "for he's the biggest fool I've ever met. In fact,
I'd give a great deal to stop him coming, for he bores me so intensely.
But he seems to feel he belongs to the family, just because he had
"known Papa since their childhood, and because they were at Sand-
hurst together."

And so he paid us endless visits. Patting Mother's arms just a
little higher up each time, he would repeat:

"Gad, how proud your poor papa would have been of you if he
could have seen you now,"

Then, while he stroked her arms and fingered them too warmly,
and looked at her much too tenderly, he would talk by the hour of
his early days with her father in Jamaica. He and Grandpapa had
been boys there together, for Grandpapa's father had once been
Governor of the island. But, my mother complained, the way he
made everything he touched on seem utterly commonplace amounted
almost to a form of genius.

"Now if / had lived in Jamaica Fd have something really worth
while to tell about it," she said. "Upon my word, if the Colonel were
describing the entrance to Heaven he'd turn it into the vestibule of a
local branch of the Y,M.C,A. I wish, Robert, you'd learn how to
help me to get rid of him."

But all my father dared to do was to glare at the monoded dandy.

' FROM THE JtURSERt WINDOW 63

And the old colonel was so busy fondling my mother's arms that he.
never seemed to notice.

Then there was an eminent editor who developed an infatuation
for my mother. He lived a few streets away, and discovered sud-
denly that we were on his direct route home from the Marlborough
Road Underground station. He looked, as we decided, rather like a
monkey, and when, on Sunday afternoons, as a means of assuaging
in his wife's breast ai^y suspicion of his true feelings, he insisted that
he and she should take us two younger children to the Zoo, we
always felt that chivalry demanded we should steer him as far away
from the monkeys as possible, so that he might not be made to
realize how much he resembled them. Roland was very mischievous,
and would teH him our mother was out when she wasn't, and enjoy
watching the poor man's impatience as he waited his beloved's return.
And then, as they talked in the drawing room for we children had
excellent manners, and always felt that we should entertain a guest
properly Roland would do everything he could do to arouse his
jealousy, till, he reported, the poor wretch actually got so beyond
himself that, not knowing what he was saying, he asked my brother :
"Do you keep chickens here in the back drawing room?'

But the most difficult times were on my mother's birthdays. All
the people who loved her wished to appear, bringing their offerings.
My mother was never any good at coping with large numbers* She
pref erred an audience of one, in order that she might direct the full
force of her magnetism straight upon that person.

"If several people are with me at the same time,*' she once said,
"I feel exactly Hke a chameleon on a tartan* Not that I take the
trouble to try to change myself, in order to fit in with other people;
this I don't hold with doing. Perhaps it might be truer to say I feel
like a lighthouse that is trying to throw its beam upon everybody at
the same moment. It is most exhausting."

From the nursery window we saw the birthday visitors arrive.
Grandmamma and her sister Pollie came first; they were always

64 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

early, so, that they might watch everything that went on, Heraelf a
beauty in her day, Grandmamma kept a jealous eye oa her daughter
Pattie. She even dared to voice an opinion on the various admirers.
But lest she might appear to have passed the age of being attractive
to the opposite sex, she had her own faithful adorer.
I He was a pompous, elderly man, and his name was Charles, and
he belonged to some of the most distinguished London clubs. My
family never discovered how he managed to pay the club dues, for
Charles was an impecunious aristocrat, who preferred to live in one
tiny room in Half-Moon Street rather than in a bigger place with a
less fashionable address. He might come to South Hampstead to
visit my grandmamma by the plebeian Blue Atlas omnibus, but he
would wear Klac suede gloves, and a top hat, and an expensive
flower in his buttonhole, and always lie brought her gardenias, and
bunches of hothouse grapes. He was inordinately fond of good food,
and on her part she saw to it that he was well fed when he visited
her.

"Another piece of this good bird, Charles?" I can hear her say-
ing, as she dangled a slither of pheasant in front of his plate with the
same sirenlike smUe that she had bequeathed to my mother. But they
never got married. Perhaps Grandmamma considered it more
romantic to keep him hanging about

Charles must have resembled my mother* & father, Captain
Connor. Both these men were impecunious aristocrats, and both of
them knew how to keep up appearances on practically no money at
all. They ran up enormous debts, and washed the dishes at home,
but they never let the outside world see them economise, and though
Grandpapa had also taken the Blue Atlas from outside the Eyre
Arms public feouse in St. John's Wood, when he had been going into
the "West-end," yet he would leave this omnibus about two blocks
before h reached his dub and, hailing a hansom, arrive before the
doors in grand style, where he could have been observed tipping
the cabby.

PROM THE NURSERY WINDOW 65

"A gentleman/* he is supposed to have said, "is known by the
way he tips/ 1 And he had lived up to this himself.

But Grandmamma's Charles was not brought to the birthday
teas. My mother, in fact, was hardly ever allowed to meet him. He
was known chiefly by hearsay. Grandmamma may have been afraid
lest he should forsake her for her daughter, or she may merely have
wanted to keep an air of mysterious glamour around her own life.
Anyway, he always came into her conversation, and, when we went
to see her and our great-aunt PolUe, who lived with her, we generally
found him at the house* We felt we had to treat him with distant
awe, though we knew, too, that we were expected to tell our mother
that we had seen him*.

Grandmamma was a Trelawny* She had a dark, Celtic beauty
which, though striking, was yet less unusual than her daughter's,
with the straw-colored hair that my mother tossed around so wildly,
Hke a lion's mane. We often thought our grandmamma wore a wig;
her richly coiled curls never varied* But we could not find out for
certain.

There was something exuberant and almost blowsy about her.

"If Mamma hadn't unfortunately happened to be born a gentle-
woman/* my mother once remarked, "she would have made a most
excellent and successful lodginghouse proprietress, or even, better
still . * .**

But at this point Mother looked round and saw me in the room.
Giving an embarrassed little chuckle, she stopped short. I wanted to
know what it was that Grandmamma would have been so good at;
but I dared not ask. Instead, I Mstened while my mother went on
saying that Grandmamma had a way with her where men were
concerned, and seemed to understand them as few women had been
known to do.

I never knew whether she had the same power to attract men as
her daughter, though there were whispered tales of an earl she had
bewitched, and some of her most expensive jewelry was supposed to

66 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

have been given her by the man who made a popular brand of beer.
But she was getting along in years, and had to maintain a certain
dignity. Her romances had taken on the purifying patina of the past.

There was no doubt about it, though, that Charles was faithful
over a long time, to the very end, and wept openly and unabashed at
her funeral.

She was a fearless creature. Neither God nor the devil floored her
she said, and on her deathbed she grew really irate when the family
asked if she would not Eke to be visited by a priest, to make her
repentance.

"Have you no better idea of the sort of person I am?* she asked.
"Do you know me as little as all that? If you thinlc I'm so mean as
to want to cash in at the last moment, Tm sorry for you. Fve done
without a priest all my Hf e, and I have a greater sense of pride than
to haul down my flag and ask for one now. If God*s the kind of
Person I suppose Him to be, He'd consider me a pretty poor object
to cringe at this late hour of the day. No. Ill die alone, thank
you."

Aunt Pollie was the one member of the family who never seemed
to have had any romance. This was strange, my grandpapa is said to
have remarked, because she had fascinatingly high breasts which
somehow she had wasted, for they ought to have brought her a good
husband. She was short and podgy, but that could not have told
against her. Grandpapa seems also to have said this was even
desirable, and that no man would ever lose his head ova: a rabbit-
bottomed woman.

For that matter, most of the women those days were well
covered. Considering the amount of food they ate, they could hardly
have been otherwise. Grandmamma's house smelt at breakfast time
of deviled kidneys and mutton chops, and never a morning passed
but what some substantial nourishment was taJcen at eleven o'clock,
washed down with a glass of port. Both she and her sister Aunt
PoUie were impassioned and superb cooks, and their enormous larder

FROM THE NURSERT WINDOW 67

was filled always to overflowing. When we visited them we used to
gaze in awe at the chickens and pheasants, the huge sirloins of beef
and the fruit pies on the larder shelves* But only very rarely were we
invited to stay for a meal, which was a bitter disappointment to us*
Instead, we sneaked into the larder when no one was looking and
stole Httle bits off the cold chicken or the sirloin, or dipped our fingers
into the fruit pies*

This passion for food even turned Grandmamma into a petty
thief. Despite the luxury of most of what she ate, there was one thing
in this world she liked better than anything else. It was a really new-
laid egg. Her craving amounted almost to a mania, so that had she
been Eving today weE-meaning friends would probably have hinted
at traumatic unbalance and suggested that she consult a psychiatrist.
Many a time she risked her reputation over it, for never could she
bear to hear the cackle of a hen without searching for the egg that
had been laid. As a very smaU child I had been for walks with her in
the country and, in passing a farm, we had heard this cackle.

"Listen, Baba/* said Grandmamma as she dropped hold of my
hand. "You stay here a minute like a good little girl and I'll be back
again.* 9

She looked around her and then, lifting her skirts and placing a
protecting hand over her hat, she crept with difficulty under a gap in a
hedge to reach the farmyard. After a few terrified moments in which
I stood alone, a tiny speck of humanity in the country lane, I saw
first a hat, then shoulders, and finally the whole of Grandmamma
reappear through this gap under the hedge, bearing proudly in one
hand a warm brown egg. She was always happiest when she knew
that the egg was still warm from the hen as it was placed in the
saucepan, and on these occasions we hurried home at a pace that was
unkind to my young legs, even as the whole episode was a strain on
my nervous system. I dreaded lest she should be found out, for had
we not been told that we must not steal? Probably the farmer knew
all about it, and merely smiled at the eccentricity, for there must

68 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

have been something amusing and ludicrous in the picture of this
dignified matron on all fours, pilfering an egg.

But Auntie Pollie would never have dared to steal She was a
timid creature. She was also supposed to be a weak character, and
our mother used her as an example to us of what not to be. Out of her
own excessive force, our mother had a deep contempt for anyone
who was weak, and, though her aunt had more or less sacrificed her
entire life for her when she was a girl, yet she held her in scorn. Any
tale that could be told at Auntie Pollie's expense would surely be
remembered and repeated. I recollect a legend of what happened to
her one day because she ignored my mother's advice, and took a
"growler." There was some strange social distinction between a
hansom cab and a fourwheeler, or "growler/* as it was called. Mem-
bers of the family were never supposed to demean themselves by
entering a f ourwheeler.

"For one thing,'* said my mother, "you run the risk of catching
scarlet fever. You wiU always notice that the lower classes, if they
need to go to a hospital, invariably take a growler. There's no law to
stop them from entering a hansom, but in the same way that you
never see a common person in Bond Street though there is no bar-
ricade to prevent them walking there so you will never find the
lower classes in a hansom cab. A hansom is surrounded by an aura
of romance which would frighten a common peraon, and make him
think he was being wicked."

But poor weak Auntie Pollie forgot herself one day and, in a
hurry to get somewhere, hailed a fourwheeler. She had only been in
the conveyance a little while when the bottom began to fall out Try
as she might, she could not make the driver hear when she rapped
at the front window of the cab. And then the ridiculous thing hap-
pened. The floor of the fourwheeler parted from the vehicle, and
all Auntie Pollie could do was to patter along the road within the
shell of the growler, her dainty feet, of which she was so proud,
visible beneath the cab, until she reached her destination. The story

FROM THE NURSERY WINDOW 60

has a Baron Hunchau&en flavor to it, but my mother assured us it
was gospd trath 3 and from the moment we were told the talc we
could never dear this picture from our mind, and something of the
respect that we should have shown our aunt was lacking.

The two things that interested us most in Auntie Pollie were her
grey parrot and her banjo. She was devoted to the parrot, and the
creature fitted in with her character, for always it seemed as though
she were connected with birds. Practically every hat she wore had
stiff birds' wings in it, and her brown sealskin coat was trimmed with
grebe feathers. And had not Grandpapa said that her high breasts
made her look Eke a little pouter pigeon?

We had heard once that talking parrots swore great oaths, and
we would stand by the cage on its table in the back part of the
kitchen for the longest time, hoping to learn some swear words with
which to shock our nurse.

But Auntie Polllc's parrot, in addition to being this dull grey
rather than an exotic yellow and green we would have preferred, was
disappointingly well behaved, and the most daring thing it ever did
was to call our dead Grandpapa's pet name, "Non," in Grand-
mamma's voice* Apparently this wasn't as harmless as we supposed,
for there was a continual battle going on between Auntie Pollie and
her sister's admirer, Charles*

"Pollie,** we would hear Charles say in a petulant voice, "you
know perfectly well you're up to your tricks again* It isn't pure
chance that makes that parrot call out Captain Connor's name.
Every time I begin to fed your sister is about to succumb to my
charms that damn bird calls *Non* and reminds her of her dead
husband- One of these days I shall slip some poison into the cage.
If you think Fm going to let a mere parrot ruin my chance of a
home for my old age, you're mistaken."

But Auntie Pollie had her own views on the matter, and I rather
think that from then on she encouraged the parrot even more coax-
ingly to call "Non/* At least, I frequently saw her in front of the

70 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

cage, scratching the parrot's poll as she called the name softly for the
bird to imitate.

The banjo, which was the other thing we associated with Auntie
Pollie, was kept in a green baize case, in a comer of the morning
room, behind the sewing machine. Every time we visited Auntie
Pollie we pestered her into playing it for us. She was supposed to
have a good voice, and, as she picked the banjo, she sang coon songs.
We sat in front of her, fascinated, while she ran through her limited
repertory, which began, always, with "My Uncle Ben and Old Aunt
SaL" We begged her to bring the banjo with her when she came to
Vallombrosa* But our mother would not allow this*

"I don't want you children to get accustomed to it," she said.
<C A banjo is the most unromantic of all musical instruments. In
itself it has been enough to condemn poor Pollie to the life of an
old maid."

But I think there must have been more to our aunt's spinster-
hood than this banjo. I rather imagine that in her youth our forceful,
handsome grandmamma must have monopolized all the men who
came to their home. The Trdawny blood in Grandmamma would
have balked at nothing. Auntie Pollie was destined to live her whole
life in attendance upon her dynamic elder sister.
, Unfortunately Auntie Pollie detested Mr. Bowles,

"It's a pure case of jealousy," our mother said. "Pollie is madly
in love with him herself if she'd only be honest enough to admit it.
But instead of being frank she goes and invents all sorts of nasty
things about him. I wouldn't be surprised any day to hear her say
he is trying to kiss her and make love to her. Women are like that,
you know. No woman who really has men making love to her ever
says anything about it. It's always the women who've never in their
lives been kissed who complain that men in railway carriages and
men who sit next to them at the dinner table are pressing against
their knees, or pinching them."

Mr. Bowles insisted on coming to the birthday teas. Knowing

FROM THE NURSERY WINDOW 71

how complicated the situation was growing, we watched for him in a
state of apprehension. But we had also other reasons*

He always brought a huge bouquet on these occasions. We had
already given our mother our own presents of flowers, and they had
cost us pocket money accumulated over many weeks, so that it is not
surprising that we felt annoyed when we saw him arrive with his
armful of expensive flowers,

Our mother's birthday came at the beginning of February, and
custom demanded that, whatever else we might have for her, each of
us should give her a potted plant And so one child would present
her with white hyacinths, bound round with crinkly green paper
and ribbon, and another would have a pot of daffodils, or tulips,
while Roland, who had always more pocket money than we did,
would buy an azalea, elaborately decorated with pink and silver
paper. These potted plants were smuggled into the house the day
before, without our mother seeing, and they spent the night in the
back nursery, hidden under the beds, or behind chairs.

Evelyn and I were allowed downstairs for tea only on family
birthdays. Our mother's was the earliest anniversary of the year.
On this day we had tea for the first time without artificial light. It
added a symbolical meaning to the occasion, as though it ushered in
the rebirth of spring. Ritual was observed, down to the smallest
detail. We must have a walnut cake with white icing, and "jumbles,"
or brandy snaps, from the local confectioner. These, with our potted
plants and a penny bunch of the year's first snowdrops, a new ribbon
for our mother's hair, and a present to her from our father of a
salmon-pink silk and lace morning jacket, were the elements of the
birthday. We would have Eked to draw a circle round the family,
excluding everyone else. So, as we waited in the nursery for the tea
hour, dressed in our party clothes, we resented the ring of the bell
that announced the arrival first of Mr. Bowles, then of Judge
Talbot and finally of Alexander in his kilts. To us, on this day of our
mother's birthday, these were intruders.

7 2 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

'&

But neither was our mother really happy.

"It's a funny thing, Robert/* we heard her say* "My birthday is
supposed to be for my pleasure. Actually, I don't have much chance
to enjoy It, because I'm always having to see that people aren't
jealous of each other,, and start quarreling. First George gets an-
noyed because I am smiling at Alexander, Then Pollie sulks because
I appease George. And then, just as I think everyone is satisfied, and
I can settle down to enjoy the Fuller's walnut cake I am so fond of,
Louis Talbot makes a remark that shocks Mamma or so she pre-
tends. I made a great mistake in ever letting all these people know
the date of my birthday. If I get any new friends I shall tell each one
of them I was born on a different day.**

But from our vantage point of the nursery window we saw much
besides the friends and admirers who visited our mother* The tessel-
lated pavement dried each morning in time for the punctual arrival
of Walmy, who, whatever the weather might be, paused to wave to
the two small heads at the window. At exactly half-past ten the
butcher boy came for orders, returning an hour later, in his dark
blue and white striped uniform, with meat for the family dinner.
Just before this the grocer's young man appeared, and the cook woul<S
give him the list that had been compiled in the study by our mother
and Walmy, while I had sat quietly at fhc table, drawing with the
blue pencil. This grocer man always stayed a long time for, as I once
heard the cook tell Nanny, he had "bedroom eyes" where she was
concerned, and there was no getting rid of him.

And then, too, there was the greengrocer boy, the fishmonger's
assistant, and the poulterer's boy. The gaslit world belowstairs must
have throbbed those mornings with excitement and romance,

But there was something else we watched* It was the life beyond
our high garden walk.

In the months of winter, when the linden trees of VaUombrosa
were leafless, we saw the lamplighter pass along Abbey Road in the
violet dusk. Through the closed window we could not hear his step.

FROM THE NURSERY WINDOW 73

but we knew when he passed, for, as he lit the first lamp at the
corner of the street, it shone into the nursery and illumined the pic-
ture of "Baby's First Outing/* from the Illustrated London News
Christmas Annual, that hung on the wall The primrose gaslight
from the street turned our coal fire to deep orange. Soon, now, Nanny
would light the incandescent.

But certain sounds penetrated the closed window. At the clang-
ing of a hand bell, in the late afternoon, we rushed to see the muffin
man swing along the road, a tray of muffins, covered with green
baize cloth, balanced on his head*

"Oh Mother, can't we have some for our tea?* 9 we one day asked,

"Dear me, no,*' she replied. "They're indigestible, those soggy
muffins and crumpets. They aren't for little children in the nursery."

At other times we heard the cart rumble by with logs for sale.
As a raucous voice shouted his wares, we looked at the logs in
distrust*

"Mother says they're simply swarming with cockroaches," I re-
minded my little brother. "It's a good thing we aren't anywhere
near them."

,^', Street singers and Punch and Judy shows, knife grinders and
barrel organs : the life outside our garden walls was filled with events.
All we had to do was to look from the nursery window.

But one year, when our father nearly died of pneumonia and
we stayed in St. John's Wood until late summer, we found that we
could not see half so much when the linden trees were in full leaf. In
vain we stared through the thick foliage to see the man calling,
"Strawberries all ripe. Ripe strawberries, a shilling a pannet" ; and
a lyrical voice singing, "Now is the time to buy my pretty lavender"
was all we knew of the lavender hawker.

We had one real friend, though, who was as unfailing in his
greeting as Walmy. At the corner of the road, outside the synagogue,
sat old Charley, the one-legged crossing sweeper. We saw him touch
his cap to each passer-by who handed him a coin, and from time to

74 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

time when he was resting on his upturned wooden crate and nobody
was near, he waved his stick wildly in the air towards our window.
We would wave back, though I never knew if he could see us do so.
All this while that we were watching so much happening, our
mother sat at work in the study. Her bell-like voice rang through
the house, clearer than the hand bell of the muffin man or the Italian
opera tunes that were played by the barrel organ. She was dictating
the stories that paid for the meat and the vegetables, the fish, the
butter and the eggs.

* The Annual Exodus

Winter passed, with Its fog and ram. Across the road, now, in
the garden of the house opposite, the almond was in sudden bloom.
The thrushes and blackbirds sang in the trees of St. John's Wood.
Little rivers of gold ran down our garden path, on each side of the
paved walk, as the crocuses opened to the sun.

Our mother was feeling sad at the coming of spring.

"It brings so many promises it never keeps," she sighed to our
father as she looked out of the study window. "And it makes me feel
ill and unhappy. I always need a little time in which to be physically
fit to claim relationship with the spring. Besides, it's all nonsense to
say the spring Is meant for the young. It isn't. If s only bearable when
you're really old. But then, it actually manages to make you feel old.
That blackbird's song takes away all your contentment, and first
thing you know you are wanting something without being able to
find out what It is you want. Oh, dear me, how I wish it were still
the autumn. That is the season for youth and work. The poets knew
this. You remember the poem that begins: <God in His heart made
autumn for the young*?*'

75

76 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

And she burst out weeping, even while she was quoting this
verse. We grew shy, and turned away in confusion as we saw tears
drop from her eyes onto the bundle she carried in her arms, till the
ink of her outlines was blotted and smudged.

But we did not feel sad about the coming of spring. We knew
that in a few more weeks the trunks would be hauled upstairs foi
the annual migration to Lowestoft

Each spring the family moved to a house in East Anglia. This
annual migration had an Old Testament flavor to it, as though we
moved out of Ur of the Chaldees into Canaan. It ought never to
have been negotiated in a modern conveyance like a railway train.
There should have been camels as beasts of burden, and rivers and
deserts to cross.

The first few years f my life we had rented a furnished house for
two or three months each summer on the South Coast, It had been
exciting to go to a different resort every season, and later on, when
we went always to the same place, we often hankered after this
change of scene, as over the years of our childhood we grew to know
each bush and stone near Lowestoft. For the time came when the
Leighton family decided it should have a permanent seaside home,
and we bought a half-built house in East Anglia, on a cliff over-
looking the North Sea.

"Of course, 3 ' my mother said, "if we could have found a suitable
house for sale that had been lived in and mellowed, it might have
been better though then we'd have had to spend quite a time get-
ting rid of the mental atmosphere left behind by the people who'd
lived there before. But as things are, the fact that The Red Croft
was only half-built when we bought it ought to make everything
pretty safe."

My mother had a deep superstition against building a house*
Nothing on earth could have persuaded her to do so.

"But it isn't merely a whim of my own/' she protested. "It's a
superstition that goes right back to the days of the Bible. Don't you

THE ANNUAL EXODUS 77

remember the proverb that comes somewhere: Tools build houses
and wise men live In them 3 ? They knew perfectly well that the surest
way to achieve a premature death is to build a house for yourself.
It is flagrantly tempting Providence. If you look around you'll see
I am right when I say that no one ever lives to enjoy a house he has

built"

The migration started a week or two before we actually took the
journey by train, for there was so much to be packed. Countless
linen chests and trunks appeared on the landings, and in odd corners
of all the rooms* I never knew where these were kept over the rest
of the year, because there were depths in that St. John's Wood
house Which we were not allowed to penetrate. Two staircases in
Vallombrosa were forbidden to us: the pitch black stairs to the
basement, and the equally dark stairway, shut off by a door, that
led to the servants 5 bedrooms in the attic. Between these two floors
lay our world; but the outer darknesses were the unknown. Sounds
came to us from these regions. The ring of the alarm clock that
wakened the servants before sunrise on winter mornings broke into
our sleep in the night nursery. As we walked through the hall on
our way out, we could hear Dolly stoking the kitchen range, and
could imagine the glow of the great banked fire that cooked our
dinner. But it never worried us to realize that the servants lived in
perpetual gaslight and saw no sun. Only once in all my childhood
did I visit our kitchen. That was when our mother and father were
away and tremblnigly I crept down the basement stairs, challenged
by Roland, but terrified of rats and mice.

Though the trunks stood waiting, there was one unpleasant ritual
to perform before the packing could take place. My mother's furs
must be put away for the summer. Her ermine stole and muff, her
sable stole and her skunk-trimmed velvet coat must be protected in
pepper from the ravages of moths*

My mother had a great love for furs, and considered that she
looked her best in the winter, when she was justified in wearing

78 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

them. In fact, one of the main reasons for her dislike of the summer
months was that she could not be seen In these furs.

"That," she said, "is essentially a sign of breeding. All the com-
mon people of the world, you will notice, look their best in flimsy,
cheap, gay-colored little cottons and prints* They are the people who
are happiest when they are shouting to each other across a tennis
court. But the really worth-while women are those who feel most at
home in rich furs. And they are in their element when they are
quietly indoors. You will see, my child, if you keep your eyes open,
that there is a strong line of demarcation between the people who
can't seem to wait for the summer, and those who understand the
quality of chrysanthemums, and an early dusk, and the magic of
lamplight. And nearly always, as I say, if s a case of breeding."

Furs were not only a romantic delight to my mother. They were
a symbol.

It was always an especial sorrow to her that she should think it
unhealthy to wear a fur coat. I remember her weeping one day
because a rich friend, knowing herself to be dying, had asked if she
might present my mother with her chinchilla coat*

"I simply had to tell her No," sobbed my mother. "I treasure
my health more than a chinchilla coat, and it wouldn't be worth it
if I were to die of pneumonia. You notice that no opera singer ever
wears a fur coat. She daren't risk catching pneumonia or bronchitis.
And neither can L"

And now the romantic half of the year had ended. Her fura must
be packed away. Tears fell upon sable and ermine. They were not
only caused by pepper.

My mother had no faith in such moth preventatives as camphor.
Nothing advertised on the market was to be trusted. She must use
household pepper. This pepper arrived in great five pound paper
bags, and my mother sprinkled it among her furs with the same
lavish abandon with which she pasted her papers together with
Stickphast or sealed her envelopes with scarlet wax*

THE ANNUAL EXODUS 79

"I dare not let anyone else do this/ 9 she said, "My aim is to keep
my furs from the moths, and not merely to be able to say that they
have been put away. Nobody but myself would think it worth while
to rub the pepper thoroughly into the entire surface of the skins."

And so, over several days, my mother dictated her stories to
Walmy while she peppered her furs. My mother sneezed. Walmy
sneezed. My father bound his nose with a handkerchief as he wrote
his stories, and yet he sneezed. Even the dogs seemed affected. But
still my mother went on dictating, while she scattered the pepper
around her as though it were a libation to some god.

These peppered funs were wrapped securely in old newspapers,
and tied with an elaborate network of string. They were put for
safety in the top part of the wardrobe in the night nursery, which
was the only place in the house with a key. But the pepper seemed
to ooze through the packages, and we always sneezed when we
opened the wardrobe door.

This sneezing in the spring, though, was as nothing compared
with early autumn, when my mother considered it safe to bring out
her furs, Walmy was deputed to shake them free of pepper in the
back garden, but in spite of this there was an epidemic of sneezing
in the Leighton household for many days.

"Is it absolutely necessary, Chummie, to use quite so much
pepper?" my red-eyed father dared timidly one day to ask.

But my mother was scornful.

"If Robert thinks I'm going to slave away all my life writing like
this in order to get myself a completely new set of ermine and sable
each winter, he's wrong," she declared. "Good furs are like family
jewels. They come into the category of heirlooms, and are not to be
tossed around as though they do not matter."

Once the furs were safely protected against moths, my mother
was free to put her mind to the packing for the annual exodus. Not
that she did much, for it was Walmy's business to attend to it.
Downstairs in *the study Walmy was busy amassing my mother's

8o TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

bundles. Into numberless trunks they went: rubbish and unpaid bills
newspapers and dress designs, old love letters and aired under-
garments. Everything that lay about in that study was tossed into
these trunks, and nothing was sorted. It is not surprising that our
luggage was enormous. Even my father's easel and painting materials
had to be strapped together and packed.

The only thing of importance we did not take was the gramo-
phone.

"It makes me quite a little sad to leave it behind," my mother
said, "for often, over the summer months at Lowestoft, I find
myself needing the emotional stimulation of a love song. But it is
unwise to risk breaking such a precious thing by taking it on a train/'

And so she removed and hid the sound box of the gramophone,
in order that the policeman and his wife, whom we always engaged
as caretakers at Vallombrosa while we were away supposing this
to be the safest insurance against burglars might not use it.

"If it were only the police sergeant himself," my mother added,
"I would not even remove the soundbox. You can trust a London
policeman with anything on this earth besides, he is gpieraUy
asleep all the day, when he might want to play the gramophone, and
on his beat at night. But unfortunately he is married though con-
sidering he's out always at night it is beyond my understanding what
use he can make of marriage and you can't really trust a woman
even when she is a policeman's wife."

But though the entire household was topsy-turvy, my mother
went on dictating her serials in the rapidly emptying study* Nothing
might interfere with this, and Walmy would try somehow to get
everything ready even while she still sat before the typewriter. Up to
the very last moment the sound of my mother's voice could be heard,
in passionate love scenes.

" 'Oh, my heart's darling, my own, my joy/ w our mother called
across the table to Walmy as she gathered together some of her
manuscripts. " 'Give me one chance to prove my love. Give me time

THE ANNUAL EXODUS 81

to earn your kisses. Let me woo you and you shall know* Miss
Walmisley, did you remember to pack the outline of that next serial
we have to do for the Weekly Dispatch? Where was I? Yes: 'and
you shall know the happiness of living in the shelter of a good man's
love/"

The dictating continued even through the last midday meal,
with the typewriter placed on the dust sheet that cloaked the dining
room table, as my mother decided the destiny of a heroine between
mouthf uls of mutton chop.

One year a terrible thing happened. The last meal was finished.
The last cord was tied round the last trunk. The enameled hip bath,
filled with nursery belongings, was ready to be placed on the roof
of the omnibus. Dust sheets covered the beds, and blankets and
towels were packed away. The entire Leighton tribe, with all the
dogs, stood in the hall, ready for departure. We waited like this for
over half an hour, and the dogs grew restless and began to whine.

"Dear me," worried our mother* "Whatever can have hap-
pened? All these yeara Fve never known the Great Eastern Railway
omnibus to be late like this. And stranger still, the carriage from
Trinder's Livery Stable is late also. If they don't come sopn now
we shall miss our train."

The grandfather clock in the hall ticked loudly as we waited. It
struck the hour. By this time everyone was agitated.

"I don't see the ghost of a chance now of catching the train, 9 '
my mother complained. "What on earth can have happened?"

A sniffling sound came from the far end of the hall, where Walmy
was hiding.

"Are you perfectly sure you ordered the conveyances for today,
Miss Walmisley?" our mother asked. "You'd better look at the
carbon copies of the letters you sent."

The sniffle became a sob as Walmy with difficulty undid the
enormous corded chest that held my mother's papers. She searched
through this confusion* with all eyes upon her. On to the floor of the

32 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

hall tumbled the old bills and the unanswered letters, the torn news-
papers and the dress designs. When finally she found the carbon
copies, her sobbing grew louder*

In the agitation of packing she had ordered both the omnibus
and the carriage for the following day. It was no wonder they had
not arrived,

Walmy ran to the lavatory to finish her sobbing. My mother kept
an angry silence.

It was a good-sized gathering when It assembled for the migra-
tion. First there were the heads of the tribe, my father and mother.
My mother wore her best, biggest, newest hat in order thatt it might
not get crushed in the packing. My father's coat was covered with
dog hairs, because there were so many dogs to assemble. There
seemed always to be a new litter of Skye terrier puppies. These were
placed in a big hamper, and I remember that they had to come into
the railway carriage with us instead of being put in the guard's van
with most of the dogs, in order that we could feed them during the
journey with Brand's Beef Essence on a half crown, slipped into the
interstices of the wicker hamper, Evelyn and I were encouraged to
do this, to occupy our minds, and so keep us from being sick.

Then, of course, there were we three children. Although Roland
was only five years older than I, he always associated himself with
our parents and referred to us two younger ones as "the children,"
ignoring the three years' difference between me and my little
brother. We never resented this, because we loved Mm. Everything
he chose to do must be right. On the occasion of the migration he
went to Liverpool Street Station with our mother and father in the
separate , hired carriage.

Walmy, too, came to Lowestoft with us, and lived in the house
over the summer months. This meant that she had to bring her own
Skye terrier along, to swell the canine crowd. Our dogs disapproved
of this stranger and always started a fight, which added a last minute
complication.

THE ANNUAL EXODUS 83

And then came the "staff/* The old nurse was tired and irritable,
wondering at what exact point I would disgrace myself, as invariably
I did, by being sick.

"It seems to me, m*say, there's no way as I can stop that there
Miss Clare from vomiting/* she grumbled. "Even if I lets 'er go
without 'er dinner she'd manage it somehow just the same."

Her pockets were stuffed with two or three table napkins, as a
precautionary measure*

The undernurse was strapping the last bundles, and the cook,
the parlormaid and the housemaid, dressed in their best clothes,
waited discreetly downstairs, in a dark corner of the hall, for the
omnibus to arrive.

It was an enormous omnibus, as it needed to be, for there were
always about eight dogs, as well as the humans. I find myself
remembering every bit of that long drive. Past the walled gardens of
St. John's Wood, into the grime of King's Cross, and the awful
depression of City Road; this was a world we were shielded from.
We were not accustomed to such ugliness. The horses that drew the
omnibus trotted in a way that made the whole vehicle vibrate.
Outside was a grey collection of sordid public houses and chimney
pots, beneath a smoke-dimmed sky. Everything smelt of grime and
airlessness, frightened dogs and sweaty horses. The ride took so long
that it seemed as though we would never reach the station. Sud-
denly it was all too much for me. True to ritual, I rushed to the
hastily opened back window and made my offering to the City of
London, while the driver went his way, unaware of the pollution of
his omnibus. Out from one of Nurse's pockets came a table napkin,
but, as always, it was too late. I had to cross the frightening expanse
of Liverpool Street Station with a disfigured coat.

My mother was not exposed to this shame. She and my father
and Roland had already anived at the station, in the carriage hired
from Trinder*s livery Stable. They were joined there by a sad little
Mr. Bowles and one or two equally sad lesser adorers. Bound to-

84 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

gether by a common grief, these men forgot their rivalry. We could
see them a long way off, at the far end of the platform. My mother's
hat looked strangely gay against the grime of Liverpool Street Sta-
tion, as though an exotic bird had escaped and landed on her head,
and the sweep of her fawn-colored shantung dust coat seemed out of
place in this smoky setting. She wore this dust coat open, so that the
grandeur of her clothes might not be hidden from sight. It was
essential that she should be looking her best.

"Don't ever forget, my child," she said to me from time to time
over the years, "don't ever forget that the last impression you give
a man is important. Never let a man who loves you remember you
as anything but your most seductive. If he has seen you for even one
careless moment in curling pins, or with a smut on your nose, it is
this that he will remember, rather than the times when you were
all prepared for him."

And so, now, as she was leaving London for several months, it
was especially necessary that Mr. Bowles and the lesser adorers
should think of her as they had seen her last on the platform at
Liverpool Street Station. She must remain in their memory as a
vivid picture of beauty.

But my father had watched for the omnibus to arrive, and has-
tened to help us as we struggled with the frightened dogs. It was his
job to steer all these dogs safely into the guard's van, while Walmy
and the two nurses coped with us. As the moment for our departure
grew nearer, we saw him taking the dogs, one after the other, for
a last short walk up and down the platform, to do their "business,"
so that they might behave themselves in the van for quite a few of
them lived in the kennels in the back garden, and were not house-
broken. Leaning from the window of our reserved compartment, we
grew more and more frightened lest the train should start before our
father had been able to get himself and the dogs safely inside.

When the train moved out from the smoky station, we saw a
group of gloomy men walk slowly down the platform, their heads

THE ANNUAL EXODUS 85

sunk low* As usual each summer, our mother had left behind her
some broken hearts.

I do not know how sad she herself was feeling in the privacy of
the separate reserved compartment where she sat with our father
and Roland. Evelyn and I were far too much worried with our own
terrors just then to be aware of anything. Wedged into corner seats
with our backs to the engine, where we had been placed to prevent
further train sickness, we did not even hear the ceaseless chatter of
the servants.

"How far are we now from Colchester?** we kept on asking in a
frightened voice. "Walmy, Walmy, how far?'

We had once been told that the particular part of the earth's sur-
face near Colchester, through which we had to pass, was susceptible
to earthquakes. We expected at any moment to be swallowed up in
a great opening of the globe, and never felt at ease until we were
well past that region.

As we slowed down in the station at Ipswich, a pile of brown
wicker tea baskets awaited us. Three of these were delivered into
the compartment where our father and mother and Roland sat in
state. Four were handed m to us, and Wakny and the old nurse,
Evelyn and I started in on our refreshment of strong tea and bread
and butter and stale fruit cake* The three servants and the under-
nurse, though, ware not supposed to have baskets; they rated only
separate cups of tea, poured from an enameled urn that was wheeled
along the platform.

The journey seemed endless. It was only one hundred and
eighteen miles from London to Lowestoft, but journeys in those days
were weighty things. With the strange way in which memory retains
insignificant details over the years, I remember that we took the
three-eighteen train in the afternoon. Three-eighteen down, and two
fifty-seven back to London in the autumn; train journeys will always
be associated for me with the face of a clock marking one or other
of these times. I shaH see the enormous clock in Liverpool Street

86 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

Station, dim through the veil of fog and smoke, with the hands
moving slowly towards the moment of departure. Three o'clock
for we were installed in the compartment a good half hour before
the train left and then the moment when the hands came together,
at three-fifteen, and the exciting moment when the minute hand
overtook the hour hand, and there were only one or two minutes still
to wait.

But the hours passed. Suddenly we could smell the sea* This
happened when we stopped at a little place called Beccles. A very
old man hobbled alongside the train, shouting the name of the sta-
tion, and ritual demanded that we should lean out of the window to
sniff the air, I am certain the grownups in their separate compart-
ment didn't do this; it would have been too underbred to show such
exuberance.

But even though she was a lady by birth, Walmy was not so
well brought up. She could not resist our excitement.

"Marvelous, Marvelous," she always said, drawing a deep
breath. "Perfectly marvelous. All the ozone of the whole of the
North Sea is in this air. Lo-ar, it's good for us. And after a winter
in Bayswater, too." For Walmy lived in a stuffy semi-basement flat
in Bayswater, all the time she wasn't with us in East Anglia.

It seemed as if new life had suddenly come to us. The servants
began to straighten from their wilted exhaustion and even the
puppies within the hamper squealed with unusual vigor.

Those were the days when people had a great belief in "sea air."
Our family didn't go to Lowestoft to take a holiday. We never took
holidays. We went there so that we children should benefit in our
health, and in order that our mother and father might go on working
with additional vitality. Nobody in our household ever stopped
working. Precisely the same pattern of life was led at the seaside as
in St. John's Wood, except for seasonal variations such as tea out of
doors on fine days in the summer and slightly different hours of
working because Walmy now lived in the house with us. But nobody

THE ANNUAL EXODUS 87

ever dreamed of taking days off to laze or go gadding. Even Evelyn
and I worked hard at our studies during the school holidays, in a
desperate effort to improve ourselves.

My mother had profound contempt for people who took holi-
days. She dismissed them as "having something common in their
make-up,"

"The only real row I ever have with George/ 9 she said, "takes
place once a year when I discover that he has sneaked off for a
holiday. The poor little man is so timid that he is afraid to tell me;
but as he is in the habit of writing me a letter practically each day
of the week, it isn't easy for him to hide his movements."

And so my mother's face hardened as, suddenly, after a week
without a letter, a picture postcard came from Mr. Bowles from
"some lower middle class place like Switzerland."

"I have always been afraid that there was something just a little
suburban and ill-bred about poor George," she would tell my father
with a sneer.

And then, for a day or two, she showed a sudden tenderness
towards Judge Talbot or Alexander; for neither of them was off on
such a plebeian thing as a holiday. My brothers and I felt sorry for
Mr. Bowles when next he came to visit us. We knew how coldly
aloof our mother could be when she wished.

For several weeks before he took the rash step, Mr. Bowles would
work up to it by saying that of course he wouldn't be able, this year,
to afford a holiday. My mother would console him, and say that it
didn't really matter, did it? He would then hint that his work was
growing somewhat stale, because he needed some new setting for his
next story. At this point my mother grew suspicious, and that eve-
ning she might be heard talking to my father about it.

"George will be off somewhere or other soon, on one of these
travel bureau tours/* she would say. "You see if I am not right.
And if he does have to do it and, of course, it's partly that common
wife of his who forces him to, to save the housekeeping money while

88 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

he's away why can't he choose somewhere Interesting and original?
Why does he have to go off in such an organised manner? It'll be
Switzerland again, I expect. That's such a safe place. His wife
knows he won't possibly meet anyone dangerous there. You
couldn't. It's filled with schoolteachers. Now look at me. I never take
a holiday. And what's wrong with me? Why, nothing.**

She showed the same contempt for my uncle. My father's brother
was an artist. He was a very bad artist, but as he had married a
woman with some money this didn't really matter, because, when
she died and left him fairly well provided for, he could go around
with all the outward and visible signs of bohemianism without the
anguish of having to justify himself by producing any paintings.
This uncle was dearly loved by art societies, as he had all the time
of the world upon his hands and adored being needed and con-
sidered important. And so he was always organizing artists' trips to
picturesque countries. Back to us, on the East Coast, came romantic
postcards from Palermo, from Spain, from Florence or from Algiers.
My mother tossed them over to my father, with contempt.

"There's Jack at it again," she said* "And can't you see him,
with all those third-rate artists, thinking himself God Almighty.
Little shabby spinsters, who've never in their lives been further than
Hammersmith or West Kensington, supposing themselves suddenly
the center of romance, and Jack doxing around with them as though
he were a legitimate sort of Don Juan, And all the silly little water
colors that will come out of it, to be placed on the walls of suburban
villas, and to be shown to visitors with a 'and that was the year I
was in Italy' sort of sigh. And even Jack himself will be thinking
he's truly living at last. He'll be unbearable when he returns per-
fectly unbearable. As if travel ever improved anybody. You've got
to have it in you yourself, and if you have, you don't need to travel."

But Uncle Jack was wise enough not to come down and visit
us for quite a long time after his return from one of these "lower
class" trips.

THE ANNUAL EXODUS 89

And so this move to the seaside was merely a change of locale,
in order that we might benefit by the strong air of Lowestoft. My
mother had tremendous faith in this North Sea air. Nothing would
take her to any "soft, backboneless place" like Devonshire. She
needed the hard bracing quality of East Anglia, and never tired of
telling us what happened when she went once to the Lake District.

"That air is no good/' she would say. "It just lets you down. Of
course those poets wrote. There wasn't any possibility of any vitality
to make them do anything else. All your ambition leaves you, and you
want to do nothing but live with someone you love in a little rose-
covered cottage, on fifty pounds a year, and write sonnets. Now
here, on the East Coast . . ."

And she would turn to Walmy and go on dictating the romantic
adventures of her latest heroine*

The old judge was always at Lowestoft station to meet us. As
the train slowed down, the lumbering figure could be seen vigor-
ously waving a thick stick in the air, to greet my mother. His enor-
mous voice boomed out :

"As I was saying " But the noise of the porters drowned the
rest of the sentence*

My mother and father and Roland, joined now by Judge Talbot,
went their way in an open victoria. The rest of us were bundled into-
the pale yellow omnibus that had been ordered from the Crown
Hotel It was a tight squeeze, for this was a much smaller omnibus
than the Great Eastern Railway one in London.

Somewhere, In the luggage van of that train, were the nursery
hip bath, my father's easel and the trunks and chests of the Leighton
family- But they would appear next morning, by special truck.

The air was filled with the sharp, tangy smell of fish, for
Lowestoft was dedicated to the herring. There seemed to be magic
in this air. As the yellow omnibus rumbled through the town, bur-
dened with children and servants and dogs, it passed little streets
leading, to the fish market and the harbor. In the pale light of a

90 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

spring sunset the world seemed bewitched. It was the dry, clear light
of the North. Here we saw none of the violet mist of St. John's
Wood dusks, or the dirty sky of Bethnal Green, Everything was
sharp-edged, and pure of color. Excitedly we pressed our noses to
the windows of the omnibus as we watched each shop, each street,
each loitering fisherman. At this moment we were completely happy.

The yellow omnibus left behind it the town of Lowestoft. It
reached Gunton Cliff, and stopped at last In front of The Red Croft.
The grownups* hired carriage had already arrived, and waited to
take the old judge back to his home. But he was not yet ready. He
had not seen his "Beloved Beaut/* for many long months. As we
and the servants, Wahny and the dogs swarmed Into the house, his
fat body blocked the way.

"The sun has come into my Hfe again," he shouted, just as the
undernurse was carrying a heavy case around his enormous bulk.
He brandished his stick in the air and almost hit the poor girl in
the face. But he did not notice this. He did not see that he was pre-
venting us from entering the house. Neither did he hear our nurse
grumbling.

"If that old man doesn't get out of my way," she muttered below
her breath, as she tried to force herself past Mm, "if *e doesn't let me
get through with these children they'll be dropping to sleep all over
'im."

But the fat old judge was in such a delirium of joy that he saw
and heard nothing except his own "Beloved Beauty."

"As I was saying . . ." his voice boomed loud above the barking
dogs, the moving of luggage and the whimpers of tired children.

My mother stood in the front hall, in her best, biggest, newest
hat, unable to get rid of him. Life in the Leighton family over the
summer months of the year had started its traditional pattern.

6; F Life at the Seaside

"I can't think what your father does with himself In the garden
all this time/* our mother often sighed, as she looked out of the
window in the house at Lowestoft. "Personally, I find nothing to
interest me in a garden. And it would be much better for the family
income if Robert didn't waste all these valuable hours out there
with that ridiculous hoe. The only good thing to be said for this
craze? of Ms is that it does keep him out of mischief."

Actually my father worked in the garden as a background for
thinking. Even as my mother evolved the destiny of her heroine
while we stroked her neck with the feathery end of her quill pen, so
my father developed the plots of his Wild West stories over the
mowing of a lawn. The distant look in his eyes as he hoed made us
realize that his mind was occupied with other things than flowers.
Cowboys and broncos must have galloped across the grass; Indians
surely lay in ambush behind the privet hedges.

But the purpose of his gardening did not make things any easier
for his children, as he forced us to spend hours at a time in a

92 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

crouched position, weeding the edges of the paths. We hated it and
feelings of rebellion rose within us when, each evening during the
summer, unless it should happen to rain, he made Evelyn and me
drag the hose round to the front garden, to water rows upon rows of
geraniums and marguerites,

But our father had, also, a real passion for this garden on the
East Coast. Fortunately for us, the passion did not extend to the St.
John's Wood garden, which was fenced in at the back exclusively for
the dogs, but allowed to run wild even in the front. Though we
would have hated working in it ourselves, we used to feel ashamed as
we compared our wilderness with the lovingly tended gardens of
other houses in the neighborhood. The grass of our lawns blos-
somed and seeded* Tall weeds flourished in the flowerless beds. It
was lucky for us that the main charm of Vallombrosa lay in the
thirty-six lilac bushes and the row of linden trees, which needed no
care.

But on the occasion when we gave a garden party, suddenly the
front garden was attended to. I can remember my distress at what
I then saw happen.

My father was standing around one morning when we went
for our walk, talking to a strange man wearing a sacking apron.
When we came back for the midday dinner, there was a big cart
outside the front gate, half filled with gorgeous plants geraniums
and marguerites, calceolarias and pelagonias at the height of their
flowering. We opened the gate, and there, in the front garden, were
three men. They were digging round holes all over the place, and
at one end of the grass, near the holly tree, were dozens of potted
plants like the ones still out in the cart, waiting to be placed in these
holes. The garden looked lovely when all the holes were filled with
these plants. But during the party I walked among them in shame.

"I always supposed I was a good judge of character/' I over-
heard one dressed-up lady remark to another, "but I have to admit
that for once I've been wrong. Knowing the Leightons as I do, I

LIFE AT THE SEASIDE 93

would never have believed they took such care of their garden. If
I'd been asked, I'd have sworn they were the sort of people to let it
run wild, while their minds were on their writing. But look at it.
It's perfectly beautifuland with all these flowers in full bloom at
just the right moment for the occasion. I must congratulate them."

As I listened, I felt myself turning as red as the geraniums at
my feet.

"Don't you see what* s happened?" my sense of honesty made me
want to cry out. But I was loyal to the family; and I walked away.

It was a dreary business, filling in those holes next day when the
party was over; but I felt much more at home in that drab, flower-
less place than I had done when it was falsely filled with strange
plants in pots.

The garden on the East Coast had many uses. Not only, as my
mother said, did it keep my father out of mischief, but it was an
excellent place in which to take your daily exercise. Up and down
the middle path my mother walked. Fuly dressed in her outdoor
clothes, with an elaborate summer hat and a fringed sunshade, she
strode the length of the path to the "crazy beds" at the end where
the roses grew, near the fence which divided us from a neighbor
who, my mother remarked, was "somewhat common" and so under-
bred that he kept chickens and hung his washing on a line each
Monday; and then, with the disciplined movements of a drill
sergeant, she stopped, paused, turned around and marched straight
back down the center of the path to the white painted trellis that,
covered with climbing roses, separated the garden from the kitchen
entrance. She looked neither to right nor to left, neither up nor
down. She never saw the pansies that bordered the path, or noticed
the rows of annuals that my father grew. This went on for exactly
half an hour. It was the summer variant of the walks she took in St.
John's Wood during the months of winter, when she would go round
and round the block of houses, and round and round again. Nothing
could force her beyond these prescribed limits.

94 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

"I think I'll just run upstairs and put on my hat and coat and
go found the houses," my mother would call to my father. "I've got
a bit stuck with this plot. I can't seem to know what to do next."

If he could possibly help it, my father never let her go alone. In
a few moments my parents might be seen striding along Abbey Road
with several dogs, looking neither to right nor to left. "Round the
houses" was one of the first expressions I ever heard. It was one of
the most frequently used.

Down at Lowestoft my mother did not even need to go beyond
the garden gate.

"Why should I risk having my mind disturbed from my work
by walking along the Front?" she always said. "Exercise is exercise,
wherever you may take it. You can never tell what interruption to
my thinking might not occur on the public road, where I would meet
people. An entire day's mood could easily be destroyed if I were to
get involved with outsiders."

One of the lawns my father so assiduously mowed was used for
croquet. This was the battleground for more bad tempers than would
have been thought possible in a well-brought-up family. I can see
my father turning in rage to a middle-aged female visitor with whom
he was playing. She had sent Ms ball right to the end of the lawn,
and, not knowing his character, had indulged in a superior little
smile. This was more than Father could stand, and with a fury that
seemed admirably suited to the red-haired, long-moustached Viking
chieftain that he looked, he shouted to her: "If you were a man I'd
kill you." My mother's adorers delighted in beating poor Father;
even the fat old judge would try his hand with a mallet, as he leaned
for support on one of us, who had been brought down from the
nursery for that purpose. But Evelyn and I were never allowed to
play croquet with our parents. It would have been bad for the
family morale if we had beaten our mother in a game. Walmy,
though, did not in the least mind if we won, and even people like
Mr. Bowles would condescend to play a game or two "with the

LIFE AT THE SEASIDE 95

children.** Generally we looked on. It was the most exasperatingly
slow game to watch, but it was the only form of sport our mother
believed in.

"Tennis makes people look hard-faced and strained/' she said,
as she put on her gloves before being handed a croquet mallet.
"And you have only to watch a woman swinging a golf dub to know
straight away she has no romance in her Hfe. But croquet takes
none of the femininity from a woman. She has enough time during
the game to think about other things. In this way she does not lose
her men. n

My mother moved over that croquet lawn with dignity. Her
skirts swept the ground as she walked, and whichever adorer hap-
pened just then to be playing with her had difficulty in keeping his
attention on the game* This was not made any easier by her habit of
reciting passionate love poems to her opponents. The games of
croquet were played to the accompaniment of Swinburne or Henley,
or fragments from the Indian Love Lyrics. My mother won most of
her games.

The grownups played their croquet in the afternoons. We were
allowed to play only when we were not interfering with our parents.
And this did not simply mean when they were playing croquet them-
selves* It also meant that we must keep away from the garden when-
ever my mother was sitting out there working. Though she never
for one moment exposed herself to direct sunshine, she considered
it healthy to sit outdoors and work in the open air.

"This is the reason for coming here in the summer,'* she said as
she protected the entire surface of her person, lest a ray of SUB
should strike her. "Sun is bad for one, but sea air can work wonders."

A wooden cabin was built at the far end of the garden. It stood
high above the ground, so that it might not be damp, and beneath
it, sheltered from the sun, slept several dogs. Four steps led up to
the door. Within this open door, at a little table, sat Walmy, amply
provided with pens, ink and paper; for once my mother started work,.

9 6 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

the stream of words flowed without Interruption over several hours.
Below, on the path, facing the cabin door, sat my mother, dictating.
She was fully dressed, with a Paris hat and a raised sunshade, and
sometimes, when it was windy, a spotted veil. On her hands and
arms she wore old elbow length white suede gloves that had seen
much service in London when they were new. She always looked
somehow as though she were taking the indoors to the garden with
her,

She sat there on the garden path in the attitude of Britannia on
a coin.

There was yet another time when we had to keep away from the
garden. This was at tea during the summer months, on the days
when the weather was warm and dry* Then the wicker tea table was
set up at the very bottom of the garden, on the gravel path, at the
point of intersection where the center path was crossed by the path
leading to the tool shed on the one side and the cabin on the other,
Exactly here it stood, with geometrical accuracy, and round the
table were grouped my mother and my father, Roland and Walmy.
Why this tea table was not placed a little nearer to the house, I can-
not say, as it must have been unnecessarily irksome for the parlor-
maid to take tablecloth, cake stand and tea service all the way down
the path to the bottom of the garden. It wasn't for the sake of
privacy, for there was no privacy in this particular garden. Every-
body could see everything that happened in it everywhere* That was
one thing my mother had against it

"It's what comes of buying a new house/* she complained. "Now
if only we'd been able to get an old one, nobody cotild have seen
what we were doing. There would have been big trees in the garden,
and high hedges. It's so underbred to live like this in the public eye."

With my mother's upbringing and need for seclusion, it must
have been a trial to her. I remember that there was something almost
indecently naked about the sight of the group sitting at tea in the
middle of a big open space. For there were no trees whatsoever in

LIFE AT THE SEASIDE 97

this newly made garden, and no possibility of shade. When the sun
shone strongly my mother raised her sunshade as she sat at the table.
The Surrealist painters did not exist in those days, but if a photo-
graph of this family garden tea were to be shown to anyone today,
the first expression to come from his lips would surely be the word
"DaH" For there was something oddly out of place about it all,
down to the detail of Walmy reading a novel to my mother over the
tea table, through an enormous magnifying glass. It looked almost as
though the whole scene were taking place indoors, and the walls of
the room had withdrawn, leaving the tea table standing derelict
against a background of the cosmos*

There was probably a great deal of jealous envy in our feelings
about this garden tea party* The sun beat in at the nursery windows,
till the room became unbearably hot. If we could have had our own
outdoor tea party, somewhere in another part of the garden, unseen
by the grownups, we would have been happy; but this did not
happen. And so the next best thing was to gaze down upon the
distant scene, waiting with impatience for the moment when valiant
Walmy, remembering the two children in the house, would slip
away from the table with a glass dish, at the bottom of which lay a
few remaining gooseberries or strawberries, raspberries or green-
gages.

For fruit in our family was a rarity and a luxury. It wasn't any-
thing to squander upon a nursery. Occasionally over the year a
pound of Newtown pippins would be bought for us, and at Christ-
mas we had a big bag of pale, sour oranges from Spain. But generally
it was supposed that the stewed fruit we ate at dinner with our milk
puddings was enough for any child.

In the summer, though, the Ltightons did indulge themselves in
fruit for tea. It was the only time of the day my mother dared to eat
raw fruit. She was always afraid it would upset her inside, and
decided that the least unpleasant time to be inconvenienced would
be between the tea hour and the following morning. But this fruit

9 8 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

was untold agony to Walmy-j who had a terror of wasps. So, too, had
my mother, but she denied lt ? even, while she threw her arms around,
to beat the creatures off.

"It's utterly ill-bred not to be able to control yourself before a
mere insect," she reproached her secretary, "Now look at Robert
There he is, sitting perfectly quiet and still, with a wasp actually
crawling up his cheek. That's the way to treat them. They'll never
sting you then/'

And her own arms would be flung out like a windmill, tossing
more and more wasps towards Mm.

But it was not only wasps that disturbed the garden teas. Some-
times, as the family sat listening to my father or Walmy reading
from a recent novel, a thunderstorm crept up unnoticed by them.
At the nursery window we saw it happening, and held our breath in
fear. Would Mother reach the house in time? For she must not get
her feet wet. If she were to be caught in the rain, even for one
minute, she would most certainly come down with a cold exactly
f orty-eight hours later. I have so often watched her as she waited for
the forty-eighth hour to arrive, confident of her doom. Generally she
managed to achieve the expected cold.

Those days on the East Coast held their rituals. One of the most
important was the visit of the "Gorton Boy,** Three times a week
this market gardener from a neighboring village came with vege-
tables and fruit and flowers. My father never allowed his own flowers
in the garden to be picked, and we had to rely upon the "Gorton
Boy 5 ' for house decoration* The cook brought the great basket of
flowers into the front haU, where my mother was working. There
was no study at The Red Croft; my mother's bundles lay aU over her
bedroom floor and strayed even into the dining room. She worked
in any room that seemed at the moment most convenient. Without
pausing in her dictating, she would Hft the flowers out from the
basket: daffodils and wallflowers, country bunches of mixed flowers,
roses and sweet peas, and, later, asters and gladioli. Eight, nine, even

LIFE AT THE SEASIDE 99

a dozen bunches, In the extravagant abandon that was her nature it
did not matter how many we bought, if they were beautiful. They
lay on the window seats, and among her bundles, waiting for me to
arrange them. For in true British tradition I, the daughter of the
house, was allowed always to arrange the flowers. It was one of those
things that a growing young lady was supposed to do.

But as the summer wore on, my mother took a different attitude
towards these flowers* Spring and early summer do not abound with
insect life as does the later part of the season. Dahlias came into
bloom, and dahlias are proverbial for housing earwigs. If there was
anything of which she was truly scared, it was that harmless, creep-
ing insect called an earwig. I have known her to stay up most of a
night because she had been unable to track one down that she had
seen crawling under the bed. They reduced her to panic.

So, when the "Gorton Boy's" flower basket arrived in the season
of dahlias, it was never brought into the house- It had to be placed
on the steps by the f rQt door. From the safety of the hall, my mother
pointed through the window to the particular bunches she wanted,
and the cook would Hf t them from the basket. A bath towel was then
produced for you can see an earwig upon a white surface and
when each bunch had been separately shaken upon the doorstep, the
dahlias were enveloped in this bath towel and conveyed to the
downstairs lavatory. Here they were left for a while in the basin, to
give a chance for any further earwigs to appear. After this, I cut
open each bunch and shook and examined each separate flower,
so that we might be perfectly certain no single insect nestled still
within those fluted petals.

One day I must have done my job carelessly, for suddenly, at
the dinner table, an earwig emerged from a large pink dahlia and
crawled in the direction of my mother's soup plate. After that I
always had to leave the arranged flowers in the vases for several
hours in the downstairs lavatory,. to make doubly sure there were no
loiterers. I have often wondered why we ever bothered to buy these

soo TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

dahlias, considering the potential peril they harbored not to men-
tion the work they involved, ,,

My mother made very little use of the fact that we were at the
seaside.

"The only thing that interests me on the East Coast is the actual
sea air/' she always said, <c and I can get that just as ^vellin the back
garden without the bother and waste of time of the long walk down
to the beach. But I would Hke you children to be taken to the beach
each morning when the weather is fine. So long as Nurse keeps you
away from the part which teems with trippers and bathers, the
stretches of sand and the loneliness are good for your souls. This will
develop the best in you far more than sitting around in Bellevue
Park, among the crowds/*

But there were strict rules as to what we might do. Generally we
were made to play quietly beside our nurse. The old woman brought
her sewing with her, or her crochet work or h^r tatting, and, resting
her back against a breakwater so that there might not be a draught,
she spent the long summer mornings keeping watch over us.

If the weather were leally hot, our mother issued an order that
we could paddle; but this was not encouraged, for there was no
telling what harm might not come to us if our heads were heated
from the sun and our legs and feet cold from sea water. The uneven
distribution of hot and cold was risky. Sea bathing was forbidden.
There was an undertow of the tide on the East Coast, which might
drag us out to sea. Obediently we built our sand castles, and made
our mud pies, and never questioned why all the other children who
bathed returned safely to shore.

Occasionally, though, sounds from the populated part of the
beach drifted towards us in our select isolation. And then we would
hanker after the seaside life of the ordinary child. Farther down the
shore stood the Hne of donkeys, waiting, with the bright-colored
fringes over their eyes to keep away the flies, for their little riders. We

LIFE AT THE SEASIDE 101

knew the smell of the hot bodies, and the way the donkeys slashed
their tails against their flanks; but never had we been allowed to do
more than pat them in passing. Next stood a row of miniature car-
riages drawn by nanny goats. Into the shouts and laughter of the
bathers were mingled calls of men peddling their wares.

"Lowestoft rock, only threepence a stick," shouted one man as
he trudged through the sand with his basket full of the sickly
magenta confection.

"Fine William pears, all ripe, tuppence each," shouted another.

But sitting quietly beside our nurse as she sewed a flannel
nightgown, we munched our midmorning allowance of two Gari-
baldi or Osborne biscuits. The men did not come as far along as
our deserted part of the beach.

"I want you to grow up to have personality," our mother would
tell us. "And that means you must do a considerable amount of
quiet thinking, by yourselves. You were probably too small to
remember it, but I would remind you that when the Duchess of
Teck's children played with you on the beach at Bognor they weren't
allowed to mix with the lag, tag and bobtail. They were intended,
you see, for positions of importance in life. Never feel you are missing
things if you do not laugh and shout with the crowds."

But in spite of this injunction our eyes often turned longingly
towards the goat carriages and the donkeys.

Our mother considered there was healing power in sea water.
For this reason, one summer when she had sprained an ankle we
were made touring pails full of sea water back to the house each
day. It was difficult not to spill them as we crossed the long stretch
of dunes, and climbed the steep slope to the Front. By the time we
had reached home and emptied the pails into' the basin standing
ready in the comer of the hall, there was not much water left. But
each evening our mother dangled her weak ankle in the pool of salt
water, while she went on dictating her instalment to Walrny. This
sea water was never thrown away until it had been renewed; for

102 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

how was our mother to be sure that the following morning might
not be rainy, and her children unable to fetch a fresh supply from
the beach?

One summer Mrs. Bowles paid us a visit with her husband. This
in itself was not of any great importance, for we disliked her, but
it so happened that she was overheard remarking to Mr, Bowles
that "Marie" was stouter than she used to be. Our mother was
worried* If there was anything she feared, it was losing her figure.
She began to diet, but this did not seem to make any difference,

"Robert/' we heard her say one day, "I'm sick and tired of
eating nothing but water biscuits in order to reduce. It doesn't seem
to do any good at all Now there's something I want to ask you.
I've just been reading in a magazine that sea bathing has a dimming
effect upon the body. I'm feeling inclined to try it. But first I'd like
to know if that undertow of the tide is really dangerous?"

Our father managed to convince her that it was absolutely safe,
knd a carriage was ordered each morning to take her down to the
beach. This made him very happy. He had always wanted to bathe.
He loved the sea and everything connected with it* But he had never
dared to go into the water by himself. He knew that his Ghummie
would have thought it a waste of his time, when he should be
writing his boys' stories. Now, however, he sat beside our mother
in the carriage, as it rolled along to the beach, with a look of joy
upon his face.

Unfortunately, the bathing machines were a good way off from
the select, isolated part of the beach where we sat We could see
them in the distance, being drawn by horses to the water's edge.
Sometimes, when our nurse seemed especially occupied with her
sewing, we had been known to stray nearer to these machines and
watch the bathers bobbing up and down in the ocean. One of my
wildest ambitions was to look inside a bathing machine. Perhaps,
now that Mother had started to use one, this longing might be
satisfied.

LIFE AT THE SEASIDE 10$

But I was not to be so fortunate*

Our parents did not intend to be seen by their children in
dripping bathing costumes,

"If one is to retain authority one must be most careful not to be
visible in any undignified attire," our mother declared. "Never
shall I forget the sight of your grandmamma in hair curlers and
a scarlet flannel petticoat, scolding the cook. I lost considerable re-
spect for her and so did the cook. And I never regained it. But I
learnt a most valuable lesson."

On morning, however, Evelyn and I determined to watch our
parents bathing. We ran away from Nanny and hid behind the
breakwater nearest to the bathing beach.

The carriage arrived. Our mother walked cautiously up the
inclined plank that led into the bathing machine, tenderly assisted
by our father. She entered her half of the machine, and closed the
door. Father then dimbed the plank and went into his half. They
were hidden from sight as they emerged in their bathing costumes
at the other end of the machine, straight down into the water.

At this point we grew reckless. We emerged from our hiding
place and crept along the sand until we reached a place where we
could watch.

Our mother would have had no objection to being seen by the
whole world while still she was dry. Her costume was a dressmaker's
creation. Elaborate patterns of white silk braid wriggled over the
navy blue serge. The undulating bands of white braid that edged
her fuE skirt resembled the waves of the sea. Even her rubber sand
shoes were faced with white, while on her head, though she had
no intention of dipping it below the water, she wore a frilled navy
and white cap, like a satin mushroom.

My father did not look nearly so attractive. Beneath a bathing
costume of horizontal navy and white stripes his arms and legs were
pale and lanky.

"Come in further, Chummie," we heard him call to our mother.

104 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

"It's quite safe if you keep hold of the rope. Only, don't let go
while I have my little swim."

We watched his head of red hair far out at sea,

Our mother was terrified,

"Robert/ 5 she shouted. "You'll drown. You'll drown,* 9

But Father could not hear.

It was when he had returned safely to our mother's side at the
edge of the water that we were discovered.

"That's it, Chummie," he was saying, "Let the waves caress you.
It'll do you so much good. It * * * Look. There's Glare and Evelyn
watching us."

Instinctively they both bobbed down low beneath the water,
to be as little visible as possible.

"Go and send them away, Robert," our mother called in a loud
voice. "But no; on second thought don't go. You're such a sight
in that dripping costume that you'd have no authority whatsoever.
You look like a figure in the comic papers."

The punishment was merely delayed.

Very soon after this my mother abandoned her sea bathing.

"It does you more harm than good," she said, "At the end of
the morning you are completely exhausted with all the effort, as well
as with the actual bathing itself* There's something thoroughly
debilitating about it. Besides, it takes up far too much of my time.
If I continue like this I won't be able to get enough work done even
to pay the butcher's bill. 5 '

But the main thing was that it did not seem to have had the
slimming effect she had anticipated.

My punishment took the form of having to sit beside the old
nurse on the beach each morning for days on end, crocheting lace.
This lace was to go round the legs of my flannel drawers. I can
remember the pattern even now; it was a series of little triangles,
made of rows of blobs. It was the dirtiest lace that ever existed, for
I carried it around with me everywhere, knowing that the sooner I

LIFE AT THE SEASIDE 105

finished it the sooner would my punishment be over. Just at this
time Nanny was herself making yards of elaborate crochet, six
inches in depth, to go down and around a blue linen dress for my
mother. I would look at it in awe, as it rippled like magic from the
old woman's hands.

"If you make this lace of yours well enough," our nurse said,
trying to comfort me as she looked down at the dirty grey crochet
I clasped in my fist, "if you do it really finely and keep it clean, I'll
let you crochet some lace to go round your mother's new flannel
petticoats I'm just going to make."

We were a great family for flannel. It had to be real Welsh
flannel, and none of the delicate, ladylike soft white stuff edged with
a pale pink selvedge. The stuff of which all our underclothes were
made was thick and coarse, and came from the shop in a shade of
pale greenish blue with a dark blue selvedge. It had to be "shrunk"
before it was made up, and I can see it now, soaking in the nursery
bath, so that our vests and drawers might not be too tight after
they had been sent to the laundry. This was not used only for us
children* Our mother also wore it. She would have expected to die
of pneumonia if she left off her flannel vest and flannel petticoat,
even on the hottest days of August.

With all her ideas of beauty, she never considered it unromantic
to wear these bulky flannel undergarments.

"What good would it do to go around with delicate, thin under-
clothes and sniffle and drip with a red nose and a chill in the in-
sides?" she asked. "No man would look your way. And after all,
the Queen wears thick flannel underclothes, and what's good enough
for her is good enough for me."

But she did, at any rate, let herself go when it came to her
drawers. I cannot imagine that the Queen of England would have
favored the sort of drawers my mother wore. "Regularly indecent
and improper, I calk them," said the old nurse, while she helped
me cut out a pair I was making for my mother's birthday. But I did

io6 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

not share her views, and, bundled up In my own thick flannel
knickejnSj I vowed to follow in my mother's footsteps the first moment
I was beyond her control. I was overcome with the beauty of these
rows of lace and insertion on the pair from Paris I was copying.
Baby ribbon ran through the insertion and was bunched at the side
in what Nanny, who had not understood what the word "chou"
meant, insisted on calling "slippers/* One day, yes, one day , .

But when, one day in my late teens, my mother saw me making
myself a quite moderately elaborate undergarment, she looked at
me in a strange way as she said:

"When a young girl begins to interest herself in her underclothes
I begin to interest myself in her morak**

I had no idea what she meant, but somehow the pleasure seemed
to have been taken out of the garment I was making.

There was no glamour about the lace I crocheted in my child-
hood on the beach*

My eyes would stray from the crochet, to watch the ships go by.
This was one of our chief delights, and we knew each vessel that
passed along the North Sea, and aE about it* For, loving the sea
and everything connected with it, our father would explain to us
where the ships came from. He spent a large part of his days with a
telescope, looking out to sea from the top front room he used as a
study. The stairway to that room was steep and twisty, and my
mother didn't Eke going up there, which was fortunate, for she
never discovered how little work he really did, and how much of his
time was occupied with looking out to sea, or painting pictures of
fishing smacks.

And so, as we sat on the beach, we watched warships and sub-
marines, fishing smacks, steam trawlers, and shabby tramp steamera
with coal from Wales. Sometimes, when we returned home, our
father appeared in the nursery and whispered to us to hurry r~
stairs to his front room. There, on the horizon, would be a foi
masted schooner, in full sail. We looked at her through his telescoj

LIFE AT THE SEASIDE 107

She was even more beautiful than the yachts dotting the sea during
the week of the annual Lowestoft Regatta, when our mother spent
the afternoons at the Yacht Club with Judge Talbot, dressed in her
grandest and most appropriate clothes. Once each summer a sailing
ship from Seattle passed. She seemed to have more sails than any
ship we had ever seen. In excitement one day I told my mother
about this schooner* But my mother scarcely listened. I discovered
then that the only ships she was interested in were yachts.

Mother considered herself an experienced sailor. Many years
before I can remember, it seems that she and my father used to go
off sailing with G. A. Henty, the boys 9 story writer.

"And this was a great compliment/ 3 she said with pride. "Henty
always swore he would never take any landlubber to sea with hinu
He respected his yacht far too much to expose it to this ignominy."

One of her most prized possessions was a photograph of her-
self on this yacht, sitting beside Mr. Henty. She was dressed as
though she were a member of a chorus in a musical comedy which
had the setting of the sea, or a character even from H.M.S. Pina-
fore, Her sense of drama always made her dress the part, whatever
she might be doing in Hfe. And so, for this yachting expedition,
double rows of brass buttons covered the front of her navy blue
serge coat, which was trimmed with coils and twists and twirls of
white braid. Her hat was swathed in a thick white veil that tied
under her chin.

"If you know how to dress properly," she said, "you are aware
of which colors are suited to which occasions. Navy blue and white,
for instance, are very definitely the only possible colors to be worn
either on or near the sea."

She was prepared for anything that was demanded of her,
though how much of the actual labor of sailing the yacht was given
over to her care I never knew. I rather suspect that my father and
the crew did most of the work while she spent a great deal of the
time sitting talking with G. A. Henty; for he was very fond of her.

io8 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

But she ought to have known everything about sailing a ship
because her own father had been a champion sailor. In his spare
moments which were many, after he sold his commission and had
nothing to do Captain James Valentine Nenon Connor made
model yachts. During her childhood my mother helped him sew the
sails. After his death these yachts were kept for Ms grandchildren.
They lay over the years in our father's top room, waiting for the
time when we should be old enough to enjoy them. They were very
perfect, beautiful things, but it was our father who eventually got
most pleasure out of them. Sad to say, they bored us, and though
our mother tried to interest us In them, she had little success. Except
for the afternoons when our father dragged us out with them to the
Lowestoft Model Yacht Pond 3 they lay there on the floor, gathering
dust, next to Grandpapa's bows and arrows.

These bows and arrows excited us far more. In addition to be-
ing a yachtsman, Grandpapa had been a crack archer. During his
years of idleness he had, too, made all these bows and arrows. My
mother wanted us to be good archers.

"There are certain sports that only well-bred people Indulge in,"
she said. "One of them is fencing, and another most emphatically
is archery . You only have to look at the faces and bearing of the
members of the Royal Toxophillte Society in Regent's Park, to see
that I am right. Any ordinary person can play tennis, or even golf, or
billiards; but no easily acquired fortunes win win you entry into the
close society of archery/*

And so Roland took lessons In fencing, and even we two younger
ones were allowed and encouraged to play in the back garden with
Grandpapa's oversize bows and arrows*

"It's nearly as good for showing off a woman's figure as playing
the harp," my mother remarked, as I struggled with a bow that was
far too large for me. "It develops all those curves to the body that
men love. Never, my child, be so stupid as to play any game that
makes you look like a man/*

LIFE AT THE SEASIDE 109

My mother did not take to archery herself.

"I don't have time for such things," she said. "If s as much
as I can do to get my work done and to keep myself neat and clean
and see that the household runs smoothly."

Occasionally, though, she did indulge in the wild expenditure of
time of hiring a conveyance to take a drive into the country. This
was not done out of any love for the countryside; she admitted
without shame that the countryside bored her. It was. generally used
as a means of entertaining some house guest of the female sex.

"You never need to bother yourself to entertain men/ 5 my
mother said, as she put on her driving clothes. "Men are happy in
just talking to you, wherever you may happen to be. They wouldn't
mind if they spent all their time with you in a station waiting room,
or even in. the housemaid's pantry. . . . But women always want to
get the utmost benefit out of the expensive railway journey they
have taken. And they seem to think they'll get more air when they
are moving along in a conveyance than when they are sensibly
sitting still."

And so, when we had lady visitors staying with us, Walmy
ordered a queer little man with side whiskers, called Tarbox, and my
mother, properly attired in a dust cloak, long gloves, and a veil to
protect her hat, set off with the guest in the governess's trap, to see
the country* If there was any time left over, on their return fdr
Tarbox charged by the hour Evelyn and I were allowed to use up
. the extra minutes*

It was a good thing my mother did not acquire her superstitious
terror of horses until the motor car came into existence, else I can-
not think how she would have managed to get about at all. As it
was, the first taxicabs had already begun to appear on the streets
strange monsters that we would count as children count white
horses, for luck when she paid her visit to Cheiro, the palmist. He
was a most celebrated palmist. King Edward the Seventh had ton-
suited him. So had many of his lady friends. So, I believe, had

no TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

another of my mother's idols, Lord Kitchener. There were not, in
fact, many outstanding personalities of the day who hadn't visited
him. My mother went, taMng Roland with her. Cheiro told them
many strange things. None of them ever came true. But the one dis-
quieting thing was the manner of her death. She would, this palmist
said, die a sudden death, too early in life, from "some member of
the second order of creation."

"But what is the second order of creation?* 3 she had asked Mm.
And he told her that he wasn't sure, but that it might be a horse or
a bull, "Mother's Bull," we called it from that day on, and a shiver
of terror ran through our bodies* For we believed absolutely in this
awful doom. How not, when our mother herself beHeved in it so
completely?

This terror even frightened us on our own account During our
long daily walks up the country roads near Lowestoft, with the
old nurse, we trembled if we should see a bull in a field. Perhaps
this was the creature destined to kill our mother* Let us hurry past,
or turn back. We must get out of range of the beast.

This threat of doom that hung over our mother was especially
cruel because her daily life was so deeply controlled fay superstitions.
The main trend of these superstitions though there were variants,
such as the ill luck of wearing green, or of bringing hawthorn or ivy
into the house was a belief in the law of compensation.

"But why is my Chummie so depressed today?* 9 we would hear
our father ask.

"Oh, Robert," came her answer. "It was so lovely this morning,
with the sunlight streaming into the bedroom, and I felt so care-
free and happy that without thinking what I was doing I sang to
myself while I was dressing. It was a most terrible and challenging
thing to do, for something unlucky always happens to me during
the day. Oh, I know you think Fm ridiculously superstitious, but
let me remind you of the old saying: *Sing before breakfast, cry
before night* And ifs true, I tell you. If s absolutely true.**

LIFE AT THE SEASIDE in

This fear of compensation stopped her from any outward sign
of happiness. She was convinced that It was asking for trouble.
Strangely enough, she never anticipated good luck in the wake of
anything bad that had happened to her. Despite her incomparable
spirit and vitality, she went through life with a sense of gloom.
Not for nothing was she a Celt.

7* Flowers and Ftatbers

* c Let*s hurry so as to be back before Father gets up/* we would
pant as we rushed home with our hands full of harebells and wild
roses.

During the summer we went out early to gather these bouquets.
Whatever happened, our mother must have a flower at breakfast.
Never must she come down to find her plate empty-

Our father was jealous of us in these floral offerings. "Damn
those children," we often heard him mutter as he came into the
dining room and found we had been there before him. If a little
bunch of flowers lay on our mother's plate^ he was in a bad temper
for most of the day.

All through the months of summer he cherished his rosebuds in
the Lowestoft garden so that he might cut them at the exact moment
for our mother to wear. He had planted bushes at the bottom of
the garden, behind the tool shed, where she would not see them on
her daily walks. In that way he might surprise his "Churnmie" with
ome specially perfect bloom*

112

FLOWERS AND FEATHERS 113

One morning our father brought a particularly beautiful rose
to our mother. The white petals of this Frau Karl Druschki were
flawless. He had gone into the garden early enough, he supposed, to
outwit his children. Just as he entered the dining room he saw us in
the very act of placing our bouquet of honeysuckle on the bread
and butter plate* It was too much for him. He snatched the honey-
suckle from the table and crushed it in his hands.

"And who do you suppose you are?" he shouted to us in his
rage. "I've stood this long enough. Here I spend hours on end
growing these roses for your mother, and if you think you're going
to put this over on me you're utterly mistaken."

Our mother came into the room with a smile, and she was very
kind to our father all that day.

After this we knew we would be wise occasionally to get up late,
so that he might sneak out to the garden and cut his rosebuds
ahead of us, Luck was with him, also, when the weather was wet,
for we were not allowed to go out in the rain. And then the roses
he brought in glistened with raindrops.

I don't think our mother would have considered herself decently
clad if she had not been wearing flowers. These ranged from the
fabulously expensive flings of stephanotis or gardenia she carried
upon her evening dress when she went out to dinner in London,
down to the nosegays of wild roses we picked for her in the coun-
try. But though she liked the rustic posies, her real taste was for those
flowers which symbolized luxury and wealth. And so, during the
winter months in London, it was always Parma violets or carnations,
lilies of the valley or expensive roses that she demanded. This
brought her into conflict with our Uncle Jack. I can see her now,
arguing fiercely with him one day in the study.

He stamped up and down the room, haranguing her.

"You," he shouted, "you've no idea what beauty is. You only
want flowers because they mean that people enjoy giving them to
you. You don't love them for themselves. You could never under-

U4 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

stand the beauty of a dandelion, for example* If s got to be all those
shapeless affairs that stand for extravagance. You **

"Oh, but you're quite wrong," broke In my mother, "It's not
because they stand for extravagance that I love them. It's because
they represent love and passion and Paris and Nice and all the dif-
ferent men who have been in love with me, and n

"What did I tell you?* shrieked my uncle. "You're condemned
out of your own mouth. It isn't the form of the flowers that matters
to you. If s their human association* You don't know what beauty is.
You never did. You never could. You **

He was so worked up by now that my mother burst out laughing
at him.

"If you could only see yourself at this moment/* she told him,
"you'd realize that yon are no thing of beauty/*

Overhearing aU this as I passed the study door, I knew exactly
what Unde Jack meant. I had myself suffered from my mother's
attitude towards flowers.

It happened one Saturday morning in May.

I had bought a penny bunch of Mngcups with my weekly pocket
money. They shone like gold as the flower man handed them to me
from his basket on the pavement* s edge, and I took them home in
great excitement, feeling sure my mother would love them. But in
this excitement I had forgotten that kingcups were considered wild.
The same morning Roland had decided to buy her flowers. In his
greater wisdom he had bought three expensive pink carnations. I
entered the study to find my mother already wearing these carna-
tions.

"Aren't these lovely?* I cried, as I thrust my kingcups upon her,
"They shine like little suns."

But she had no interest in them,

"Thank you, 9 * she said without enthusiasm. * C I will put them in
a vase on the mantelpiece in the back drawing room***

And there they drooped and died, for lack of water; scarcely

FLOWERS AND FEATHERS 115

anyone ever went into the back drawing room. Uncle Jack had been
right in what he said. You could not wear a kingcup.

My mother must have missed all these exotic flowers during the
summer months at Lowestoft. Even my father's rosebuds lacked the
cachet of the florist's shop. And so when, on his periodic visits to the
County Court at Norwich, Judge Talbot sent her a box of sulphur-
colored carnations, she did not hide her delight.

"I always think there is more real style about a sulphur carna-
tion than about almost any other flower," she murmured as she
pinned a large bunch to her dress, and a smaller bunch in her pale
yellow hair. "Even after they have faded they retain their sense of
distinction."

But my father did not enjoy these carnations. Neither did the
Scotch adorer, as he, brought his "Hea" rough sprigs of heather to
wear in her hair.

Thinking of my mother's flowers, though, I remember that it was
when she was going to what the old nurse called "one of your
mother's public dinners" that she was most abundantly gar-
landed.

These "public dinners" were great events. To this day I have no
idea what they were or where they took place* They were probably
dinners given by my mother's progressive dub called the Pioneer or
my father's literary dub called the Whitefri^rs. The preparations
began early in the morning. Walmy stayed to midday dinner in
order that my mother might work in the afternoon, as she would be
unable to do so, in her customary manner, during the evening. Not
even a "public dinner" might interfere with the ordained number of
words she must produce each day.

By this time a long cardboard box would have arrived, contain-
ing my mother's flowers. They usually came from Hatred's, and
Walmy ordered them at the same time she ordered the electric
brougham in which my mother and father slowly but with dignity
made their way to the "public dinner." It was supposed to be very

n6 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

daring to go in one of HarrotFs electric broughams. Most people
still drove behind a horse. One or two, said my mother, were so
underbred that they actually went by omnibus.

"If I were forced to go in that common manner," she added,
"I wouldn't go at all. It is better to stay at home than to go to
Buckingham Palace in a public conveyance. You've only got to
watch Mrs, Bowles to see what I mean. She arrives everywhere in
an ordinary street coat, with a scarf over her head to keep her hair
neat, and wearing stout walking shoes. And she carries a telltale
brown holland bag in which are her evening slippers. She might
almost be a dancing mistress at a girls' school Now a lady is dressed
for the occasion from the minute she leaves her own front door."

Throughout the afternoon my mother dictated to Walmy. But
the work was carried on in the bedroom, instead of in the study, so
that she might combine it with dressing. How cold it was in that
bedroom! Walmy wore her outdoor coat s and wrapped her legs
around with an eiderdown off the bed. At the far end of the room
stood an oil stove; but it gave out scarcely any heat. My mother did
not intend that it should, for she was convinced that the only way
t6 keep beautiful was to have a really cold bedroom.

"We can learn an important leason from American women," she
said. "They all have skins Eke shabby parchment* And considering
the time and money they're supposed to devote to their complexions,
I can only conclude it is due to the fact that they heat their bed-
rooms. Cold water on the face and cold air all round the face : these
are the things that make for beauty."

And so Walmy shivered as she wrote, while my mother kept
her own circulation going by vigorously rubbing her face.

Her toilet was a lengthy affair. It began with an elaborate
cleaning of her face with lemons and oatmeal. If the top of hei
washstand was covered with mouldy, used-up lemons, the drawers
of the washstand were filled with loose oatmeal. Unfortunately there
were many mice at Vallombrosa; and mice like oatmeal. You had

FLOWERS AND FEATHERS 117

always to open these drawers very slowly, and with great care, in
order to give the mice a chance to run away. Otherwise one might
jump out at you. And my mother was afraid of mice.

"Dear me," she would gasp as she withdrew in a hurry from
a baby mouse in the washstand drawer. "This is terrible. This is
really terrible."

Walmy was not always quick to realize what was happening,
and sometimes she incorporated these frightened exclamations into
my mother's story, supposing them to have been dictated.

But at other times the situation grew much more serious. For
occasionally the mouse leapt from the washstand drawer and ran
wildly about in the bedroom. And then Tita the Skye terrier began to
chase it while my mother and Walmy lifted their skirts high above
their knees as they sought safety in standing on their chairs.

But there was, my mother always insisted, nothing you could do
about it.

"People have been known to tell me we ought to get a cat," she
said. "But much as I loathe these mice, I'd rather have them in the
house than keep such a common thing as a cat. A cat is almost as
impoverishing to the general atmosphere of an establishment as a
baby's napkins hanging in the garden.* 5

When the mouse liad escaped, and all was quiet again, she went
on rubbing the mousy oatmeal into her face. It seemed never to
strike her that the oatmeal might not be completely pure and clean.

The next thing my mother always did was to cream her face.
She used something called Cr&me Simon, and the little empty white
jars with the tinfoil tops accumulated on her dressing table over the
months and years. She never threw, them away.

As she rubbed this cream into her face, she dictated. I knew
exactly the way she did this rubbing for often, during the afternoon,
I was called in to read a French play to her while she dressed, and
out of a corner of one eye I would watch her, fascinated, while I
stumbled through the "slightly improper" comedy. I could not say

n8 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

how many of these pale blue paper covered French plays I had read
to her. I was too small to know where the improprieties lay, even
had I been able to understand all the French, but when my mother
burst out laughing I would produce a gurgle of my own, to make her
feel that I knew it was risqud It seemed the polite thing to do. On
these afternoons before a "public dinner," however, she could not
thus indulge herself. She must work.

But sometimes my mother's conscience must have smitten her
about the odd kind of French I was reading,

"I really think you ought to know something about French
classics," she said once, as she produced Balzac's Eugenie Grandet.
At another time we wept together over Pierre Loti's Pecheurs
d'lslande. While I was still very young she gave me De Maupas-
sant's Boule de Suif, and I waded through it with difficulty, be-
wildered. But she would never let me read De Maupassant when I
had grown old enough to understand what he was writing about.
She said he was a danger, and might put wrong ideas in my head.
And then we returned to the pale blue paper covered plays. Always,
to this day, when I read a book in French, I seem to hear a gentle,
regular swishing sound, and I remember that It is the stroke of my
mother's brush in her yellow hair*

But on these special days it, was after tea that the real excite-
ment started. For then we were allowed to help our parents dress.

"Why on earth do we have to go to these pompous affairs,
Chummie?" my father shouted from the bathroom. "You know how
I loathe and detest putting on a stiff shirt and a white tie. I'd give
up my very soul to you, I love you so much f but I will not tie my
own white tie. 11

"That's enough, Robert/' my mother would call back. "You
know perfectly well that it's an unforgivable social sin to wear a
ready-made white bow tie. Clare will come in and tie it for you.
She's good with her fingers. And if I find you getting the children
to give you any more of these ready-made things as Christmas

FLOWERS AND FEATHERS 119

presents I'll take them away from you. Don't you want to look a
gentleman?"

And so, when I had put the cuff links and studs in my father's
dress shirt, I had to tie his white bow. It was a nerve-wracking
experience, for I had been known to leave a dirty mark on the bow
and once, when I had pricked my finger on one of the safety pins
that held together my mother's torn flannel vest, which had come
undone, I deposited a large spot of blood upon my father's only
remaining clean tie,

My mother dressed now by lamplight. There was magic in this
warm glow. It shone on her pink satin peignoir with its swansdown
edging, and tossed rich black shadows across the bedroom ceiling,
giving a sense of enclosed intimacy to the scene. She was frizzing her
hair; the room was filled with the smell of the hot curling iron.
Outside in the gaslit street a barrel organ was playing. But the
sounds came faintly through the closed windows, and they were
almost drowned by my mother's voice. For, as she fastened the front
busks of her stays, she quoted Swinburne:

I remember the way we parted,

The day and the way we met;
You hoped we were both broken-hearted,

And knew we should both forget.

And May with her world in flower

Seemed still to murmur and smile
As you murmured and smiled for an hour j

I saw you turn at the stile.

Right, left, right, left, up the front of her stays the steel loops
alternately fastened, till rny mother was encased at last in the tight
curves of these stays. But tight as these curves appeared, they were
not yet to her satisfaction. At this moment I was called upon to help.

I tugged at the stay laces, while my mother went on quoting
Swinburne:

120 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

And the best and the worst of this is

That neither is most to blame
If you've forgotten my kisses

"Can't you pull them just a little tighter?" My mother inter-
rupted the poem to ask me.

I tugged till it seemed to me that she must be going to burst,
but she finished the last line of the poem, undisturbed:,

And I've forgotten your name.

At last she told me to stop. The laces were tied in a secure knot,
My mother was ready now for her dress.

With her full breasts forced high above her stays and her frilled
taffeta petticoat swirling out below, she looked like a picture on a
cover of La Vie Parisienne, which I often disobediently looked at
when the family was out. I glowed with pride as I gazed at her.

Now, in a pale blue satin dress trimmed with pearls, she was
ready, except for the fling of flowers, and the flowers in her hair.
What would they be this night? I knew they lay there in that long
white box, wrapped in wax paper. And suddenly as we opened the
box, the bedroom was filled with their scent: tuberoses, thick-
petaled like white kid. We swathed them across the front of my
mother's dress, as though it were a ribbon of honor, and the flowers
fell into the dip between her breasts. Over her yellow hair we placed
a crescent of tuberoses, Hke a May Queen's wreath.

As she swept from the room and down the stairs, out to the
waiting electric brougham from Harrod's, she left behind her upon
the night air the scent of tuberoses.

But it was not only flowers that delighted her. She had a passion
for hats. Fortunately, the fashion of the day allowed her to indulge
this extravagance, for hats were being influenced by The Merry
WidoWy and buried a woman beneath a spreading expanse of
feather and flower. This suited my mother's taster She was a product
of the Merry Widow age, and loved this musical comedy so much

FLOWERS AND FEATHERS 121

that she had seen it at least thirty-five times. For her it was the
epitome of passion and romance.

Even while she dictated her stories, she would hum the "Merry
Widow Waltz/' and on her bedroom mantelpiece, in the place of
honor, stood a photograph of the actress Lily Elsie, in the part of
the Merry Widow, It went to Lowestoft with her in the summer,
packed safely in her dressing case among her cosmetics, and was
placed, first thing upon arrival, in the center of her dressing
table.

"When my mind gets too much cluttered with thoughts of rice
pudding and bills," my mother would say, "then I have only to look
at Lily Elsie and my dreams return to me."

Daly's Theatre, where The Merry Widow was played, became
her unfailing fount of strength.

Long after the fashion for Merry Widow hats had passed, my
mother managed somehow to give every hat she wore the charac-
teristics of that era.

"Little hats," she said, "are meant for sex-starved, common-
place women that you can shovel up by the hundred, because they
are so exactly alike. But a distinguished woman, with a dream,
needs a large hat."

And large her hats always were.

The buying of these hats was an event. My mother did not go
to them. They came to her. A mouselike creature called Miss Spence,
who kept a fashionable hat shop in a little road off Bond Street,
notified my mother the minute she had received an especially tempt-
ing consignment from Paris for my mother would only wear a hat
that came from Paris. When this happened, three thin, pale young
girls would be sitting in the front hall as we returned from our daily
walk. Scattered around on the floor were half a dozen enormous
bandboxes. From the drawing room came the sound of voices. Miss
Spence had arrived, accompanied by her midinettes, and upon each
arm of each girl had been hung one of these gigantic bandboxes. It

122 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

was like the chorus of a musical comedy. It would not have been
surprising if the girls had started to dance and sing.

The choosing of her hats was one of the only things for which
my mother would put aside her work. It was a lengthy business
because there were always so many hats she wanted, and her con-
science would not allow her to buy more than two at a time, or at
most three,

It took place in the front drawing room, which was the only
room in the house large enough to enable her to walk away and see
herself in a mirror.

"It's so silly of women to buy their hats without thinking of the
long distance view," she always said. "For this is the first impres-
sion the world gets of the hat you wear. By the time a man is close
up to you it's your face and your eyes that fascinate him. It's not
your hat. But the way to attract him from far off is by your general
silhouette; and it's then that the hat counts."

Grandmamma was called in for these occasions, because she
always knew what pleased a man; but although Auntie Pollie
insisted on accompanying her sister, my mother would never listen
to anything she might have to say,

"Your Auntie Pollie has no taste," my mother declared, "Just
look at the hats she wears, with the stiff birds' wings &tuck on in
front, as though a seagull had been impaled on her head. No man
would look at a woman twice with such millinery*"

And saying this, she stroked the voluptuous sweep of ostrich
feathers curving around her latest confection.

But though most of her hats seemed to have this extravagant
spread df plumage, occasionally she decided upon something more
austere, And then a black velvet brim would be adorned by a
crown of ermine, to balance her ermine stole and muff. Sometimes
again an especially expensive hat would be severely simple. When
this happened, my mother gave me a lesson in the merits *of
simplicity.

FLOWERS AND FEATHERS 123

"Always notice/* she said, as she stood there in her own elab-
orate clothing, "that the best things in this world, and the most
expensive, as well as those things which are really good style, are
invariably simple.**

She never realised that she herself rarely followed her own
advice. If the winter hats were a riot of feathers, the summer ones
were a tangle of secured blossoms.

The rest of her attire was in keeping with this flamboyant mil-
linery. Buttons that buttoned nothing lay in rows upon her dresses,
and fringes and curved braid overlapped each other, and fell upon
bows of ribbon and elaborate trimmings.

It was impossible to make her conform. Many years later this
became decidedly awkward.

For Evelyn was going to be married.

My future sister-in-law came from an orthodox "huiitin* and
shootin' ** family. She appeared in the pages of the Tatler, sitting oil
a shooting stick and wearing severe tweeds at a point-to-point race.
Never in her life had she come across anyone like our mother.
I promised Evelyn that I would try to subdue Mother's attire for
the occasion of the first meeting with his fiancee.

And so I took her to Debenham and Freebody's. If she could
not have a dress made especially for her by her own dressmaker,.
Madame Louise Freeman, who had been trained in Paris, she con-
descended to go to this shop, which she considered one of the "most
exclusive" in London. I let her loose among the afternoon dresses,
though I tried to steer her round to some dignified black gown that
would have satisfied her future in-laws and at the same time have
showed up the fairness of her beauty. But she resisted me, and her
eyes strayed to the pinks and blues of the debutante dance frocks at
the far end of the row.

"If you think I'm going to allow myself to be made to look like
Annie Besant, just because I have a son who's going to be married,
you're quite wrong," she said. "Something must have happened to

124 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

the world, for I have never seen such a dowdy lot of clothes in this
place in my life. There used to be glamour in this shop. If you don't
mind, we'll call a taxi and go straight back home. Fd rather meet
Cynthia any day in this old dress I've got on now, than be made a
present of the whole collection of these middle-aged looking gar-
ments hanging over on that rail."

Her future daughter-in-law came to meet her in clothes that
were impeccably correct My mother, in the frayed, fringed pale
blue silk dress that she was so deeply attached to, behaved with such
graciousness and with so much the air of a grande dame that Cynthia
was the one to feel inappropriately dressed*

There was, however, one adornment to which my mother never
succumbed. Nothing would make her wfear jewelry*

"If you cover yourself with jewelry it? s as good as proclaiming to
the world that you know you are not beautiful Whoever wanted to
place a necklace round a lily? And a woman who has good looks
should treat herself as though she were a flower/*

She knew, of course, that her particular type of beauty was not
suited by adornment; for it would have been like putting trumpery
upon a Grecian statue, to clasp a necklace around her sculptured
throat* She would wear rings upon her fingers, if the rings were
valuable; but I never saw her with brooches or earrings,

"And as for bracelets," she said, as she dissuaded one of her
admirers from giving her an expensive one, "they add years to your
age. The only women who can wear them with advantage are

scraggy ones who want to draw attention away from their bony

***<, *>
arms.

But one day when Mr. Bowles was leaving for a lengthy absence
in Canada, he gave my mother an amethyst necklace and begged her
to wear it always, for his sake. So pathetic was he in his tearful
insistence that at last she promised him she would. No sooner had
he left the house than she took it off*

"I'm not going to ruin my beauty for any man/ 1 she declared.

FLOWERS AND FEATHERS 125

"But neither will I actually break my promise to George. I will still
wear this wretched necklace, but I will hide it from view."

And so, for a long while^ she wore it in a muslin bag, pinned
between her breasts. But this was far from comfortable and, when-
ever she moved, the precious stones jingled against each other.
My deaf father never heard this noise; but other people did.

"Whatever has Mrs. Leighton got underneath her dress that
makes that queer sound?" one visitor was heard to whisper to
another.

It became so embarrassing that finally my mother decided she
was justified in breaking her promise to Mr. Bowles. She laid the
amethyst necklace safely away at the back of one of her dressing-
table drawers.

8, TheLeightons

"Don't forget, my children/* our mother said as she told us that
Grandmother Leighton was arriving that morning to pay us a visit,
"don't ever forget that my family has always considered I married
beneath me. They were so upset at my running away with your
father that when finally I gave them our address Mamma refused
to send me on even a pocket handkerchief/*

We were supposed to share this contempt for our father's rela-
tives, and everything was done to prevent us from coming into con-
tact with them*

When we were small we associated the Leightons with intimi-
dating people like our grandmother. She was aged, and very Scotch.
I never saw her in anything except an old lady's attire: black satin
dresses fastened at the neck with cameos or gold brooches filled with
someone's hair, mauve and white silk ribboned caps, and, when the
weather was cold, a lace shawl wrapped around her shoulders. For
a Christmas or a birthday present I was always forced to make some-
thing for her out of black satin, which I hated* Not only did I

126

THE LEIGHTONS 127

object to the color, but I hated it because my nurse made me sew
these satin aprons and knitting bags on the beach, during the
months of summer* As the sun beat down on the black material till
it was almost too hot to hold, and my eyes strayed to Evelyn
paddling at the water's edge, I stitched resentment into every hem.

Grandmother Leighton was aware of my mother's feelings about
her family, and it made he* angry.

"I would remind you, Marie/ 5 she told my mother in unavail-
ing self-defense, "that I am a Campbell of Breadalbane. There is
nothing in your inheritance to surpass this. Even a Trelawny is a
mere upstart."

But she was less forceful a character than my mother, and all she
got in return for trying to uphold her own ancestors was a steely
coldness.

The visits Grandmother Leighton occasionally paid us in St.
John's Wood were uncomfortable affairs. She wanted to get to know
her grandchildren, and insisted on taking us for walks. She seemed
so very old that we were always afraid she would die suddenly in the
road which, oddly enough, she did some years later when, at the
age of ninety-seven, she stole from her house unnoticed, to mail a
letter, and fell on the icy pavement. Not only did she take us through
some of the "common" streets in St. John's Wood that were for-
bidden to us lest we catch an infectious disease, but, too, on these
walks she gave us advice we didn't understand.

"There is one sin I hope my little grandchildren will never fall
into," she often said as we plodded slowly along the pavements,
"and that is self-abuse. No child is too young to start sinning in this
terrible way. The road to madness and hell can begin in the nursery.
I will leave you some booklets on this subject, to read at leisure."

The booklets had frightening titles, such as Are You Simting,
Brother? which made us feel sure we had already sinned without
knowing it, and were on our way to hell. But we had no idea what
this terrible sin was, and we did not dare to ask. All we knew was

i$8 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

that our mother always searched the nursery after Grandmother
had left, and scooped up any of these pamphlets she could find.

"Trust these really good people to have their minds fixed on the
dirt and evil of the world," she stormed, as she burned the offending
literature in the nursery fireplace. "As my mamma always told me,
it is safer any day to leave your children in the company of a rake
than to place them for half an hour in the care of a vicar's wife.
The rake does the evU thing and keeps silent, whereas the virtuous
woman gets satisfaction out of discussing what she does not do."

When Grandmother Leighton wasn't preaching us sermons we
didn't understand, she was giving us dull books like Ministering
Children, We dreaded lest she should ask us if we had enjoyed
them, for they bored us so much that we left them only half read.
But the most troubling thing about her was the ear trumpet that
looked like a black snake. It had a queer smeU to it that reminded
us of an empty church.

"Nobody with any sense of style or beauty would be seen with
such a trumpet," our mother declared. "And let me tell you,
Robert," she added, shouting to our deaf father, "if ever you sug-
gest using this hideous, impoverishing contraption I will pack up
and leave you straight away."

We grew even more frightened of the ear trumpet after this, so
that, when we had to hold it to speak to our grandmother, we
always seemed to forget what we had meant to say* Considering
these embarrassments, we were glad when she left*

But perhaps it was my father who suffered most. My mother
held him responsible for all the "underbred" habits of our grand-
mother, and immediately a visit was over a general spiritual disin-
fecting took place.

"Hease remember, Robert/' she told my father, "I only mar-
ried you to get away from my own people and write books. You
know perfectly well I never intended having anything to do with
your family. It's bad enough having your old mother up here, but

THE LEIGHTONS '" 129

whatever happens, I'm going to keep the children but of the way of
contamination."

Listening to these tirades against my father's side of the family,
I was bewildered as to what she meant. Everything about the
Leightons seemed so respectable more respectable, in fact, than
my mother's relatives. That was probably what irked my mother,
who considered respectability a sign of lack of breeding. She was
distressed, also, because my father's parents had been Unitarian.

"It's a funny thing,'* she said, "but no ladies or gentlemen can
be Unitarian. Neither, for that matter, can they be any kind of
Nonconformist. It's as though there are as many social levels in the
next world as in this. And, my dear Robert, when it comes to the
next world, definitely I do not expect to meet your family there."

And so it was much against the grain that she would have to
agree to our paying an occasional visit to the Leighton family in the
village in Berkshire called Swallowfield, where Grandmother lived
with her three unmarried daughters.

These visits never lasted more than one day. Fortunately for our
happiness, while we were actually spending that day at Swallowfield
we could forget the shadow of impending punishment which lay
before us. For never did we return home but what our mother would
tell us we had become "common," and a doll or a toy engine or
some other treasure would be sacrificed upon the altar of "good
breeding." We did not understand what had happened in us to
displease our mother so, but as we grew older we had a suspicion
that anything we enjoyed automatically must be wrong.

We were taken to Swallowfield by our father. The journey itself
was an event. Trinder's brougham, smelling of old leather and
straw, fetched us from the door of the house in St. John's Wood.
The day was so enchanted that the smallest detail took on a glow.
Even Roland, who rarely associated with "the children," seemed
friendly on these occasions.

"Why doesn't Mother come with us sometimes?'* I asked

i 3 o TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

Father as we sat in Paddington Station, waiting for the train to
start. But he looked worried at this question and, muttering some-
thing about her being behindhand with her work, he changed the
subject.

When we reached the town of Reading we plunged into a dark
livery stable. As a treat we were allowed to choose our horse for the
six mile carriage drive out to Swallowfield, So rarely were we given
any freedom that this sense of power intoxicated us. We walked from
horse to horse, unable to make up our minds.

Generally we brought Selina, the Scottish deerhound, with us.
She was an exciting complication, for invariably, on the drive into
the country, she caught the scent of some animal a deer, we were
convinced, though we never saw it and leapt right out from the
open carriage. She had to be chased over several fields and coppices.
It was as though even Selina felt the unaccustomed freedom. We
always arrived at our destination covered with mud*

Our father seemed like a child who had played truant from
school. All of us were very happy.

Swallowfield was a paradise of strawberries and roses. The lanes
and woods in spring were sulphur with primroses, and sweet with
the songs of nightingales. The Meadow, where the Leightons lived,
was far up a leafy lane called Spring Piddle, beyond sight of any
other house. The most interesting thing about this place was that it
had no gate. The lane merged imperceptibly Into the garden, which
was a feature practically unheard of in England, This was no mere
oversight. It was a symbolic gesture, but a gesture that, my mother
said, was in itself enough to prove that our grandmother was not
well-bred; for well-bred people demanded privacy. Years earlier
our grandmother had accompanied her husband to America. There
she had been impressed by the lack of hedges and gateways and
fences, and had determined to have a gatdess garden for herself.
The path flowing unobstructed from The Meadow into Spring
Piddle was a clarion call tc earth brotherhood.

THE LEIGHTONS 131

The garden was gay with flowers, and quivered with bees. We
were allowed to pick these flowers. We watched while our Aunt
Jean removed the honey from the hives. We ran in the fields and
played hide and go seek up the lane. We gathered strawberries in
June, and apples in September, For one day we could forget the
dull walks with Nanny, who never let us move from her side, lest
we got overheated and caught a chill.

Our bliss must have been evident on our return when, next
morning, Mother paid her daily visit to the nursery to see us and to
ask the nurse if our bowels were working properly.

"You are always completely spoilt by these visits to Swallow-
field/' she told us, as she carried off our most cherished toys.
"The only way I can teach you a lesson is by making you
suffer,"

If Mother had only known, her rival was not the despised
Leighton dan, but the unaccustomed sense of freedom, and a comb
of honey and a basket of ripe strawberries*

There was one member of the Leighton family whom my
mother disliked more than any of the others. This was Aunt Sarah.
My mother said she had outstanding malice. I never myself saw it,
but when she felt she needed to influence us more strongly against
the Leightons, Mother would insist that Aunt Sarah had once stated :
"When I cannot bite with my teeth I bite with my tongue."

Oddly enough, there were certain similarities between my
mother and this aunt. For one thing, Aunt Sarah, also, wrote stories.
But whereas my mother's serials were filled with bloodcurdling
melodrama, my aunt's tales were gentle, sentimental romances. As
these sugary stories appeared in several of the weekly papers, Grand-
mother sent them up to us with pride, anxious to prove that the
Leighton women were intellectuals. And then Mother would smile
and say:

"Of course, when you read one of Sarah's love stories, it's only
too evident that she couldn't possibly understand anything about

132 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

love, and that no man in his senses could ever have wanted to kiss
her- the poor, ugly little creature*"

She never knew of my virgin aunt's hopeless passion for a well-
known Dante scholar of her day* Aunt Sarah, on her part, had the
deepest contempt for my mother's lack of true emotion*

"Your mother/* said my aunt, in a sudden burst of incautious
confidence, "is all wrong in her values. She is absolutely incapable of
feeling love. All she wants is worship and adoration from men. She
could never understand the joy of sacrifice and service."

But not only did my mother dislike Aunt Sarah; she considered
her the most dangerous of aH the Leighton influences. She had not
worried over Aunt Jean while she was still alive* Aunt Jean had
been the domesticated member of the family, with no interest in
ideas. The story went that her lawyer fianc6 had jilted her the day
before her marriage, deciding at the last moment that she was too
ugly to Eve with; the shock to her pride, my mother said, had
humbled her and kept her in her place* It had, the family believed,
led to her early death. Even Aunt Lexy, the black sheep of the
family, was not supposed to be so much of a danger. This may have
been because the Leightons themselves were ashamed of her. The
Leightons were strictly upright, and tolerated no deviation from the
straight path. For they were Scotch, as weE as being Unitarians.
But my mother considered Aunt Lexy the only member of the family
worth knowing.

Aunt Lexy had gone on the stage*

It wasn't thought quite "nice" to go on the stage, even though
Irving had been knighted and a number of King Edward's lady
friends were actresses. It had to be admitted, though, that Aunt
Lexy was as "legitimate" as she could be, for she acted ia Shake-
speare, with Ben Greet> and was in the same company for a time as
Sir Henry Irving and Ellen Terry. Actually it was because she
resembled Ellen Terry and got her "calk" that she was thrown out
of that company, And so, when in my earliest childhood, I sleepily

THE LEIGHTONS 133

watched Captain Brassbound*s Conversion with my mother's old
judge, I was not altogether wrong in being reminded of the derelict
old aunt*

Aunt Lexy had started life correctly. She had even been en-*
gaged to a clergyman. But some ferment was at work within her.
She could not see hersdf in the quiet life of a country vicarage. And
so she jilted her clergyman and ran away. She went on the stage,
with her Venetian red hair that fell down to her knees, and the
romantic name of Alexes Leighton which nobody ever believed to
be really her own. :

She was not a beautiful woman* Her eyebrows and lashes were
so fair as to be scarcely visible. Her nose was decidedly large. But,
even as she resembled Ellen Terry in appearance, so did she share
with her that element which can best be called temperament, or
magnetism. My mother was slow to praise another woman's looks,
but she admired Aunt Lexy.

"If I were a man Fd fall in love with Lexy any day," she said.
"She has more charm than most beautiful women put together."
From the first moment I met Aunt Lexy I had been tacitly
warned against her; not by my mother, but by family pressure on
the Leighton side. I must have been a tiny child, for, I remember,
I had been sent to stay with the Leighton grandmother at Arbor-
field, in Berkshire, to be out of the way while Evelyn was born.
Aunt Lex/s stage days were now over, and she was a broken
creature. Some time earEer she had gone to America with Olga
Nethersok's company, to act in Sappho. The play had been con-
sidered immoral, and withdrawn. This, with all its implications and
difficulties, proved too great a strain for poor Aunt Lexy. She
sought solace in drink. Unfortunately the habit grew upon her, and
she had to be brought back to England, where she needed to be
cared for from that time on.

"But how much more worth while she is, in her wrecked condi-
tion, than all the self-consciously upright members of the Leighton

134 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

family," our mother insisted. <4 It mate me positively angry to see
how ashamed they are of her. They should be proud to show her
off, instead of keeping her hidden always, like a skeleton in the
cupboard."

Even as a tiny child I must have been aware of Aunt Lexy's
magnetism, for whenever I saw her I felt a strange excitement. I did
not then know anything about her, but I noticed that she lay around
In the house at Arborfield doing nothing while my austere, spinster-
ish Aunt Jean did all the housework. And yet, indolent though she
seemed to be, Aunt Lexy was the lovable one, rather than Aunt Jean.
j I remember her in the morning room of the old house, dressing
me up in all kinds of fancy garments. Sometimes a lace curtain
transformed me into a bride; at other times she covered me with
the family jewels and I became a rich lady; or, again, we ransacked
the drawers upstairs in my grandmother's bedroom and, collecting
aU the artificial flowers we could from my grandmother's discarded
bonnets, Aunt Lexy said that I was someone called Ophelia. And
then she stood off from me at the far end of the room, pretending
she was the audience in a theatre, Clapping her hands, she said:
'Splendid. Splendid." One frightening morning she acted her
favorite part of Lady Macbeth and, sending me into the kitchen for
the bread knife, towered above me, declaring; "Infirm of purpose,
give me the dagger/'

But just as I was decked out in some exciting costume, Aunt
Jean walked in, her hands white with flour.

"Shame upon you, Lexy," scolded Aunt Jean, wiping her hands
on her apron. "How dare you go on so ! You*d think you'd given us
enough trouble without trying to put immoral ideas into little Baba's
head. One actress in the family is one too many. Come along, Baba,
and help me with the dinner* 1 *

She carted me off to the kitchen, beyond the reach of moral
contamination, and made me sit in a chair and shdj peas*
But Aunt Lexy called to me, as I disappeared :

THE LEIGHTONS 135

"Which do you love most, your Aunt Lexy, or your Aunt

Jean?"

Suddenly the Leighton blood within me asserted itself, and as
the scrawny Scotch arms of my Aunt Jean kneaded the dough for
the bread, some sense of justice made me answer: "Aunt Jean."
Even to this day I can see the figure of Aunt Lexy wilt as I denied

her.

When I returned to London to confront a new baby brother,
I found my values in life swimming around me in confusion, and
overheard my mother saying to my father:

"Robert, if there's anything extra needed to make me sure never
to be careless and have a baby again, it's the way that child Baba
gets ruined when I send her down to your mother. In a few weeks
they undo aU the good of the training I've given her since she was
born. She's a common little thing, now, instead of a little lady."

But in spite of all this, Aunt Sarah was the one whom my mother
most distrusted. During my childhood I was kept from her as much
as possible. It was only when I had grown up that I began to know
her.

Then she became my greatest friend.

Over those many years of friendship I realized why my mother
feared her influence upon us. For one thing, Aunt Sarah had a
contempt for class distinctions. To her all men were equal. Her
father had been a Scottish poet whose philosophy of life was a mix-
ture of Robert Burns and Walt Whitman and who had instilled into
his children a feeling bf the innate dignity of the human being. He
had spent some time in America and, whereas my grandmother had
brought back with her a longing for a gatdess garden, he had
returned fired with excitement over the New World, and the brother-
hood of man. I never met this grandfather; he had been killed in an
accident long before I was born, while he was still young; but I felt
that I had known him well, for Aunt Sarah never tired of telling
me about him. Looking from his photographs almost like a twin

i S 6 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

brother of Lord Tennyson, he seemed to have been a noble character.
A great part of Aunt Sarah's idealism stemmed from his example.

And thus It was natural that my aunt should have a special con-
tempt for the pastimes of the aristocracy. The very thought of fox
hunting maddened her. Unfortunately she was continually being
exposed to this particular sport; for her nearest neighbor was the
Duke of Wellington, upon his Stratfieldsaye estate. I can remember
the fierce glee with which she told me of her successful thwarting of
His Grace's pleasure.

"The unemployed were up the lane here last week," she said to
me in a feigned casual voice one day, as she poked the living room
fire.

I started in surprise, for her home in Swallowfield was a good
six miles from the nearest town of Reading.

"But they didn't come as far into the country as this, did they?"
I asked.

My aunt smiled whimsically.

"Yes," she said, "they were up the lane. They were here, as large
as life; all their pink coats and their horses and their hounds. And
the Duke himself, sitting his horse and leading them aH."

"And what happened?" I asked, for I could see that she was
bursting to tell me.

"Well," she said, "they came up the lane as far as where this
garden begins. They even started to come tip the path. It's the first
time in my life Pve ever wished we had a garden gate.**

Listening to her so, I began to realise how absolutely right it was
that my mother should have Eved behind high walls and a solid
garden gate, while this Leighton garden merged into the country
latie with no gate whatsoever. It seemed to me that the two cultures
were as well shown by this as by anything. . . . And now I could
see the Berkshire Hunt bearing down upon my tiny little aunt as she
walked to mttt it for -I knew that was certainly what she had done.

"Yes/* she went on, "there they all were, surging up the garden

THE LEIGHTONS 137

path, and with the horses trampling upon my flower beds. So I
went out to meet them* 'Well?* I said to the Duke as he reined in
his horse, 'Well? 9 But the Duke did not seem to understand. The
fox has got away in your orchard, ma'am,* he said. The hounds
want to be after him.' The fox is welcome to the safety of my
orchard/ I answered him calmly. And at that he grew so angry that
his face turned the cmor of his coat. 'But madam/ he said, 'the fox,
I tell you * 'Good morning, sir,' I bowed to him. 'Good morning;
And will you please have the goodness to call your dogs off my
garden.' It made him mad to hear me call those hounds 'dogs. 3 It
just isn't done. And that's exactly why I did it. With that I drew
myself up and stood there in the middle of the garden path, looking
him straight in the face. And he couldn't move, you see, for if he had
he'd have knocked me down oft my own land, 'But the fox, madam.
He's in your orchard.' 'And he couldn't be in a safer place,* I
snapped back at him. I was losing my temper, for some of the hard-
faced women in the hunt were beginning to grumble. They had no
manners, and seemed to consider me a nuisance. 'And I'll be obliged
if you will please call your dogs and horses together and leave my
garden,' I went on severely. 'Perhaps you are not aware that you
are trespassing?' And I stood there, without moving, till the Duke
turned his horse and led them all down the path again and out
into the lane. I liked to think of that fox, safe among my apple
trees. ... It was a grand morning, I can tell you, a grand
morning.**

She gave the fire a vicious poke, and the flames glowed upon the
look of triumph on her face.

She knew that in obstructing this hunt she had defied the whole
fabric of England. i

But I was careful never to teE my mother this story. She would i
have called my aunt a cad for interfering in such a sacred thing as!
a fox hunt.

What possibility was there that these two women might agree?*

138 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

The only wisdom was in keeping them completely apart. And so
I visited my aunt, but refrained from telling my mother.

My mother said that Aunt Sarah was something dreadful called
a Socialist, and that shp read terrible books that no well-brought-up
woman would have on her shelves. Actually my aunt introduced me
to the books of Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis, Lowes
Dickinson and E. M. Forster. But she also opened up to me the
world of American literature. Sometimes, when I felt mischievous,
I would tell my mother about these writers I had discovered. And
then she would lift an eyebrow and look at me in a superior manner.

"None of them really matters," she declared. "They are eccen-
tric highbrows, and lack the stamp of the professional. Now if
Sarah were to give you books by people like Robert Hichens or
W. J. Locke, there' d be some sense to it. However, I suppose I ought
to be glad she isn't the sort to get you started on Elinor Glyn or
Ouida. These stuffy things she's interested in can't actually do you
any harm."

My mother had a passion for Ouida. A copy of Moths was
always hidden among her bundles in the study. It was falling to
pieces from over-use, as she would often pause for a minute or two
in her dictating to reread some favorite love scene. It helped her,
she said, to keep in the mood for what she was herself writing.

I was never allowed to read Ouida. She was supposed to be far
too improper for a young girl, though an exception was made in the
case of Two Little Wooden Shoes, which, had "a minimum of sex"
in it. My mother was strict about the books I read. This was part
of her promise to Judge Talbot to bring me up as innocent as a wild
rosebud. Being forbidden to look at it, naturally I managed to read
Moths. I used to slip into the study when the family was out and
skim through as many pages at a time as I safely could. But the sad
thing was that I found myself disappointed. Where were the pas-
sionate love scenes that gave my mother such thrills of emotion?
Why, even, was I forbidden the book? Many years later I admitted

THE LEIGHTONS 139

to having read Moths, and asked my mother what was so improper
about it. She seemed surprised and grieved that I had been
unaffected.

"When I was a young girl, 1 also disobeyed my mother/' she
confessed to me. "During those times when we were hard up and
had no servants, I was made to dust my parents' bedroom, and I
found that my mother kept a copy of Moths in a drawer of one of
Jher cupboards, hidden underneath some flannel petticoats. Each
morning, while I was supposed to be busy dusting, I managed to
read a few pages. My whole existence was transformed by the glow
of the book, and I went about all those days in a haze of emo-

tion."

There was something to me very enviable about my mother's
impressionableness. She would be reminded of a particular line or
verse of a poem, and carry it around with her for hours or days, or
even weeks. She wrote me once that she had been interrupted that
particular morning from her work because of waiting for the chim-
ney sweep.

"He is unromantic but necessary," she added. "But there is a
touch of spring in the air and all the while the verses of This month
,the almonds bloom in Kandahar 9 are running in my mind."

As likely as not, when the chimney sweep arrived she quoted
these verses to him from Indian Love Lyrics, mixed in with the direc-
tions about the chimney to be swept, till he grew confused, and won-
dered what was happening to him.

All the while that she was living in this world of romantic
poetry, she was vituperative against Aunt Sarah who was, in her
own way, living an identical life of books. But my mother could
never understand the particular intellectual color of my aunt's life.
She had never heard of Calderon, and the name of Camoens was
probably unknown to her. And so, living alone in the country, my
aunt spent her days in the world of writers, even as my mother wove
the Indian Love Lyrics or Swinburne and Henley intp her business

140 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

with the chimney sweep. Had they ever been able to meet, without
knowing who the other was, it is even possible that they might really
have liked one another.

Years later, after my father had died and my mother was com-
pletely alone, the parallel between her and Aunt Sarah was still
more strange. For outwardly they were living such similar lives,
while yet the entire range of their values was different. In her house
in Hertfordshire my mother was free to shape her day as she chose,
so that she could write to me: "And, by the way, I've just dis-
covered that I've forgotten to have my breakfast, and it's just one
o'clock, and a lovely day, too," while, down in her house in Berk-
shire, my aunt was living her own queer diurnal rhythm. This
rhythm was thoroughly sensible, and yet, if the people in her village
had known of it, she would have been considered even more of an
eccentric than she already was. For her "entire life revolved around
her passionate need for reading.

During the winter months my aunt went to bed when the birds
did; but before she could shut her bedroom door there were four
trays to prepare. And so she laid out her tea tray, her supper tray, a
tray with a saucepan of milk and a tin of Ovaltine for midnight
refreshment, and a breakfast tray. These were placed on chairs in
her room, as near to the bed as possible in order that she might not
have to travel far to reach her next meal On the round table by
her bed stood a methylated spirit stove and a box of tobacco and
cigarette papers. Aunt Sarah smoked unceasingly, even in the days
before it became the fashion. She made her own cigarettes and her
remarks seemed always to be accompanied by the action of rolling
a cigarette, while her sentences were broken by a pause for the lick-
ing of the paper.

Having placed nearest to her the tea tray, which she would need
first, she got into bed and started her reading. She read books in five
languages, though, like all the women of our family, she had had
practically no schooling whatsoever. She despised translations, and

THE LEIGHTONS 141

felt strongly that Cervantes should be read in Spanish, Dante in
Italian, Balzac in* French and Goethe in German. Some little time
after the last bird had finished his evensong, she reached out for the
matches and started the spirit stove, for her tea. While the water
was heating she lit the oil lamp, which was the only form of artificial
illumination in this house the daily cleaning of the wicks was an
art of enormous importance, for only if the lamps were well trimmed
could my aunt read with comfort over the hours of darkness. At this
moment she would decide to draw the curtains, as no longer was
there any light from the sky. And then, as she waited for the water
to boil in the tiny aluminum pan, she would roll a cigarette, and
turn over in her mind what she was reading.

The lamp shone with a warm glow upon the shell-thin Japanese
teacup and saucer, and upon the silver milk jug and sugar bowl.
Even though she lived alone, she treated herself always to the best
china and the best silver; Grandmother Leighton had trained her
children that what was not good enough for guests was not good
enough for the family. Her tea finished, she pulled the Jaegar shawl
closer around her shoulders f or she did not want to bother to keep
the coal fire in the grate too high and settled down to two or three
hours of solid reading. As the feeling of hunger overcame the excite-
ment of the story, she would push aside the used tray and draw
towards, her the supper tray.

Raised on vast quantities of meat, potatoes and suet puddings,
I found it difficult to get accustomed to the food she ate.

"You've only got to see what Sarah eats to realize she is an
eccentric," my mother said. "Whoever could possibly imagine there
was any nourishment for the brain in figs and dates and lettuce and
garden vegetables? If you were to place a good beefsteak before her
she'd have a fit and teE you we had no right to kill animals."

"But she does cat meat," I interrupted. "She's trying a diet which
is almost entirely meat/'

My mother would not believe it

142 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

"You must be mistaken/' she told me. "I am perfectly certain
that what you suppose to be meat is really a chopped nut affair that
has been cooked in some way or other to look like meat mock
cutlets, I think they call them. You've only got to read a sentence or
two from any one of your Aunt Sarah's stories to know that she's a
food fad and a vegetarian and an anemic homespun crank. If I ever
find you eating salad I shall know you've become a Leighton; and
you will be beyond salvation."

Meanwhile, my aunt would be sitting up in bed, devouring
minced beef upon her supper tray. She had been experimenting with
a diet called the "Salisbury cure," which consisted of nothing what-
soever but meat and hot water. My mother was right in saying that
Aunt Sarah was an eccentric in her diet. But now, though, she was
beginning to doubt the wisdom of the "Salisbury cure" and had
started again on "reformed food," and brews of medicinal herb
teas.

This supper finished, she would read past midnight, and some-
times well into the smaE hours of the morning, until she began to
feel sleepy. And there, at the other side of the round table, stood
her nightcap of milk and Ovaltine, waiting to be heated. If there
had been any neighbors close enougkto see it, the light in Miss
Sarah Leighton's bedroom window might have been noticed through
most of the hours of darkness.

But before this light could be turned out, an important ritual
had to be observed. "Bobs" must be remembered. "Bobs" was her
pet robin. On the ledge by the opened window she placed the lid of
a matchbox, through which was inserted a heavy pair of scissors.
Upon the top of the matchbox lid she put a dab of butter. This was
her alarm clock; each morning, at exactly twenty-five minutes past
eight, "Bobs" flew in at the open window for his breakfast of butter
and, pecking at it, he made a noise with the heavy pair of scissors.
My aunt then would wake and smile at the little bird, knowing it
was time for her own breakfast.

THE LEIGHTONS 143

This continued over many years. It might have gone on longer if
her brother, my Uncle Jack, had not died. She went to London for
several weeks, to attend to his affairs. Before she left Swallowfield
she asked the village policeman to come up to The Meadow and,
telling him to keep his eye on the place each day while she was away,
she tipped him five shillings as she begged him to give the robin his
butter. The butter was placed in a closed tin on the porch, but
though the English are notoriously sentimental about birds, this par-
ticular policeman must have been slightly casual in keeping his
promise, for on her return Aunt Sarah found "Bobs" had lost his
endearing ways and no longer visited her in her bedroom. Neither
did he, as the summer came around, ever again alight on the toe of
her foot, or on her book, as she lay in a hammock under the chestnut
tree, reading.

My mother did not know any of this, for I kept silent always
about the life at The Meadow* But if she had known she would have
had little sympathy. Hers w^s a world of dogs rather than of birds.

"You can always tell whether people are well-bred or not by
whether they love dogs," she used to say. "And isn't it so exactly
right that not one single member of the Leighton family except
your father, who, of course, isn't really a Leighton any more not
one single member of the family owns a dog? They're the sort that
ought to have quantities of common tabby cats. And I rather suspect
they know all about birds. It's strange how the people who know
the names and habits of birds seem to be the ones who never do
anything important in life."

Aunt Sarah ran through an enormous quantity of books. When
Uncle Jack went for holidays abroad he had difficulty in finding
enough literature to occupy his sister while he was out of the coun-
try. The length of Proust's novels was an answer to prayer, and
enabled him to travel farther afield with a clear conscience; but
should he be away unduly long, and the Proust novels be finished,
Aunt Sarah was never really at a loss. She fell back upon "running

144 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

through Balzac once again," or "having a look at Dickens or
Trollope."

Mudie's Library was a household word in our family, both with
my father and mother in London and with Aunt Sarah at Swallow-
field. Every Tuesday and Friday afternoon of my childhood an
imposing horse-drawn closed vehicle with a liveried coachman
stopped before the gate of Vallombrosa and "Mudie's man" came
up the garden path, dressed in a brass buttoned overcoat and a silk
hat. By a thick leather strap he carried a pile of books. They were
the latest novels for my mother and father to read over tea. Up in
the nursery we could hear the steady drone of my father's voice as
he read these books aloud to my mother from the start of the five
o'clock tea until half-past six, when Walmy appeared for the eve-
ning dictating.

But Aunt Sarah had none of this regular twice a week service.
Uncle Jack selected her literature. Living in Bloomsbury, not far
from Mudie's headquarters in New Oxford Street, he spent a great
part of his days in the Library, discovering books that were worth
reading. And then an enormous crate was sent down to Aunt Sarah
at The Meadow. It was a wonderful thing to be visiting her when one
of these crates arrived. She acted like a drink addict before a sudden
vista of endless bottles. A wild light came into her eyes, and her
hands trembled as she began to open the crate. When there was a
book she wanted to possess, though, she became independent of her
brother and ordered it through the village boy who left her daily
newspaper. Once, however, she was in a predicament.

"I really don't know what to do," she complained to me. "I own
everything; any of the Powys brothers has written; but now John
Cowper Powys has just brought out a book called In Defence of
Sensuality. I dare say it's perfectly innocuous, but, I ask you, how
do I dare to order a book with such a title? Before I know where I
am, I might ruin my reputation for respectability in the neighbor-
hood."

THE LEIGHTONS 145

She felt so upset about it that I bought the book for her in Lon-
don and sent it by mail, securely wrapped.

The books she read, however, were not by any means always
innocuous. She chose the unexpurgated editions of the classics, and
reveled in their licentiousness. But it was the romantic attitude
towards love that really interested her. Over our sewing, on the long
dark evenings of my visits to Swallowfield, she told me the plots of
the books she had read since I was last there. Her voice grew tender
at the remembrance of the love passages.

"And then, one day, when he had waited for her several years,
they again met. And still she resisted him for quite a long time.
But he was persistent and, of course, at last she gave way and it was
the * chose ordinaire.* "

After that she gave up any interest for, she said, at this point
the story always lost its originality.

"It's not for nothing that I caU the sex act the *chose ordinaire/ "
she added. "That's just what it is. It has neither beauty nor variation.
The only part of sex that is worth while is romantic love."

There was a great deal in common between Aunt Sarah and
my mother.

9- Uncle Jack

"It's strange what a world of difference there is between an
artist and a writer," my mother sighed. "An artist used to be
romantic, but I ask you, where today can you find the painter Ouida
wrote about in Two Little Wooden Shoes, with his deep-set soulful
eyes and his brown velvet coat? As I pass the St. John's Wood Art
School and watch those anemic degenerates emerging I feel sure
there can be nothing more pitiable than an art student."

My mother's opinion was colored by her contempt for the
Leightons. Both Aunt Sarah and Uncle Jack were artists.

Aunt Sarah was a bad artist. She was, if possible, inferior to her
brother. Art was her less important form of expression; the romances
she wrote mattered to her far more.

They had attended the South Kensington Art Schools together,
but whereas Uncle Jack had managed to get accepted into the Royal
Academy Schools, Aunt Sarah had failed. She did not seem to have
resented this, for she worshiped her brother, and spoke with awe of
the four foot high stump drawing of the Venus of Milo which had

146

UNCLE JACK 4 147

opened the sacred portals to him and which, framed in gold, hung
above his bed in his Bloomsbury flat, looking cold and dismal in the
grey light of winter* So greatly did she worship him that she felt
bewildered and hurt because I did not appreciate his work.

"You young moderns have lost all subtlety," she told me one
day, as I showed her my most recent sketches. "Now when we were
art students Jack and I we never used such harsh colors or
sharp contours. We were taught always to bring a gentle tone of
brown into all our pictures, for harmony. And we knew the beauty
of dim outlines."

This contempt Aunt Sarah and Uncle Jack felt for my painting
almost reconciled my mother to it, even though she had no real use
for an artist who wanted to paint anything other than beautiful
women or romantic situations.

"If I had seen you draw or paint even one pretty face, I'd think
there was some hope for you," she sighed as she looked at a compli-
cated problem picture I had just finished, called 'The Call of the
Blood/ in which a handsome young priest prayed before a crucifix,
with the wraith of a beautiful woman around his shoulders.

Uncle Jack was visiting us just then, and my mother turned to
him for support.

"And what do you think, Jack?" she asked in her most alluring
voice. "Do you suppose there's really any hope for Clare as an
artist?"

But Uncle Jack was completely bewitched by my mother's
charm. In addition, he resented my indifference to his own work.
Now was his chance. He did not miss it.

"If anybody could have made Clare into an artist, it was I," he
boasted. "But I must admit that I've failed."

I smiled as I heard him answering her question, for I was recol-
lecting an amusing struggle between them.

The incident started from a potted pink oleander. It happened
just before the First World War, when we left London and moved to

148 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

a pretentious house near Lowestoft, called Heather Cliff. At the
bottom of the garden was a big greenhouse, and within this green-
house, when we bought the place, stood a large oleander. There
were very few oleanders in England. The plant, in fact, was so rare
that scarcely anyone had heard of it.

"But in Italy, where I have lived so much, there were real
oleanders," Uncle Jack loved to boast, "And when I say real olean-
ders I do not mean potted ones, Fiorita Mia. I mean great bushes
of them, growing out of doora in the sunshine of Florence or
Fiesole. Now if only you had been to Italy you'd see that this solitary
oleander you're so absurdly proud of is a mere straggling, puny
plant."

This made my mother furious. She resented it when our uncle
started to boast about Italy.

"Let me tell you, Jack," she answered him, "it isn't the actual
object that has beauty. It's whether the eye of the person who looks
at it is really worthy. Now all those oleanders in Florence and
Fiesole cannot possibly mean a quarter as much to someone like
you as this one 'straggling, puny plant/ as you call it, does to me.
To you oleanders are only pink flowers, but I am able to surround
them with glamour and a dream."

My mother had read somewhere of a lover who, disappointed
in his passion, had sought escape in death through breathing
deeply of the fatal perfume of the oleander. The story placed a halo
of glamour around our potted plant We waited in trembling sus-
pense for the first flower to appear, feeling that here, in this pink
blossom, lay the power of exotic death.

But Uncle Jack was far more deeply involved in the blooming of
our oleander. He was in love with his Fiorita Mia. My mother, in
her usual manner, was anxious to put this love to the test. Besides,
she was annoyed with his boasting about Italy. Now, here, was her
chance.

"Jack," she said one day in the greenhouse when he was staying

UNCLE JACK 149

with us at Heather Cliff, "Jack, if you truly love me you can prove
it by painting me a picture. You can paint me a picture of a lover
drinking deep of the perfume of the oleander blossom, while the
spirit of his beloved hovers in the air above and around him."

I was busy at the far end of the greenhouse with some young
tomato plants, but I could feel the consternation in my uncle's
voice.

"It is an almost impossible thing to do, Bien Aimee," he said,
using his latest pet name for my mother.

"Oh, no," she answered him airily, "not at all. Here in front
of your eyes is the oleander for you to do your study from, in case
you've forgotten the shape of the oleanders you knew in Italy. And
all the rest, of course, is in your imagination. Love, you know, fires
the imagination. The picture should be quite easy."

I delighted in my uncle's discomfort because of my aesthetic
grudges against him. Mischievously I waited for the morning when
he would bring out his sketchbook and paints. I knew that the thing
he lacked most was any form of visual imagination. I also knew
that my mother was going to be very exacting.

As the pink blossoms of the potted oleander burst more fully
into flower, I developed an interest in the tomato plants in the
greenhouse. My unde arrived each morning with his sketch book,
and did not notice me crouching low at the far end. But the light
was not right for him, or the blossoms were not yet far enough out,
or something else must t have been wrong; for pretty soon I heard
him bang down the lid of his paint box and swear out loud. Each
evening my mother questioned him about this picture, and each
evening he procrastinated. It was great fun for me.

The picture was never finished. Knowing what was at stake,
Uncle Jack did achieve some studies of the oleander, and on his
return to London he actually drew a model in the pose of the
phantom lover. But the small oil sketch of the picture seemed to my-
mother so lacking in imagination that forthwith she turned her

150 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

attention from my uncle to a fat bank manager who had appeared
on her horizon.

"The Leightons are so mediocre in their art," she said. "There's
nothing to choose between them, whether it is Jack or Sarah,"

And she smiled at the bank manager in her most beguiling
manner.

"Just fancy trying to paint a passionate picture like this from
such an utterly commonplace model, and against the background
of Jack's dingy Bloomsbury flat/' she went on. "Of course, it isn't
the actual setting of the background that matters though I must
say that whatever the Leightons touch turns fusty, I believe they'd
make Buckingham Palace look like a West Kensington boarding-
house, and I know for a certainty that Jack took Tavistock Square,
Bloomsbury, with him when he went to Sicily. They have the knack
of impoverishing everything that comes their way. It's almost a form
of genius. But heaven protect me from their muted tones, as they
call them. If I were to see one bright color in Jack's flat I think I'd
faint. Why, I even have to be careful what dress I have on when
I visit him, for fear he'll have a heart attack. There's that pink silk
coatee I love so much the beautiful salmon pink one you're so
fond of, that I wear with the black satin skirt and salmon pink
ribbons in my hair; I can feel his eyes turning from it in pain, as
though I wore something almost vulgar. And I suppose it isn't sur-
prising, when you remember that all his curtains and his rugs look
like a bowl of porridge. Now you, Silenus . ."

She turned with tenderness toward the fat, red-faced bank
manager with the pendulous double chin. And then a look of
worry came over her, as she realized that she had let Roland's nick-
name for him slip out unawares.

Had he noticed it? And, if he had, would he know what it
meant? She looked at him keenly, to discover. But a puzzled frown
had come upon the fat, red face, as though he wished to understand
what it was his beloved was calling him.

UNCLE JACK 151

She rushed to the rescue. She knew it was not too late.

"That is my name for you/* she cooed to him. "Have you for-
gotten who Silenus was? Well, you're a very, very busy man, atid
you haven't time to go reading up all the books on ancient days.
So Fll tell you myself, which is much better. Silenus was one of the
most important of the Greek gods. And the Greek gods, you know,
were always supposed to be men who were more beautiful than
anyone who had ever existed. Think for a moment of the beautiful
Greek statues you've seen, Or perhaps you haven't seen any of
them? One day I'll take you to the British Museum with me, and
I'll show you the Elgin marbles, and then you'll realise it's a com-
pliment that I call you Silenus. , . . They had always the most
perfect male bodies . . , M

She had saved herself. "Silenus" would never know the ignominy
of the nickname. He had not heard of the god of tippling. He burst
into an enormous crimson grin, and his great bulging stomach
seemed to tremble like an excited jelly.

"Darling," he said as he leaned forward to pat my mother's
cheek. "Darling. Didn't I always say you were the most wonderful*
.wonderful, wonderful woman? Now my wife, you know, she hasn't
any idea of the learning she lacks. If you were to ask her about a
Greek god, she*d change the subject, and talk about the cook having
just given notice, or something unimportant like that. Do you know,,
it seems to me that I've never been fully alive until I met you."

It didn't really matter much to my mother just now that
Uncle Jack should have been found so inadequate in the painting of
this passionate oleander picture.

"For the first time in a very long while," she said, as she waited
one afternoon for the bank manager's arrived, "I'm being adored
by a man with the protective instinct of the complete bourgeois.
I can see now how uncomfortable it is to be involved with an
intellectual. This is something to enjoy, for I can let myself go with
'Silenus' and don't need to argue, or use my brains, Above all, I

152 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

don't have to exhaust my soul the whole time battling against the
mental sterility of the Leightons. If Jack had any insight into me
he would know his days are over."

Uncle Jack knew only too well. He took it with bitterness, and
retired to Swallowfield and the friendly company of Aunt Sarah
where the two of them would spend long hours at a stretch my
uncle reading aloud in Spanish and my aunt working at her endless
embroidery in muted-colored silks upon neutral-tinted "Ruskin"
homespun flannels in resigned withdrawal from the world,

, But Uncle Jack could not really disentangle himself from my
mother. He needed to feed upon her vitality, and pretty soon he gave
Aunt Sarah some reason for leaving Swallowfield, and appeared
once more within my mother's aura. Aunt Sarah, who was wise
never questioned her brother, and, though she loved him deeply and
dreaded his departure, she told him that of courae she knew he
must attend this art meeting, or that private view, or rehearse some
puppet show he was organising. And then she filled his glass with
Falerno, or Lachryma Christi, or, if she were out of stock of these
Italian wines with their associational glow, with Australian Bur-
gundy decanted into an antique Florentine wine bottle*

But before bidding him good-bye she gathered a bunch of the
choicest roses in her garden. She grew these especially for him, and
devoted a large part of her days to producing the most rare speci-
mens for him. Each time he returned to London he took them back
to his Bloomsbury flat, and laid them in the shallow black bowl my
mother had given him. Whenever my mother visited him he pre-
sented her dramatically with the most perfect of them all. She took
malicious delight in knowing that they had been grown by Aunt
Sarah. I always hoped that never, by any cruel satire of circum-
stance, would my aunt discover the fate of some of her loveliest
TOSCS.

My mother rejoiced in torturing Uncle Jack. She may have done
I this as a means of getting her own back upon the Lekhton f amily,

UNCLE JACK 153

for undoubtedly lie was the most vulnerable. My father was so
happily enslaved that he would have been miserable without her
domination. But Unde Jack stifl fought her, though he loved her
so disturbingly, Love, to my mother, meant complete submission.
Her adorers must think as she thought, and live as she demanded.
It exasperated her to find that she could not change Uncle Jack's
views on life.

"If I had been told that I would allow a man to love me who
was a Liberal even, perhaps, almost a Socialist I would never
have believed it," she said, after a wild quarrel with my uncle
during the First World War. "Jack's opinions stamped him as being
no gentleman. Look at the way he storms and rages at me for
being what he calls a reactionary. Why I put up with it, I don't
know. If he weren't your father's brother I would never allow him
to cross our threshold again."

But she was fascinated by his intellectual independence. Never
before had a man resisted her.

"He's utterly impossible," she sobbed, "What's more, he's wear-
ing me out with this pacifism of his. Just think of it I, a hard-
working writer, have had to spend an entire morning arguing with
him about the stories of German atrocities. It's the most absurd
waste of my time. Brother-in-law or no brother-in-law, he'll have
to go."

The worst times of all were when, during the war, he was
staying with us at Lowestoft. There was then little escape for either
of them. He and my mother strode up and down the morning
room, like caged spaimals, while she tore Ramsay MacDonald to
pieces and Unde Jack defended him. Finally they both burst out
weeping, and Unde Jack ran from the room in a passionate rage,
nearly knocking the housemaid down in his tear-blinded hurry, and
locked himself in his bedroom until lunchtinqie. My mother recovered
more quickly, and summoning Wahny, she continued dictating her
overdue instalment. When my uncle reappeared, he was filled with

i 5 4 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

remorse at his anger with "Bien Aimee," and for several days all
would be calm.

There was one thing about Uncle Jack that entirely pleased my
mother. He enjoyed reading to her.

"Not that I hold with aU the books he gets through by himself,"
.she would say, "He's somewhat smeared with the same highbrow
intellectual anemia as Sarah. But then, that comes of his being a
complete dilletante. While I'm slaving away all my life, at real
work, he is able to live on his dead wife's money and spend his days
in a brown velvet smoking jacket trimmed with frogs, and sip ex-
pensive pallid China tea while he cuts the pages of the latest novel
from Mudie's Library with a silver paper knife."

But in the matter of French books, their tastes were alike. So,
when he came to see us, Uncle Jack always brought with him a
pile of plays and some pale yellow paper covered French novels.
And then, from the nursery, we would hear his voice droning away
in French over the hours of the evening, as he read to his Fiorita.

"I don't really think very highly of Jack's French accent," she
would qualify. "It's entirely lacking in subtlety and style. But then,
one can't have everything in this life. And it means a great deal to
have someone read these French plays and novels that are too im-
proper for Clare to be allowed to read to me."

Unfortunately for my mother, Uncle Jack wished to show his
love for her in music. Here most decidedly their tastes differed.

Uncle Jack played the pianola. He did not know how to play
the piano, but he had a way of making it seem a far more exacting
work of art to play a pianola. When he went to Mudie's Library
to change his books, he took with him a small black portmanteau
that looked exactly like the kind of bag in which we had been told
that doctors brought newborn babies. This was for his music rolls,
which he also changed at Mudie's.

Each day he sat for hours at the grand piano in his Bloomsbury
flat, playing the^e rolls. Each day, too, his drawing room ceiling

UNCLE JACK 155

shook as. the pupils of the School of Dramatic Dancing in the flat
above practised their steps. But Uncle Jack did not seem to notice
this disturbance. He pedaled away at the piano, playing the "Moon-
light Sonata" or the "Waldstein," apparently unaware that a rival
piano filled the pauses of his own playing.

My mother, though, would giggle about it with the gusto of
a schoolgirl.

When she honored him with a visit he put away the Beethoven
music rolls and produced Chopin. He was very proud of her visits
and conducted her with elaborate ceremony to the big sofa in the
drawing room, from where she could watch him play.

He intended to be seen in action, as well as heard. We always
supposed it was for this purpose that he had arranged a mirror on
the wall, by the side of the piano. If he so chose, he could even
watch himself perform when he was alone.

As he played Chopin nocturnes, he flung his head back with a
gesture of passion. In the mirror a second Uncle Jack could be
seen, making an identical gesture. Forward and back, mournfully
shaking his long hair, or bending low over the music roll, he went
through the movements of painful emotion, till my mother from
her seat of honor on the sofa could restrain herself no longer.

"If you could only see yourself as you go through all these antics,
Jack," she laughed, "you'd be every bit as much amused as I am.
One of you would be enough to give me hysterics; but when it
comes to two . . . !"

Uncle Jack never forgave her for these irreverences.

"Bien Aim6e," he reproached her. "Have you no idea of the
respect due to good music?"

"Good music yes," she answered. "But you can't call what
. comes out of a pianola music. It's only one step removed from a
barrel organ in the street not but what I don't even prefer listen-
ing to a barrel organ, when it's playing Italian opera."

For some time after one of these outbursts Uncle Jack abstained

156 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

from playing to my mother. But after a while he would forget his
annoyance with her and produce the Chopin nocturnes.

However well he might behave, though, my mother never con-
sidered him a gentleman. She even felt she had to pick and choose
where she was seen with him, and when invitations came for some
especially snobbish affair at Lowestoft, such as a Ladies* Night at
the Yacht Club, or a party on board a visiting battleship, she was
always careful never to be accompanied by him.

"Why has he never learnt how to dress?" she would say to us
in vexation. "That flowing Liberty necktie completely damns him.
And his wide black hat is enough in itself to keep him out from any
decent club. But what chiefly worries me is his hair. It is far too
long and sweeping for a gentleman, and yet, if I have to be fair to
him, I really don't see how he can manage to wear it any shorter,
for he is beginning to get bald, and needs his hair long so that
it can cover his bald patches. And, too, I have to admit that I'd
rather his hair were absent and black than present and grey."

But then, just as she was beginning to get thoroughly upset
about Uncle Jack's appearance, she would console herself by re-
membering that he had never grown a beard. My mother loathed
beards. I used to wonder how she managed to reconcile this loathing
with her reverent love for King Edward the Seventh. But perhaps
there was a different rule for kings*

"There's no possibility of romance with a man who wears a
beard," she always said. "Even a young Adonis would be changed
into an Old Testament prophet if you were to stick a beard on him.
And who, I ask you, could fall in love with an Old Testament
prophet? The only admirer I've ever had with a beard was George
Meredith, and this tempered my admiration for him to such an
extent that, famous though he was, I let the friendship slide."

I never told my mother how, during one of those times when
Uncle Jack had retired to Swallowfield in rage and disgrace, he and
Aunt Sarah debated as to whether it might not be an interesting

UNCLE JACK I57

experiment for him to grow a beard. Aunt Sarah was unaware of
the self-destructive revenge Uncle Jack planned. She merely thought
it might make her brother look even more distinguished and
romantic. He went without shaving for several days, and the beard
was well on the way when an especially tender letter arrived for
him from "Bien Aim6e." Aunt Sarah was busy in the kitchen, over
the primitive oil cooking stove, making a preserve from the quinces
in her garden called "membrillo." Uncle Jack had procured the
recipe from a peasant woman on his recent visit to Spain, and
wanted to share the delight of this confection with his sister. But
him mind just now was occupied with other interests. He rushed
over to the kitchen sink and filled a pan with water. He sought a
place for the pan on the top of the oil stove; but there was no room.
He champed and raged, and my aunt turned to him in amazement.

"Why, Jack," she said. "What is the matter? Here, come and
taste this membrUlo. Does it remind you of Spain?"

But all my uncle wanted was space upon the cooking stove to
heat some water for shaving.

He did not grow his beard.

io. As the Dear Canon Said

Walmy arrived upon the scene several years before I was born.

"Miss Annie M. C. Walmisley, please," she always insisted when
she was asked her name.

But we never found out what the "M. C." stood for. It was
unusual in England to have more than one given name, and I
think she must have felt that these extra initials added to her
importance.

She needed this reinforcement, for she stood in a strange position
in the Leighton household. Although she was employed by my
mother, she was not of the servant class.

"Walmy is a lady," my mother quite willingly admitted. "But
she is that awkward thing called a lady in improvenshed circum-
stances,' and you never know how to treat such people."

Her brother, "Captain Will/' was a retired officer in the regular
Army, which was, after all, exactly what my mother's own father
had been. But in spite of this social equality, Walmy was never
supposed to be present when my mother's friends appeared. My

AS THE DEAR CANON SAID 159

mother's adorers hated her, for they thought she spied on them*
Whether she did or not, I don't know, but certainly she must have
disapproved of them, for she was a devout churchwoman and
would not have condoned my mother's views on romance.

She was a regular attendant at St. Mary Abbot's in South
Kensington, where she rented her own pew and was even on friendly
terms with "the dear Canon." This church was one of the most
fashionable in London. To belong to it made you socially secure-
But to be on the visiting list of the Canon stamped you as a lady.
Walmy's conversation was punctuated with "as the dear Canon
said to me only yesterday." Beyond all doubt, she was of the elect.

She was amazingly ugly.

"Sometimes I find myself wondering whether it is bad for me to
spend so much of my life looking at such ugliness," my mother re-
marked. "But when all's said and done, I am glad of it, for I can
leave Walmy alone with your father and know that nothing im-
proper will take place. Men are so made that if they see a great
deal of any woman who is even ordinarily good looking they'll be
kissing her behind the door before many weeks have passed. But na
man could possibly want to kiss Walmy."

My mother's admirers liked to make fun of Walmy, but my
mother had an affection for her secretary which brought her
staunchly to her defense. She would point out that Walmy's eyes;
were some of the most beautiful she had ever seen. They were a
deep, rich brown, and were "put in with a smutty finger," as my
mother described them.

"If your small pale blue eyes were only half as beautiful as.
Walmy's," I once heard her say to Mr. Bowles, "and if they had
some of the moving depths of hers, I might even think it worth while
to risk being caught in a fire with you, and come and see you in your
office all those five flights up, as you are always begging me
to do."

But the poor woman had characteristically English teeth. They

160 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

were conspicuous chiefly by their absence. Two great tusks stood
out prominently in the front of her mouth, and fascinated us. We
watched her at mealtime and wondered how she managed to chew
her food. Her greying hair was drawn back tight from her face, and
wound in a bun behind. Her extreme shortness was accentuated by
a slight hump upon her back, doubtless due to countless years of
bending over a work table. She wore severe striped shirt blouses,
with collars and neckties, but she insisted always upon pronouncing
these very masculine affairs "blouses," in a French manner, as
though they were the most seductive confections of ribbons and
lace. For she had stayed in Paris a great deal with my mother, and
was anxious that no one should forget it.

These visits to Paris took place about once a year,

"It seems to me, Marie, that you're beginning to be just a bit
stale in your work/' Lord Northcliffe might one day be heard telling
my mother. "Your last instalment of Sealed Lips isn't as exciting
as most. This won't do, you know. I rely on your serials for keeping
up the circulation of the Daily Mail. You need a change. I'm going
to send you to Paris again, to the Hotel Meurice, for six weeks."

And so my mother went to Paris, taking Walmy with her.
Neither of them ever left the hotel. They worked through the days
in exactly the same way in which they worked in St. John's Wood.
The journey might almost have seemed unnecessary.

"But a change of atmosphere doesn't depend upon going out
into the streets sightseeing," my mother declared. "I may have to
stay in my room, dictating to Miss Walmisley all the day long in my
dressing gown .instead of walking along the rue de Rivoli or the
Champs Elysees; but all the same, I am getting to know the spirit
of Paris. And the change is doing me good. My mind is working
better already*'*

Walmy never admitted to any disappointment at being kept
indoors. It was enough for her that she could boast of having stayed
at such a fashionable hotel. And so she followed my mother around

AS THE DEAR CANON SAID 161

as they emerged from their rooms for the evening meal, looking
like an endearing pug dog on a leash.

"I have a sneaking suspicion that Marie uses Miss Walmisley
merely as a foil for her own beauty," the peeved wife of one of my
mother's adorers was heard once to remark.

But in this she was wrong. My mother relied upon Walmy for
everything, and could not possibly have managed without her.

After these visits to Paris, Walmy returned with all the Parisian
affectations she could muster, and French phrases strayed into her
speech. "Oh, la, la," she said, and "il me semble," and instead of
kissing us good morning in the usual English way, she embraced
us on both cheeks as though she were a Frenchwoman, and exuber-
antly said, "Bon jour," Roland told us he had even heard her swear
softly to herself in French; but remembering St. Mary Abbot's, I
can scarcely believe it* It was not long, however, before her Bays-
water "self-contained," semi-basement flat and the world of "the
dear Canon" in South Kensington reasserted themselves, and "oh,
la, la" became the familiar "lo-ar," with which she prefaced most
of her conversations. We were glad. She was our own Walmy again,

We loved her dearly. She was the only grownup of whom we
were not afraid. She was a bridge between us and our parents, but
she had none of their frightening power to hush us when we were
being noisily happy. With Walmy we might play and laugh and
sing with no feeling that punishment awaited us. Sometimes she was
made to pay for this boisterous behavior in the nursery; she did not
tell us so herself, but we would see her snivel and wipe the tears
from her eyes, and for a few days we would have no visit from her,
and we were very sad.

Although she was enslaved by Mother, she worshiped her and
did everything in her power to copy her mannerisms. She even tried
to develop my mother's fantastic handwriting, and decided that she
could not see to read without holding up to her eye an enormous
magnifying glass, exactly as my mother always did. In her slapdash,

i6a TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

sloppy way she "ran" the Leightons. She was housekeeper as well
as secretary, and she let the bills mount in an alarming manner,

"Lo-ar, Mrs. Leighton," she would say from time to time, "that
grocer's bill seems every bit as high as it was last month, I can't
think why it is, when I really do try to keep it down."

But my mother didn't worry. Bills weren't of much importance.
They could always wait to be paid. Walmy was, in fact, entirely
suited to our way of living, and, loving us so deeply, she never
realized how completely different we were from the family of the
"dear Canon."

She was our timepiece in life. Each morning the front door bell
rang at five minutes to ten, and rain, fog, snow or thunder, influenza
or bronchitis, nothing prevented her arrival. In the thirteen years
that I knew her to be coming to the house, I don't think she missed
one day of work. She always gripped an umbrella in her right hand,
whatever the weather, and as she walked she jerked this arm with
the umbrella backwards and forwards, like the piston of an engine.
When she looked upwards to us at the nursery window she waved
the umbrella vigorously in the air.

It would be interesting to know how many thousands upon
thousands of words Walmy had written by hand during those years.
There was a long time when my mother had no typewriter, and
everything was put on paper with a pen. It must have been exhaust-
ing work, for Walmy had never learnt shorthand. Once my mother
had started, she went ruthlessly on with her dictating over the
hours, as she flung herself more and more into the destinies of her
characters. And poor Walmy covered the sheets of manuscript
paper with her handwriting which, though scribbled at a great pace,
yet had to be legible enough for the printers to decipher.

But one day my mother succumbed to progress. She bought a
typewriter.

"Lo-ar, Mrs. Leighton,'' sobbed Walmy as she looked at its
Complicated mechanism. "The good Lord gave us hands to write

AS THE DEAR CANON SAID 163

with. He didn't mean us to use contraptions like this. I'll never be
able to learn it. I know I won't."

Her tears fell upon the terrifying machine. She did not belong
to the age of mechanization.

But my mother was insistent*

"Nonsense, Miss Walmisley," she said, "You've got to learn.
Why, if I go on sending in my manuscripts written by hand it'll look
as though Fm not a success. All the best people these days are
getting typewriters."

And so over many weeks Walmy struggled with the typewriter.
She stayed to the midday dinner, in order that she might learn to
type without interrupting my mother's work. Tears continued to
fall, until it was a wonder that the machine did not get rusty.

"If Walmy can't change with the times," my mother told my
father, "I'll have to force myself to be really hardhearted, and send
her away."

Walmy was finding life very difficult.

Miss Annie M. C. Walmisley had a selfish sister who insisted
upon being looked after by her. And so, when Wahny had finished
working for my mother and walked more than two miles home to
her Bayswater flat, she had to do all her housework and marketing
before walking back the same two miles to our house for the eve-
ning's dictating.

She adored this sister Mary, and thought her the most beautiful
and intellectual of women. Actually Mary looked like one of
Cinderella's ugly sisters.

"It's perfectly obvious that Mary Walmisley drinks too much
coffee," my mother would remark. "Look at her dry brown skin.
It's like an old piece of leather. That's why nothing on earth will
make me drink a cup of coffee no, not even a demitasse after
dinner. It's almost as though the coffee leaks through the stomach
into the blood stream."

My family detested this selfish sister and saw as little of her as

164 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

'possible. But Walmy was so proud of her that on the occasion of
one of our garden parties at Vallombrosa she begged to have her
invited.

"It will give a cosmopolitan touch to the gathering/* Walmy
explained.

It had so happened that many years earlier Miss Mary Walmis-
ley accompanied a family to China for a few weeks, as governess
to their daughter. She never forgot this. It permeated her life and
gave her a sense of superiority over her sister.
, "What's Paris, I ask you?" she boasted to Walmy. "I tell you,
Annie, it's all very well for you always to be bragging about stay-
ing in Paris at the Hotel Meurice, but when it comes to China,
Paris seems like a suburb of London/*

And so, in the middle of the garden party, as the guests were
grouped around watching the arrivals, the imported butler an-
nounced in a loud voice that everyone could hear: "Miss Mary
Walmisley, from China." Everybody turned to look, as the visitor
from the Far East appeared, and our little Walmy trotted in proudly
behind her, unannounced.

This was one of the peak moments in Walmy*s life.

Walmy gave us such a glowing account of her sister's brain that
one year, during the summer, when Mary was in Lowestoft for a
holiday, our mother was persuaded to use her as a tutor for Roland.
This worked for a short time, but pretty soon Roland began to find
that he knew about as much as she could teach him. For several
days Walmy went about weeping, while possible successors arrived
at the house to be interviewed. And when my mother finally decided
upon the bearded old man called Mr, Strickland, Walmy did every-
thing she could to turn us against him.

The bespectacled old creature arrived each morning on the
tricycle that he persisted in riding, his flowing beard and his square
black hat and frock coat making him look exactly like a caricature
of a professional magician. Unfortunately for poor Walmy, he and

AS THE DEAR CANON SAID 165

Mary met one day, when she was fetching a book she had left
behind by mistake. As luck would have it, instead of hating her
rival this leather-skinned woman took a violent fancy to him. It was
mutual, and it was based upon a common love for the Swiss

Alps.

"What did I tell you?" laughed our mother, who was highly
amused about the whole affair. "It's always the governess and
tutor class that goes to Switzerland and loves mountains. This just
shows you how right I am in condemning George for spending his
holidays there. Nobody with an iota of romance in his blood could
endure it. Nothing wiH ever take me one step inside that country."

We would see these two romantic creatures together sometimes
along the Front, the old professor standing against his tricycle as he
gesticulated into the sky, and "Miss Mary" looking from him to the
sky and from the sky back, enraptured, to him. We supposed they
were both seeing imaginary mountain peaks. But I think Walmy
wasn't so sure. Anyhow, she went about that summer in a state of
gloom, and my mother was heard to say to my father that if Miss
WaJmisley's nerves didn't get less jumpy she'd have to get rid of her.
I don't know how far this romance would have gone if Mr. Strick-
land hadn't suddenly died of a stroke. The emotional excitement
had proved more than his age could stand. Once more Walmy had
her sister to herself.

But back in St John's Wood Walmy continued to have her
little struggles. The typewriter was not the only product of this
mechanized age which bothered her. My mother thought it was due
to her to have a telephone

"All the best people arc hstaTEng telephones. And I shall make
you answer it," my mother told Walmy. "Not only will that save
me trouble, but it will make IDC look more dignified."

As my mother had ordered her adorers never to disturb her
during the working hours of the morning, she could be certain that
when the bdl rang before midday it would not be any of them.

166 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

For they dared not disobey her. No servant was allowed to touch the
sacred instrument, and I was deputed to answer it when the family
was out. Both Walmy and I were scared out of our wits at having to
lift the receiver. We never rationalized this terror, but I imagine we
feared an electric shock.

None of us were conditioned to electricity. My mother con-
sidered it dangerous, and refused to have anything to do with it,

"But it's all nonsense to confuse the telephone with electricity,"
she explained. "The telephone is something quite apart. It is when
it comes to electric Hght that I put my foot down. It's all very well
to point out that people in the neighborhood already use it, but I
am deeply suspicious of it, I wouldn't so much mind having it in a
new house down at Lowestoft, you will remember, we are quite
up-to-date in our lighting system but I am afraid of a short
circuit in this old St. John's Wood house. It might set the place on
fire."

And so the study was lit by oil lamps right through the years
of my childhood, because my mother didn't trust gas, either. There
might be an unnoticed leakage, which could suffocate us. For some
reason I never discovered, she made a distinction that certain rooms
and not others were permitted gas Hght The dining room and the
day nursery had incandescent gas lamps, which gave a depressing
pale cold light and made a mournful singing sound when the air
got into the pipes; but we never went to bed by anything but
candlelight, and the drawing room on the rare occasions when it
was used was lit by candles.

But the exciting moment came when my mother decided to
be thoroughly progressive. We installed a gas fire in the front draw-
ing room. Not even Walmy was allowed to touch this. Only my
mother might light it. It was lit once a week, on Saturday afternoons.

Saturday afternoon was my mother's At Home Day. This was
a serious ritual. A line of carriages and, later on over the years,
private cars, stood before the garden wall. We would have con-

AS THE DEAR CANON SAID-* 167

sidered the family was "slipping" if the line had stopped before it
turned the corner of Abbey Road and continued up Marlborough

Road.

"The last carriage is as far as the house with the green gate.
It has never reached past the doctor's garden before this/ 5 Evelyn
and I told each other with pride, as we returned home from our
walk on an especially successful At Home Day.

But though we enjoyed counting the carriages, we were fright-
ened of these At Home Days because we had to be prepared,
dressed in our best party clothes, in case some female visitor might
"want to see the children." This was never encouraged by our
mother, as she considered it bad for us; but sometimes it was
unavoidable.

"If I refuse to let you come down," she told us, "the rumor will
run around that you've got skin disease or a harelip or something,"

When we were called to the drawing room, we were made to
shake hands and be polite. We dreaded this, because we always
felt we might say the wrong things, and be punished for it next day.
Then, too, we had been told to keep our eyes from roving to the
silver cake stand with the little round buttered buns and the cocoa-
nut cakes and jumbles. We had bought all these things that same
morning, on our walk with Nanny, and now we were greedy for

them.

We liked the smell of kid gloves and sable muffs, ostrich feather
boas, Parma violets and waxed moustaches, and listened for the
particular sound of kid gloves being eased on at the moment of
departure. These gloves seemed always too narrow across the palms,
so that we were afraid of shaking hands with the ladies, in case
we should split the precious kid. But too often the visitors wanted to
pat us, which we hated. We were glad when each At Home Day
was over. So too, was our mother.

"There's nothing really to be gained by them," she said. "You
can't ever get to know anyone when you're not alone with them.

168 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

The only thing to be said in favor of the institution is that it clears
me of unexpected visitors for the remaining six days of the week."

The one real excitement for us on At Home Day was this new
gas fire. Immediately after the midday dinner on Saturday, our
mother braced herself for the adventure. Newspapers were torn in
long strips and twisted into tapers with which to apply the light
For it was such a dangerous undertaking that you should be as far
removed from it as possible. My mother wrapped a cloth around her
head, lest her straw-colored hair get smoky, and cautiously turned
the jet of the stove, having carefully seen that, whatever the weather
outside, the front drawing room window should be opened a little
at the top so that, should there be an unnoticed escape of gas, we
would not be suffocated to death before we knew what had
happened. Each time my mother applied the lighted newspaper
there was a loud explosion, and the fire seemed to have backfired.
We waited in suspense for the moment "when the flame at last
should burn blue instead of a flickering yellow; for that meant it
was properly lit. But with each successive try the fumes smelt
stronger, until the whole of the front drawing room seemed strangely
unattractive as the setting for a fashionable At Home.

"Really, Robert," my mother said in exasperation, as she opened
the windows wider to let out the fumes, "I don't see what is to be
gained by having this gas affair. I have to let all the damp air in
so that we shan't be suffocated. If it weren't that the best people are
installing gas fires I'd send it back and go on with ordinary coal.
Besides, I'm perfectly certain these fires dry the skin and give you
Crinkles."

And so, each Saturday, Walmy had to place bowk of water in
front of the gas fire and on top of any flat surface she could
find in tlie drawing room, in order that the air might be kept moist.
My mother was not going to let progress damage her complexion.

But down on the East Coast there was neither a telephone nor
a gas fire. Life was far simpler.

AS THE DEAR CANON SAID 169

It was during the summer half of the year, when Walmy lived in
the house with us at Lowestoft, that we could really enjoy her. She
slept in a room with a skylight, on the half landing, and within this
room with its violent yellow distempered walls, she kept her Skye
terrier Cona, Gona had been the runt of one of Tita's litters, and she
never seemed to catch up with her brothers and sisters. But if she
were a puny creature, she yet possessed the virtue of patience., She
waited in this bedroom through the long mornings when my mother
was dictating to Wahny, and never once, so far as we heard, did
she misbehave herself. The bedroom, it is true, did smell most
extraordinarily doggy but then, that was an odor my family was
accustomed to, and even liked. Unfortunately, our dogs seemed
imbued with snobbishness, and couldn't stand Cona. They treated
her like a presuming poor relation, and fierce dog fights occurred
whenever Cona was taken for a walk.

"Run along to the kitchen and get me a bucket of cold water
to dash over their heads," my father shouted to me as we hauled
the fighting dogs over the garden gate. They hung there, on either
side of the wooden gate, held together by the teeth of the one in the
jaw of the other, until the shock of the cold water loosened the grip.

My mother then invariably scolded Walmy for letting Gona be
seen by Kelpie or Roy, and Wahny would sob into a .soaked
handkerchief, and go and bind up Cona's wounds.

But these out-of-door fights weren't half as bad as the fights
that took place in the house. Walrny opened her bedroom door at
midday, to take Cona on to the Front for a few minutes, to "makfc
herself comfortable" before dinner. Kelpie had followed my mother
up the stairs, on the way to her bedroom. The two dogs met at
Walm/s open door. The fight took place in Walmy's bedroom,
where there was no way to separate them.

"Robert, come quickly!" shouted my mother. But he did not
hear. In desperation she climbed the steep stairs to his front room
those stairs she hated climbing and found him calmly looking out

170 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

to sea through his telescope, while she had supposed him to be busy
writing. She never trusted him up there so much alone after she
discovered this; it is no wonder he began to dislike Cona. The fight
was a terrible affair. Both dogs had to be sewn up, and there was a
dark stain of blood all over the matting upon Walmy's bedroom
floor.

But we took these fights in our stride, for our Eves were spent
among so many dogs of both sexes that there was nothing unusual
in such complications. Although we were never told the reason for
it, we were made to help segregate the sexes at certain times of the
year. Of course, having read the Manual of Medical Jurisprudence
fron| cover to cover, we knew the bitches were in heat; but we
managed to assume a childlike innocence when our father said that
on no account were we to take Selina for a walk with Bonnie until
we had been given permission.

From the incomparable vantrje poitit of the nursery window we
watched the love affairs of the Leighton kennels, and saw Nellie the
cook rush out to disentangle the deerhound from the amorous
clutches of a tiny mongrel that belonged, of all things, to the car-
penter who came to mend a loose plank in the cabin at the bottom
of the garden. The suitor was not even a gentleman's dog. We hoped
that Nellie was too late, for it would be fun to see what sort of
puppies could be half deerhound and half tiny yellow mongrel Un-
fortunately the cook was just in time.

And so we did not sympathize with Walmy as much as we ought
to have done, when these dog fights took their toll of poor little
Cona. It was far too frequent an occurrence.

Sunday was the day we saw most of Walmy. My mother left
her free then, because she knew her secretary believed in keeping
the Sabbath. Every Sunday morning while we were in East Anglia,
we sat with her on the pink upholstered window seat in the drawing
room after breakfast until we had to get dressed for church in our

AS THE DEAR CANON SAID-* 171

starched white piqu clothes. She produced one of the books from
the twelve volume set of Wild and Garden Flowers, and we Were
made to guess the names of the flowers. Outside the window the
sun danced upon rows of white marguerites at the top of the
terrace and sparkled on the North Sea. There were no brown sailed
fishing boats upon this sea, for it was the Sabbath. There was no-
body out upon the Front, because everyone was at home, dressing
for church. Through the opened window came the salt smell of
the sea, while from the dining room drifted the lingering odor of
Sunday morning kippers.

My mother's Scotch adorer had arrived to greet her. At the
other end of the house, in the front hall, he was singing "Auld
Robin Grey" in a wheezy voice. He sat there in his Highland kilts,
with a posy of honeysuckle and heather in one hand. When he had
finished his song he would pin these flowers on "Mea's" bosom. Our
mother pretended to listen to his singing, but half the time she was
planning the next instalment of one of her serials.

While this was happening, our father was in the back garden,
tending his rose bushes.

"If Alexander thinks he's the only one to bring her ftowers,
he's mistaken," he muttered as he cut some of his pirik rosebuds.
"These will put him in his place."

Out in the kitchen Nellie was preparing the Sunday dinner;
there would be the inevitable roast rolled rib of beef, with York-
shire pudding and roast potatoes and a vegetable, and perhaps a
gooseberry pie with custard, among the many sweets.

Everything around us this Sunday morning breathed security
and order. In a coaxing voice Walmy said to me: "Lo-ar, Clare,
just you think again. You can't have forgotten it. Yes yes that's
it That's it. Ciner-aria." There was a rustle of pages as the next
colored picture was reached. It was Evelyn's turn to guess the
flower's name*

172 -TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

But the flower book was not supposed to occupy too long, for
after we had guessed our allowance of flower names Walmy made
us look at the pictures in the Child's Bible*

"Nobody can say you children have an overdose of religion,"
she sighed. "You're almost like a pair of little heathens during the
winter months when I'm not with you on Sundays. Lo-ar, you
know, sometimes it really worries me when I come to think about it
especially when I remember how you are exposed to Nuise's
Baptist beliefs. If I'm not to be held responsible before the Lord
God when I die, I'll have to do all I can now, in the summer."

And so, as the best way to prepare us for church, Wahny read
this Child's Bible to us. The wheezy singing of Scotch love songs
from the front hall blended into the frightening story of the flood.

Our mother left Walmy a free hand with us where religion was
concerned.

"Aifter all. Miss Walmisley can't do the children any harm/*
she decided. "Fortunately Walmy objects to any High Church
antics that might put wrong ideas into their heads, and her religion
has the solid lack of fervor of true good breeding. If a woman is a
lady she can be trusted in all things."

We were taken to church by Walmy each Sunday morning
while we were at Lowestoft. We hated the long hot walk in our
starched Sunday clothes, and dreaded passing through the church-
yard, among the graves. It scared us, for Walmy often talked about
death. She had a literal belief in the Resurrection of the Body, and
disapproved of heavy tombstones.

"Lo-ar," she said with a sigh, as she noticed some especially
pompous graves, "if they think it's friendly to give that poor dead
creature all that heavy weight to lift at the Judgment Day, if s
not my idea of kindness. When I die I don't want anything on my
chest A small stylish headstone will be quite enough. I'll be able to
rise out from my grave more quickly and easily that way/*

By the time we reached the entrance to the church, Evelyn

AS THE DEAR CANON SAID 173

and I were almost trembling with fear. We were a pair of frightened
creatures, and whenever we were among a number of people,
anxiously sought the possibility of an exit. We were not accustomed
to crowds. We had never been allowed to play with other children.

"That there Miss Clare and Master Evelyn, all they wants to
do is to 'ide behind a big bush so that they can't see nobody and no-
body can't see them/* our old nurse used to say*

And she was perfectly right No one of the grownups knew
what we suffered on summer Sunday mornings in St. Margaret's
Church.

Before we started out from the house we compared notes:

"Do you feel 'thundery 5 ?* we would ask each other,

"Thundery" was the word we used to denote the sense of
anxiety that came over us. This expression must, I think, have
originated from our terror of being caught in a thunderstorm on the
long country walks with our nurse. It was accompanied by horrible
feelings in our tummies, which made us wonder these Sundays if we
wouldn't have to slip out of the church, somewhere to the back
of the churchyard among the gravestones, during the sermon.

This terror of an internal upset was shared by our mother.

"It's all very well for people to tell me it's nonsense," she said.
"But I know better. After all, my inside is my own, isn't it? And
who should know how it behaves if I don't? I tell you for a fact,
that if I don't watch every single thing I eat for a full forty-eight
hours before I take a jourtiey I'm in for trouble. Above all, I must
keep off fruit or vegetables.'*

In spite of these precautions, though, our mother mistrusted
her inside, and about an hour before she was due to start whether
it were a journey to London by train, or merely a visit somewhere
in the neighborhood she dosed herself liberally with Dr. J. Collis
Brown's Chlorodyne, and carried a bottle of it, in her purse, along
with several lumps of sugar upon which to take some more in an
emergency.

174 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

But there were certain foods she would never eat, though she
might be staying safely at home. She feared mushrooms and
shellfish.

"It's tempting death even to take one mouthful of them/' she
said. "They're bound to give you ptomaine poisoning. It isn't for
nothing that mushrooms smell of the tomb. I may make an ex-
ception in the case of shrimps, because, after all, they're so small,
but when it comes to things like lobsters and oysters and crabs, why,
if you're fool enough to taste such sewage-eating things you deserve
to die."

Walmy always insisted on sitting right up at the front of the
church, in the first pew. This was especially terrifying for us, be-
cause there would be so much farther to go if suddenly we had to
rush away with an upset tummy. Besides, we dreaded being seen
by everybody. But Walmy felt that the Walmisley dignity demanded
such a position.

"After all," she said, "it would be unseemly for us to sit any-
where else, when you come to remember that our pew at St Mary
Abbot's is right under the dear Canon's very nose."

Nobody else in our family went to church. Roland considered
that he was too old to go with "the children," and our father and
mother declared they hadn't time.

"But whether or not I choose to go makes no difference," our
mother said. "On the whole I thoroughly approve of Walmy taking
the children to church. For one thing, it's excellent discipline foi
them to have to sit still during the sermon. They've had very little
of that kind of training compared with what I was subjected to in
my own childhood, Papa never forgot he was a commanding officer
and he would order me to sit still in a chair for an hour or
two on end, without saying one single word, simply as a lesson
in self-control. ... I hope, Miss Walmisley, that you are particu-
larly careful not to let the children fidget when the sermon is
long?"

AS THE DEAR CANON SAID 175

It is not surprising that Evelyn and I never enjoyed going to
church. We did not feel close to God.

As the months at Lowestoft passed, and our mother turned out
her flood of dictated words, or listened to the adoration of Judge
Talbot or the Scotch love songs of Alexander, a pattern was being
' threaded into the family o* which she was but dimly aware. It was
chiefly Walmy who threaded this pattern. With her we lived the
year's seasonal occasions, which to us, at our age, were of enormous
importance.

Each April, soon after our arrival on the East Coast, we tres-
passed in the Gorton Woods for primroses.

"Quietly, Clare. Quietly, I say," Walmy whispered as we crept
past the gamekeeper's cottage. "And if you hear a sound just lie
down flat on the ground, among the undergrowth, and don't move.
Never mind if you do tear your coat in the brambles or on the
barbed wire fencing, I'll see to it that Nanny doesn't punish you.
Lo-ar, to think that a man could buy up all this beautiful woodland,
and keep it so strictly to himself, just by making such a silly thing
as mustard."

For the woods were owned by Mr. Golman, of mustard fame.

We returned home with baskets filled with bunches of prim-
roses. And then, to our delight, our mother would wear our prim-
roses in her hair and pin a clump of the flowers in the front of her
dress. She did not mind that they had been stolen.

In September we obeyed another ritual, and were driven by
Tarbox, in his governess trap, along the lanes near Blundeston and
Hopton, to gather ripe blackberries. When this took place the
Leighton family feasted upon blackberry and apple pie and stewed
blackberries for many days.

On these occasions, like a character in a fairy tale, Walmy
always had to be back in her place facing the typewriter at half-
past six in the evening; neither coppice nor lane held the power to
deflect her from duty.

176 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

"Just one more basketful/ 5 we would plead. "Please, please let
us stay a little longer,"

But Walmy's face would grow stern as she asked Tarbox, for
the exact time.

"None of that wheedling, you two/' she always answered. "You
know I'll turn into a pumpkin if I'm even half a minute late. n

And sometimes she sounded so convincing that we almost
believed hen

Occasionally, though, when special friends happened to be
visiting us, or staying in the neighborhood, our mother gave Walmy
an evening off. To celebrate this she took us by trolley car to the
end of the line, past the town of Lowestoft, where the North Sea
was eroding the land. We returned by way of one of the pieis, and
the fish market, and because she was still free, Wahny came to the
nursery to eat with us, and there were shrimps for high tea.

Our lives in the nursery were such ordered existences that these
treats were tremendously exciting. The excitement was intensified
by a sense of danger, for we knew very well that had our mother
discovered about these expeditions she would have forbidden them.
She disapproved of our going in any public conveyance, expecting
us to catch scarlet fever. We kept them secret even from Roland.

Walmy may have made the wheels of life run smoothly for our
mother, but our father disapproved of her.

"Her ugliness is a perpetual eyesore/' he moaned. "And besides*
Chummie, she comes between us. Never do I get a chance of seeing
you alone, except when I'm asleep at night. And if that woman
could, she'd spy on me even then."

He felt convinced that Walmy was his enemy. And he may
have been right, for she had no trust in men, and disapproved of
them. There was little doubt that she continually watched my father
from hidden corners of the house, to see if he were behaving him-
self with the servants.

But to us in the nursery Walmy meant escape from the old

AS THE DEAR CANON SAID 177

nurse. She also meant exuberance and warm hugs, which we never
got from our nurse. For this old Gloucestershire Baptist who con-
trolled our days countenanced neither gaiety nor laughter. Already
in her seventies, all she demanded of us was that we keep healthy,
still and quiet. Our bowels must work regularly; our bodies must be
kept warm; and twice a day we must take long walks, slowly, one
of us on each side of her. Never must we run or play.

This nurse was a godsend to our mother. She made it possible
for her to combine work with having a family. Because the old
woman was so strict our mother realized that she could leave us
entirely in her care. For she agreed with the nurse that healthy
bowels and obedience were the chief things in childhood that
mattered.

"Disobedience is a sign of weakness," Mother would tell us from
time to time on her hurried visits to the nursery. "The strong
character obeys. The weak one has to prove its strength by disobey-
ing. I want to be proud of my children. They must be strong."

Old Nanny Vowles came to the family soon after I was born.
She had taken the place of a nurse who had turned out to be a
violent Salvationist.

"Not that I really mind what the religious views of my servants
are," our mother explained. "But when things came to such a pass
that Nurse Newby was covering the walls with texts about being
washed in the blood of the Lamb, and spending most of her days
doing a regular war dance around the nursery, and banging on a
tambourine and shouting that she was 'saved,' it was about time to
make a change. Now Nanny Vowles may be a Baptist, but she does
keep her religious enthusiasms pretty much to herself."

Actually, though, Nanny obtruded her religion far more than
our mother knew.

The Baptists in England were a rigid sect. Our nurse was a
devout Baptist and she had a propriety of behavior that exas-
perated us.

178 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

Oddly enough, I remember that one of the main things I resented
was her attitude of shame towards the human body.

"One of these days, Miss Clare, when you stands before the
Judgment Seat, you'll be sorry as you 'adn't more sense of decency
when you was young," she warned me. " 'ere you goes around the
nursery in your birthday suit, and for all you knows the dear Lord
may be 'aving to 'ide 'is eyes in shame. Now I 'ave much more
respect for the Lord Jesus, and when I takes a bath I always sees
to it as 'ow I places a big towel over the whole of the top of the
bath tub, with nothing but my 'ead and shoulders a* showing, so as
not to distress the dear Lord with the sight of my nakedness."

With a similar feeling of chivalry she did her entire dressing and
undressing each day beneath a flannelette nightgown. We used to
watch her from our beds in the night nursery, but never did we
manage to see anything more intimate than her figure when she
emerged, in her combinations, her grey flannel petticoat, her stays
and a wonderful garment with two inset ovals in the front for her
bosoms, that she called her "slip body."

In view of all this, I acted with obtuse boldness when I begged
her once to pose for me as the naked Andromeda. This happened
while I had my phase of painting mythological pictures.

Finding it impossible to imagine what a female looked like, I had
tried to use my own immature figure as the model for this ambitious
picture of Andromeda chained to the rock. One evening, as I stood
before the mirror in the bathroom, pencil in my hand, trying in
vain to take the pose of this naked adult female, Nanny discovered
me.

"Oh, so it gets worse and worse/ 5 she thundered. "Not content
with going around with nothing on, you 'as to 'ave the evil thoughts
of making a picture of your nakedness. If you don't see the error
of your ways I'll take all your pencils and paints and paper away
from you and make you sew hems."

AS THE DEAR CANON SAID 179

J was so hurt and desperate that nothing mattered to me but
my picture,

"Oh, Nanny/ 5 I pleaded, "Please please won't you pose for
me just this once?"

Ignoring the compliment to her seventy year old body, the old
nurse forgot her place and gave me a severe whipping. In addition,
she went in a fury to my mother and threatened to leave this dirty-
minded family. The only way my mother could appease her for
she dared not let her go was by taking away my paints for an
entire month.

Considering her views on the human body, I cannot help won-
dering if our nurse did not sometimes feel shocked at the way her
mistress seemed to have no sense of sin or shame where her own
body was concerned. For our mother never noticed it when her
clothes failed to cover her, and often parts of her neck and shoulders
showed which were never intended to be seen. Not only this, but she
had some pictures of voluptuous naked ladies hanging on the walls
of her bedroom. These must surely have upset the old woman, but
being a well trained servant she never so much as breathed a word
or hinted what she felt about the disreputable family.

Each Sunday evening Nanny dressed herself in her best clothes
to go to the local Baptist Chapel Lying in bed in the night nursery,
watching, we scarcely recognized her when she was ready. To us she
seemed to belong with her uniforms: starched white piqu6 in the
summer, thick grey cloth in the winter, and always the black bonnet
with nodding feathers, tied beneath her chin. Her boots creaked as
she walked, and her breath was sweet with cinnamon and hore-
hound for she had a passion for a certain brand of herbal tablets,
threepence a tin, that she bought for a nonexistent cough.

As she sailed out of the night nursery door, we were filled with
longing to go with her. There was the excitement of the forbidden
about the Chapel, as well as tales she told us of the baptisms per-

i8o TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

formed there. But our mother ordered her never to take us into this
chapel. Nonconformist chapels belonged to the lower classes, and
we were not to be exposed to them.

There was no love lost between Wahny and the old nurse. For
one thing, Walmy felt very strongly about religion, and had nothing
but contempt for the Baptist Church. You could scarcely be a friend
of "the dear Canon" without feeling this. Because she feared the
Nonconformist atmosphere was influencing us, she snatched us away
from the old Baptist whenever she could. The nurse, on the other
hand, had that antagonism towards Walmy which is always felt,
my mpther said, towards somebody who is "betwixt and between."
She never knew whether or not she had to obey her, or where she
stood in relation to her. For though Walmy was most certainly a
lady, yet she was, also, an employee of our mother which put her
in the servant category. The only thing to do, the old nurse must
have decided, was to resent her. And this she most certainly did.

The subtle complications and shades of social difference in the
world made life very difficult for us in the nursery.

II.

Education for the Leighton Children

"The 'finishing school* I went to was a very prim place," my
mother delighted in telling me whenever she thought I was demand-
ing too much freedom. "It was so correct that the headmistress
sewed flannel petticoats around the waists of the little naked cupids
supporting the chandeHers in the school drawing room. The pupils,
you see, had to be kept innocent and pure, for they were the daugh-
ters of British diplomats, and might one day become the wives of
ambassadors. And they were never taught much because it was far
more important to give them grace and subtlety than to fill their
brains with facts out of textbooks. You can always leave those facts
to the lower classes who will never have to govern."

My mother had very definite ideas about education for girls.
While the family fortunes were in luck, her own schooling had con-
sisted of short stays at this ultrafashionable establishment in the
aristocratic town of Tunbridge Wells. But when the family funds
ran low she was removed from it and remained for long periods of
time at home, doing whatsoever she pleased, until the next legacy

181

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arrived from a deceased relative. Her parents had no interest in her
education. Although they liked her to associate with these diplomats'
daughters, they sent her to school chiefly in order to keep her out
of mischief, in the same way that she had been dispatched to a
convent in France, as a small child, to be out of reach of the window
cleaner with whom she had fallen in love.

This idea of school as a place of safety for a straying young
female persisted in her, so that when, at the age of thirteen, I fell in
love with a lawyer friend whose portrait I had been allowed to paint,
she threatened to send me away to a boarding school. As weeks
passed and I fell more deeply in love, the paint on the canvas became
thicker and yet thicker, till it must have been almost an inch in
depth. Apparently my mother had noticed my lovesick condition,
and was beginning to worry about me, for one day I happened to
overhear a conversation between her and my father.

"Robert," she was saying, "if this affair goes on any longer
there's nothing to be done but send Clare off to Miss Dothie's as a
boarder. This man's intentions are not honest. He's merely playing
with her. Besides, he's far too old. And he drinks whiskeys and sodas
at teatime, which I strongly disapprove of. I'll give them one week
more and then if things haven't changed, I'll send her away."

She was probably remembering her window cleaner,

I don't know how she supposed the situation could have altered
in one week. If I had not happened to overhear this talk I would
certainly have been yet deeper in love, and the paint on the portrait
would have stood out even half an inch thicker. As it was, I told the
lawyer what I had heard, and suggested an elopement. But he
never came to the house again. I was not sent back to school.
And some little time later I recovered from my infatuation.

Actually I would have enjoyed returning to school, for it had
nearly broken my heart to be taken away when I was twelve. But my
mother informed me that already I had received more schooling than
she had, and far more than was necessary.

EDUCATION FOR LEIGBTOM CHILDREN 183

"School/* she said, "takes all the character and charm from a
woman. Suppose Juliet had been sent to high school or college,
Shakespeare wouldn't even have found her interesting enough to
write a play about, and most certainly Romeo could not have loved
her with such passion* Besides, if you do not need schooling in order
to be able to write books, much less do you need it in order to become
an artist . . . And don't forget, my child, that I had my first novel
published when I was only sixteen The Lady of Balmerino; and a
three volume novel, at that/*

But when I remember the extent of my schooling, I scarcely
think my mother could have had even less education than I. The
old nurse started me off with the usual "A cat sat on a mat," out of a
paper-bound speller, and gave me copybooks to teach me how to
write. Then a woolly old lady called Miss Birks appeared on the
scene. She was completely ignorant and I cannot imagine how or
why she called herself a governess.

"But she was quite good enough for you," my mother told me
later on in my life. "It would have been a downright waste to have
given you anyone better when you were so young."

I twisted Miss Amelia Birks round my little finger. I never
learned the homework she gave me, but I always managed to know
one of the subjects better than the others, and when she asked me,
in her gentle voice: "And what's your next lesson, dear?" I would
leave the one I knew best to that moment when I thought my
mother was coming into the dining room.

This schooling took place in the dining room in St. John's
Wood, and often we had to wait until the breakfast table had been
cleared before we could start. The smell of bacon and toast hung
in the air and seemed to rest upon my school books. Every day at
about eleven o'clock my mother entered the room to fetch
her unvarying refreshment of a glass of Burgundy and two Osborne
biscuits seemMg to forget the cold bacon on toast that had been
saved from the breakfast table for this occasion.

184 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

"Good morning, Miss Birks," she always said in a detached tone
of voice. "And is Clare getting on well with her lessons?"

If I were lucky, I was at that moment repeating, without fault
or pause, the one lesson I had learnt* Sometimes I miscalculated the
moment of my mother's arrival, and was caught; and then Miss
Birks, anxious to keep her job, managed to help me out.

These lessons were varied with music lessons in the icy cold
back drawing room, and dancing lessons with Evelyn in the same
arctic temperature. Miss Birks put on a pair of black satin quilted
slippers and padded round like a baby elephant. Her breath always
smelt of onions, even in the early morning* She wasn't supposed to
play the piano for these dancing lessons, lest it should disturb our
mother at her work in the study. And so she steered first one and
then the other of us around with her, breathing onions upon our
faces, while she wheezed:

One, two, three-four-five,
Catching fishes all alive.
Why did you let them go?
Because they bit my fingers so.

In this way we managed to learn the steps of the polka. But it
was not so easy to learn the set dances that were still the fashion
those days, such as the lancers, the quadrille, or Sir Roger de
Coverley, because we had to imagine the many partners who
weren't there. One day Miss Birks hinted to our mother that she
knew several little boys and girls who could come and learn these
dances with us. But our mother forbade her to bring to the house
these possible spreaders of measles and scarlet fever, and we went on
learning the dances alone. We, circled round nonexistent people.
We held hands with phantoms. We were whirled by imaginary
partners. And Miss Birks jigged up and down, with her cheeks
growing pinker and pinker, twisting and twirling in her black satin

EDUCATION FOR LEIGHTON CHILDREN 185
quilted dippe* the feathers in her bonnet tossing, as she hummed

the tune for the dance.

All this was warming to the constitution, especially on a damp,
1A winter's day; but it was strangely ironic. For we were never
TL, to go to any parties or dances, and so there was little pur-
!Tin our learning these elaborate figures. But that, unfortunately,
did not strike me just then. I merely knew it was more exciting than
sitting in the dining room repeating my lessons.
Miss Birks also taught me music.

When it came to these music lessons, the problem of not dttturb-
in* my mother was more complicated. The playing had * be muted,
I Z it could not be heard beyond the closed doors of the back

drying room. I was accustomed to the way my

keys when she played, and the timid little tinkle 1*. Bjrksand

I produced from the piano seemed all wrong. My mother hated to

sound these days," she declared. "It is nearly
as common as the sight of washing on a line, for the world has come
to such a pass that the lower classes are forgettmg their places and
iy girl child of every greengrocer or plumberis being taught the
Diano in order that she may be changed overnight into a lady.
PW M Tmother felt especially bitter, because at Lowestoft our
had a daughter who was a musical genius. This htde

Wmcr, mad. the .ake of reporong the

i86 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

their children. And then it will be a sign of underbreeding to be
able to play."

There was not much enthusiasm over my music lessons.

Auntie Pollie, who specialized in the banjo, ventured to suggest
one day that perhaps it might be interesting if I were to be taught
the zither. It was a more uncommon instrument, she said. She even
gave me a small one for a Christmas present; but I never knew how
to play it. My mother had other ideas. She thought the harp might
be even better.

"But," she said, "it will be wiser to wait and see how Clare's
arms develop. The one advantage of the harp is that it shows off the
beauty of a woman's arms as nothing else does. Men love to see a
woman playing the harp. It gives her allure."

Meanwhile I continued learning the piano.

But the sounds of my playing could not possibly have pene-
trated the closed drawing room door to the world of the study. My
fingers were always so numb with the cold that I wouldn't have had
the strength to do more than brush the keys like a butterfly's wing.
For there was never any heating in the back drawing room. When
she came to us first Miss Birks bravely ignored this, but soon she
decided to wear her outdoor coat, and sometimes even her gloves,
as she sat at the piano by my side. This damp of a London winter
cannot be described. It has to be experienced, to be fully under-
stood. A film of near-freezing moisture seemed to hang over every-
thing. We always had some windows of the house open the whole
year long, whatever the temperature might be. The only time all
the windows were closed was during one of the London pea soup
fogs. My mother said that foggy air gave one pleurisy.

Although Wahny always found her way to Vallombrosa in the
thickest of these fogs, Miss Birks was less courageous, and sometimes
she failed to appear. But even when she had managed to reach the
house in the fog there would be no music lesson, for the only means

EDUCATION FOR LEIGHTON CHILDREN 187

of illumination in the back drawing room was a few candles, by the
light of which it was difficult to see the keys, I knew this for a fact
because my mother sometimes took it into her head to play the piano
at midnight, by the light o* one remote candle, and she struck many
wrong notes. Or so It seemed to me, listening enraptured, in a half-
asleep stupor, in the night nursery above.

My mother's playing was extraordinary. In my childhood I
thought it was the most wonderful thing this side of the music of the
spheres which I had read about, and would stay awake night after
night trying to hear. She banged the keys till the piano shook, and
Tita would sit by the drawing room door and give out a con-
tinuous howl. I never knew if the dog was approving or disapprov-
ing, but we were so accustomed to this howl that something would
have been lacking in my mother's playing if it had not existed. It
was like a strange violent duet. There was no variation of tone in
my mother's playing, and never a soft note. Looking back upon it
now, I do not see how she managed to make such a volume of
noise. But then, she was a mighty woman, as we knew when we were
spanked. There was the strength of the Amazon in her massive arms,
as they crashed down upon the keyboard.

In those days I had not heard anybody else play the piano
except Miss Birks, with her occasional strummed "one, two, three,
four, fives" for the dancing lesson, when she knew my mother had run
upstairs for a moment to her bedroom, beyond the sound from the
back drawing room, and once a year Walmy's sister Mary, who was
supposed to be a musical genius. Every winter we went to a tea
party at the Walmisleys' flat in Bayswater, and, as the grand
climax of the evening, Miss Mary sat and played us the Rachmani-
noff "Prelude."

"It's supposed to represent a man buried alive in a coffin by
mistake," Roland whispered to me each year. "And these are the
sounds of his trying to make himself heard."

i88 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

I trembled with fear as I listened. Miss Mary's playing, though
undistinguished and timid, terrified me so much that I did not
enjoy it,

My mother's repertory was limited. She generally played some-
what vamped accompaniments to popular sentimental songs, such as
"The Honeysuckle and the Bee." I used to look through her music
on top of the piano, when I was supposed to be wading through
Czerny exercises, with a feeling that within those garish colored
sheets lay glamour and romance.

"I very much want you to learn to play The Apache Dance/ "
my mother said to me one day as she handed me a sheet of music
with a passionate picture on its cover of a woman in the embrace
of a masked man. "It reminds me of Paris, and helps me with my
work. You may leave the drawing room door open when you're
playing it, so that I can hear from the study. And, by the way, I'd
like you to learn the 'Merry Widow Waltz* as soon as you are able
to play anything so advanced. I shall feel justified then in having
allowed you the extravagance of music lessons."

She condemned anything classical Uncle Jack tried his hardest
to reform her, but the only result was a remark that the f ustiness of
the Leighton family even ran into its taste in music. The Merry
Widow was her standard, and The Merry Widow it should remain.

And so, when Uncle Jack tried in vain to persuade her into going
to a concert with him, she gave one of her little flutey gurgles.

"Classical music is like tepid diluted boiled water," she said
"Your pet darling Beethoven is nothing but a stuffy old man with
a beard."

"But he had no beard, Fiorita Mia," Uncle Jack pleaded "Bien
Aim6e, I assure you he had no beard."

She was firm in her convictions, and even when Uncle Jack took
the trouble to bring along a photograph of his "pet darling
Beethoven," she remained adamant in her opinion.

"There may not be a beard visible on his physical face," she

EDUCATION FOR LEIGHTON CHILDREN 189

said. "But there's a beard evident upon the face of his soul. They're
all the same, whether it is your Beethoven or your Brahms, your
Mozart or your Bach. The only one of the whole crowd who would
ever have been capable of loving a woman was Chopin; and even he
could have learnt something of the art of love by going to The
Merry Widow. If you don't believe me, I'll put the dull Beethoven
record on the gramophone and then you'll see I'm right."

Some misguided friend had once given us one of the "Leonora
Overtures/' and my mother always used this to emphasise her
opinion. She considered it the epitome of dullness. In it there was
neither beauty nor rhythm. Above all, there was no passion. Music
should lilt with passion. It should throb with romance.

The nearest she ever achieved in tolerating classical music
apart from some Chopin, which only held its power over her because
it was woven into her sentimental feelings at that moment for
Uncle Jack, and because, after all, Chopin had been in love illicitly
with George Sand was almost to enjoy Mendelssohn's "Spring
Song." This was because Mr. Bowles's eyes had been seen to grow
moist while he heard me stumbling through it in the distant draw-
ing room,

"I want you to play the 'Spring Song* again this afternoon," my
mother commanded me sometimes when she felt Mr. Bowles was a
little detached. "I find it has a most softening effect upon George."

And I would put aside my five finger exercises.

But just then I despised Mendelssohn. I was finishing an orgy
of Grieg and discovering Brahms, and so it must have been in a per-
functory manner that I ran through the command performance, if
I could tell from the conversation I heard a little later, as I was
passing the study door.

"Funny," my mother was saying to Mr. Bowles. "Funny how
one can produce such an utterly unimaginative daughter. Clare has
neither looks nor charm. The looks don't matter, for some of the
world's sirens have been the most hideous of women. But charm is a

sgo TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

necessity. What do you suppose happened to make her so dull? To
think that an offspring of mine could play the 'Spring Song 9 with
such, complete lack of feeling and passion ! I simply cannot under-
stand it. Why, that music should be played with the kind of swimmy
feeling one has when one looks at an envelope written by somebody
one is in love with. That, as you know, my dear George, is, to me,
one of the most unfailing tests of whether one is in love with a man.
If I am in love with a man, I cannot even see clearly the address
he has written on the envelope. The writing is enchanted and
blurred, and if it weren't that the postman doesn't feel the same
about it, the letter would never reach its destination. Now you,
George, you have before now had this power over me. I have known
days when, as I came down to breakfast and saw a letter in that
exquisitely beautiful handwriting of yours, everything even beyond
the letter the eggs and bacon and the toast in the toast rack
swam before my eyes in a swirl of passion. But now I can look at
your handwriting on an envelope and say to Robert in quite a calm
tone of voice that George has a most distinguished handwriting,
hasn't he? 35

That afternoon George had started to hint that he needed a
holiday. My mother was determined to make him suffer.

But it was the first part of her talk with Mr, Bowles that
puzzled me. She had accused me of lack of feeling and passion. She
did not know that at that very moment this dull young daughter
of twelve was herself indulging in a violent love affair. Never yet
having met anyone of the opposite sex, I had flung the whole force
of my emotions into love for the woman who now taught me music.

A year or two before this, my mother had supposed me to be
beyond the scope of Miss Birks, and had sent me to a local dame
school. It was called The Elms, and it was typically a "dame school"
The standard of scholarship was grotesquely low, and because it was
a private concern there was no authority to dictate how it should
be run. One of the mistresses actually got a degree while I was at

EDUCATION FOR LEIGHTON CHILDREN 191

the school, and there was rejoicing over this. On every possible occa-
sion she had to appear, weighed down by her cap and gown, in order
that the parents of the girls might appreciate the high quality of her
teaching. But it was only the seniors who were privileged to come
anywhere near her.

This school was kept by a woman who would have fitted into
the world of the Brontes* She was tall, and straight as though she had
swallowed a poker, and her name was Miss Fanny Dothie. She was
a caricature of a schoolmistress. My mother never ceased to make
fun of her to me. She looked like an upright goose, and sailed into
a room as though she were running on invisible wires. So silently
did she appear in a dassroom that no one of us knew she was com-
ing until she loomed above us,

"The Elms won't do Clare any harm for just a little while," I
heard my mother say to my father. "All the teachers have got the
mark of the beast on them, of course; but a short stay there may
not damage her. And anyhow, she's not the sort to get emotional
about anything or anybody as I did over in that convent in France?*

But my mother had forgotten that I was her daughter, j

The music teacher whom I adored went by the unromantic
name of Miss Elsie Rooke. I would have liked her to be called some-
thing less commonplace, remembering how my mother had once
said that nobody with the name of Elsie could possibly be worth"
knowing. I would have liked her, also, to look more beautiful, but
my love soon managed to weave a veil of enchantment around every-
thing connected with her.

Never, I then supposed, had human being in this world felt
such love. My worship of her took the form of kissing the seat of
the chair she sat on, and the floor upon which she stood. If my
mother had known of this love, I might have gone up in her estima-
tion, and have been considered less of a Leighton than she feared;
but I kept it secret It was too holy to be discussed.

I grew suddenly envious of my mother's beauty. I remembered

rgs TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

how the old nurse had told me that I was "neither good looking
nor bad looking, but just passable/' and felt I must do something
about it, if I were to try to be worthy of my beloved. So I took to
stealing my mother's famous Cr&me Simon. The face cream she
rubbed so assiduously into her skin might, I imagined, give me
something of her beauty and her power. Each night, after my bath,
I slipped into her bedroom. No character in my mother's melo-
dramas lived more dangerously. But I rejoiced in my recklessness.
Had I not heard what my mother's heroines risked for their love?

I had to find my way about in the dark. I had, also, to be careful
not to knock anything over, and thus make a noise.

My mother's dressing table was an amazing assortment of
things. It was covered with empty Crime Simon jars, old pieces of
ribbon, jewel cases filled with rings, hair curlers and odd bits of red
wax that had been used to seal the envelopes of her manuscripts.
One or two postage stamps and some old love letters leaned against
the other empty jars, while dead flowers from the hair adornments
of many weeks lay sadly against the pincushion into which were
stuck numberless hatpins. Among the empty jars, I had to find that
particular pot of Crme Simon my mothfer was using. My fingers
strayed upon my mother's hair curlers, and suddenly I wondered
whether part of her power over her admirers lay in the beauty of
her yellow curjs. I thought of my own long hair, straight as a ruler,
with the wisps that hung around my neck and ears. If I could curl
and frizz these, I might not be so displeasing in the eyes of Miss
Rooke. From out of the collection of twisted, used hair curlers, I stole
four two for e^ch side of my face. Among my straight braids,
those days, appeared ridiculous frizzed curls.

But my mother noticed nothing of all this.

Unfortunately Miss Elsie Rooke disapproved of The Merry
Widow. She would not let me learn it, but said that I had the mak-
ings of a Brahms player. Until now J had obeyed my mother; but
love was stronger than dauehterlv obedience. With the insight of this

EDUCATION FOR LEIGHTON CHILDREN 193

passion, it seemed to me that suddenly I understood music, and all
that my mother had told me about it was wrong. I began to play
Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. I wanted to go to concerts. And my
mother, yearning from her study for the romantic sounds of the
"Spring Song," grew vexed at my stubbornness and threatened to
take me away from The Elms, where I was growing even colder
than before.

"I suppose it's the Leighton blood running through your veins,"
she sighed. "You have no conception of passion or romance or
anything colorful in life. You're nothing but a fusty puritan. That's
what comes of tying oneself with such a family, I suppose. Now
Roland has no Leighton in him. He, at least, has color."

Unknown to her, at that moment Roland was entranced with
Gregorian chant, which she would have considered worse even than
Beethoven. But as he continued to spend his pocket money on buying
her scarlet silk stockings she had no suspicion of his heresies.

"I may not be able to wear these scarlet stockings in the com-
mon light of day," she said, as she looked fondly at them on the
study table where they lay among quill pens and empty Stickphast
pots, "but that doesn't really matter. They give a meaning and a
glory to Ufe, even though I should never once put them on. It's
enough to be able to look at them. Thank goodness I have produced
one child who has understanding. And I don't forget how fortunate
I am, for where, I ask, would you find anyone of Roland's age
spending aU his spare time from his school work in setting Verlaine's
poems to music, or doing drawings of Spanish ladies with black
mantillas and crimson carnations in their hair? Most young males
think of nothing but cricket and football."

As was customary those days in England, there was a vast dif-
ference in my family between the education due to a boy and that
due to a girl While I was being sent for a short time to Miss
Dothie's, Roland was attending a public school on his way to
Oxford and a diplomatic career, and Evelyn was being coached for

i 9 4 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

the Navy at one of the preparatory schools which specialized in
producing naval cadets.

"It's useless for you to think you need any serious schooling," my
mother would remind me. "I disapprove of education for women.
Never forget that a blue stocking is a woman who has failed in her
sex, and that the few females who find their way to a university are
inevitably far from being the well-bred women of England, A career
woman never belongs to the aristocracy. A woman is meant for
marriage, and once she is married she has lost all chance to pursue
her career."

And without a glance at Father who was idly drawing a Ktde
fishing boat, Mother would turn round to Walmy and go on
dictating the instalment of one of her serial stories which was to feed
and clothe the three children.

She must herself have had an amazing upbringing. Her Tre-
lawny mother and her Irish father had little interest in her. Left to
her own devices, she had devoted her time to writing. When she was
only just able to form her letters she saved her pocket money for
many weeks, and with this accumulated wealth bought a large
supply of paper, pens and ink. Little Pattie, as her parents called
her, was always a quiet child, and so nobody wondered what kept
her satisfactorily occupied in her bedroom aU the day long. But a
few months later they discovered, for someone from a London pub*
lishing house came to visit her. It seems she was copying an entire
novel by Mrs. Henry Wood, word for word, and sending it to the
publisher as her own. The trick was found out, but the publisher
was so puzzled by the childish handwriting that he took the trouble
to come and see what sort of person had undertaken such an
absurd labor.

Thwarted in this, Pattie h&d other ideas. Already the incipient
melodrama writer lay within her. She looked through a local street
directory and picked out some attractive names.

"This is to warn you," she wrote to one man who lived in a

EDUCATION FOR LEIGHTON CHILDREN 195

nearby road. "Things are not as they seem to be In your household*
Your wife plans to deceive you. It would be advisable for you to
watch her more closely. We have information that points to her
running away next Wednesday night with Mr, Jonathan Wetherby,
who Uves in Acacia Road*"

She wrote to an unknown woman and told her not to trust her
husband so implicitly, for he had been seen in a saloon with a
chorus girl while he was supposed still to be at his office.

She spent her pocket money now on postage stamps, and the
anonymous letters must have reached their destinations.

By the time she was through with these escapades, my mother
was seriously writing poems. On her return from the French convent,
she fell in love with Wilson Barrett, a well-known actor of those
days, and he became the inspiration for her poenfc.

She also grew stage-struck. This caused many family tussles-
Finally her parents decided that the only thing to cure her would
be a short time on the stage, in order that she might see how glam-
ourless it was. And so, when she was about fifteen, Wilson Barrett
took her on touir. She was chaperoned and accompanied by her self-
sacrificing Aunt Pollie.

"And oh, how dreary it all was," she often told me. "Nothing on
earth can equal the dismal squalor of theatrical lodgings in a placQ
like Nottingham, on a rainy afternoon in November. I found no
romance anywhere only hard work' and the tiredness of every-
body, and the dusty appearance of the boards in the daytime, in an
empty theatre/*

So, as soon as she could, she returned home, completely cured.
And while her Aunt Pollie Trdawny breathed a sigh of relief at
being back again in her own comfortable setting, my mother in*
formed the family that she had made up her mind to write books,
and that she would leave the stage to people who were so insensitive
that they didn't know what sordidness meant

But Wilson Barrett remained her hero. He became even more

196 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

idealized in her imagination, as she understood the background
against which he worked. She felt now that he needed her. He
needed a dream world into which to escape from a theatrical lodg*
inghouse in the Midlands. To this end, she became friendly with
his daughter Kitty, so that she might be aware of all his movements.
He went to America on lengthy tours, and for a year or two my
mother's young life was a six months of ecstasy alternated with a six
months of waiting. For he told her to be patient while he was away,
and, leaving with her a copy of Walt Whitman, he asked her to stay
quiet and study until he returned. Over the dreary months of his
absence she would weave her dreams of him into; "When Lilacs
Last in the Dooryard Bloomed, 1 ' and write her own poems to her
hero. She remembered some of these poems, and often when she
was anxious to show us how backward we were in a sense of poetry, *
would start off with the first verse of one of them:

Pass TO awhile, that other lands may hear thee,
That other hands may weave the laurel crown.

Let perfect art to other hearts endear thee,
And Transatlantic tongues thy greatness own,

He was her introduction to America, and he wrote back to the
romantic young girl, waiting patiently in a waHed doll's house in St
John's Wood, dramatic accounts of the Rockies, New York City or
Niagara FaUs. This was my mother's only knowledge of the New
World, though already she had had her struggles and uncertainties
about the North and the South,

"I'm glad, really, that I shall never be forced to make a deci-
sion," she said, "for I find myself distinctly worried. Part of me is for
the North and yet another part is definitely for the South. But now,
after long years of conflict, I have settled down to the conclusion
that the Northern States appeal to my heart, and the brighter, gayer
South appeals to my temperament." *

"Mightn't it be interesting to come to America with me next

EDUCATION FOR LEIGHTON CHILDREN 197

time I go there?" I asked her once, many years later, when I had
just returned from a visit. But she would not come. She had strange
/ideas about American food*

"I have never known an English person who ate American hotel
food for any length of time who didn't break up in general health,"
she answered me. "Your American godmother used to say that the
air in the United States was so exciting that one couldn't eat rest-
fully in it, I think it will be best for me to stay over here in England,"

And so my mother's views of America remained the world of
Emerson, Walt Whitman and Uncle Tom's Cabin. In our childhood
we could not understand Emerson or Whitman, but a profusely
illustrated copy of Uncle Tom's Cabin was one of the delights of the
nursery. We gazed in rapture at the pictures of Topsy, and shiv-
ered at the sight of Eliza escaping over the ice floes. The only
Negroes we had ever seen were the "minstrels" upon the beach of
Lowestoft; but even these were really white people who had black-
ened their faces for the occasion. We would have been excited had
we known we were to meet our first colored people in the front
drawing room at Vallombrosa.

For some reason or other, my father was idolized by a certain
Negro in West Africa. He was Cornelius S. May, the editor of the
Sierra Leone Weekly News. Every week of our lives this paper
arrived, in its pale yellow-green cover, and every week it was tossed
unopened into the wastepaper basket in the study. One day a letter
arrived for my father. It contained the news that Mr, and Mrs.
Cornelius S. May were coming to London, accompanied by their
eldest daughter Isa. Isa, it appeared, was being sent to a "finishing
school" in Highgate. They wished, during their short stay in London,
to pay their respects to Mr. and Mrs. Robert Leighton.

"Do you realise they'll be as black as pitch?" said my mother.
"These will be no half-castes or such. These will be really as black
as your hat."

My father did realise it. He had only recently finished writing

x 9 8 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

a thrilling boys' story about Africa, called In the Land of Ju-ju, and

there was little he didn't know about every tribe of natives. But he

was clearly worried by my mother's attitude*

"Chummie," he pleaded, "how can I help it? We'll have to see

them and be nice to them- There's no way out"

I was listening to this conversation in great excitement. To my

joy I heard my mother's decision,

"Well/' she said, "there's one thing to be said about it. It'll be
an excellent chance of initiating the children into the existence of the
colored race. I'll make them come downstairs and shake hands with
the whole family,"

| The day arrived. There was a ring at the front door bell and
we rushed to the nursery window to see our first Negroes. There
they were: father and mother and daughter. We could hardly be-
lieve our eyes.

i . But my mother had mixed a hint of malice into this decision. She
had told our nurse to dress us in white, from top to toe. As we
marched into the drawing room we must have looked terribly like
a trio of angels to poor little black Isa, We hesitated as we drew
near to them. We had had no idea that colored people could be so
black. And then, with the most gracious manners we could muster,
we shook hands with them.

Later, when I was at my dame school, I made great use of this
little encounter \yith the Cornelius S. Mays. It didn't happen to
every schoolgirl in St. John's Wood to have had tea with three West
African Negroes. I think it probable that, being my mother's
daughter, a sense of drama may have stirred me to sEght exaggera-
tion, for I cannot help recollecting that pretty soon I was known
as the girl who had stayed with a whole tribe of African cannibals.

But I think my ego must have needed this drama, for I had
ptde chance of gaining popularity at school. My mother did not
approve of the social level of The Elms.

"I would never have sent you there if I had been able to find

EDUCATION FOR LEIGHTON CHILDREN , 199

A better school as near home/* she explained. "As it is, I do not wish
you to make friends with any of the girls. Nurse will stay with you
in the cloakroom until the bell rings. I'm decidedly worried about
the background of some of the pupils. Miss Dothie assured me she
had no tradesmen's children, but I've just found out that the poul-
terer in Circus Road has sent his daughter there."

I was always wanting to show off my mother at The Elms. I
wanted especially to show her to my adored Miss Rooke. My mother
was not like the mothers of the other girls. They seemed so drab and
inconspicuous. She was something completely different, in her won-
derful big hats and her queenly walk. One day the opportunity came.

Our nurse was ill and couldn't bring me home, As it happened,
my mother had hired a carriage that afternoon to pay a call on Lady
Northcliffe. She decided to fetch me from The Elms as she drove
back. Now my adored music teacher would see her.

But a terrible thing happened. My mother towered above Miss
Rooke, in all her splendor, and made her look so frail and insignifi-
cant that I grew confused and ashamed.

"How extraordinary it is that the moment a woman becomes a
teacher all the glamour forsakes her," my mother said to me, in the
carriage on the way home. "Why, you would think that music might
have enough magic to counteract the smear of the teaching profes-
sion, but even your little Miss Rooke has the mark of the beast upon
her. I was disappointed, for I had gathered from you that she had
personality. But she has none. She ends where she ends, and has no
aura surrounding her* She's every bit as commonplace as the rest of
them there at The Elms/'

I decided after that to keep to myself the world in which I was
living.

And so I never talked to my mother about the exciting people
who came into my school world from the outside. Neither did I tell
her about the poets and writers I discovered. It might have been
supposed that, coming from a literary household, I should already

200 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

have been aware of them, but my mother did not feed upon a diet of
Shakespeare or Dryden, Shelley or Keats. While I lived in an en-
chanted world of Shakespeare's tragedies and Wordsworth's "Pre-
lude/' and the poems of Southey and Cowper, she moved about the
house quoting Swinburne and Byron and the lyrics of Henley.

But in spite of our different worlds, life was happy. Down in
the study my mother and father worked. Up in the nursery in the
evening Evelyn and I worked. In his own bedroom Roland worked.
We were hedged by security, and It seemed impossible that this pat-
tern to our lives could change. My music lessons with Miss Rooke
made Tuesday and Thursday for me into moments of delight. As
Wednesday and Friday evenings came around, the barrel organ in
the street outside our house could be heard playing tunes from
Italian operas while we did our lessons. Monday, Wednesday and
Friday, on our return from afternoon school, Mr. Bowles's top hat
and overcoat greeted us in the front hall. Saturday was a holiday,
and we went with our nurse to the florist in Abercorn Place to buy
the weekly flowers I was allowed to arrange: sweet-scented yellow
mimosa in the wintertime, tulips and daffodils in the spring, sweet
peas and roses in early summer, before we left London for the East
Coast. When, many yeans later, I visited the Mediterranean and
found myself living among great bushes of this mimosa, my mind
turned to the study in St. John's Wood, and blue sea and silver
olive trees and the songs of Provencal peasants held little power as
these fluffy branches carried me back to a lamplit room, with a
London fog outside, and my mother dictating her love stories to
Walmy at the enormous table. By her side sat my father, writing one
of his boys* books. Around the study lay sleeping dogs.

. A New Center of the Universe

"Stop making that noise/* a male voice called to me as I sat at
the piano in the back drawing room and began to practise my five
finger exercises. "I refuse to be interrupted when I'm busy thinking."

Startled at finding I was not alone, I closed the piano. I looked
in the direction from which the command came and saw a man on
the sheepskin rug in the distant front drawing room. He lay flat
on his stomach, his head buried in his hands. It was the same figure
that I had often seen on the rug before the fire when I went into
the study to fetch a book.

It was Lord Northcliffe.

"There's absolutely nothing to be surprised about in someone
choosing to lie on his stomach," our mother reproached us when
we seemed bewildered. "The sooner you children learn to accept
any eccentricity as though it were a commonplace, the better
equipped you will be for life. A well-brought-up person should never
under any circumstances show amazement. Why, if you saw your
father or me sitting at the study table working, without a stitch of

201

202 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

clothing on, you ought to be able to behave as though it were the
normal way to sit and work. I even think it might be worth while to
try it one day, just to see how controlled you are. . * . And, by the
way, I am perfectly certain Northcliffe is scientifically correct in
supposing he can think best when he's flat on his stomach. The blood
doesn't have to make the effort of running uphill to the brain."

Whether it was a scientific truth or not, Lord Northcliffe did
imagine he could do his best thinking lying down. He had a great
sense of the value of time, and never believed in wasting a single
minute of his life. While he was waiting for my mother to come into
the room to discuss her work, he might just as well sprawl on the
floor and do some planning for the future,

Evelyn and I never spoke to this Napoleon of the Press, for \ve
had been ordered not to. He was a busy man, and he didn't like
being bothered by children.

"As a matter of fact, it isn't only because he's so busy," our
mother explained to us, after we had been hurried out of his way.
"Actually he's sensitive about children. He's never had any of his
own, you see, and it's been a dreadful blow to Hm. But there you
have another unfailing example of the Law of Compensation I'm
always telling you about. Destiny makes him into a millionaire, but
withholds from him the one thing he most wants, which is a son and
heir."

And so, whenever we saw this prostrate figure before the fire,
we tried to move quietly away before he would discover that we had
even entered the room.

But although we did not really know him, we thought of him in
fear and awe, realizing that he held the keys to our existence. It was
from the man on the hearthrug that we received our bread and
butter, our beefsteaks and our flannel undergarments,

I had a special reason for being afraid of him, which I kept secret
from everyone else. It was through his family that I had received
some of my deepest suffering.

A NEW CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE 203

Our mother never allowed us to go to any children's parties.

"If you don't catch infectious diseases you catch bad manners/*
jhe said, as she refused the various invitations.

But there was one party a year that she would not turn down*
It was given by NorthcHffe's brother. Lord Rothermere, who had
a large family of children.

"I've got to let you go because of my work/ 9 she sighed each
January, as she came up to the nursery to talk to Nanny about our
new party clothes, "If I were to refuse, Northcliffe would be bound
to know, for he always goes to these parties though why he should
torture himself by looking at aU those children I never can under-
stand. And he might take it as a personal insult. He's such an
impetuous, touchy creature that he would be quite capable of telling
the office not to give me any more stories to write. . . . And after
all, even though you may get measles and whooping cough and all
the diseases of the young, yet I can be pretty sure you won't catch
any very serious bad manners that I can't rectify. The children you
meet there shouldn't do you much harm. 5 '

My elder brother, Roland, was always clothed by our mother
with extravagance and care.

"He is the only one of my children who is beautiful enough to
be worth dressing," she would say, as she took time off from her
work to buy him the velvet suits and silk blouses of the Little Lord
Fauntleroy period. My younger brother, Evelyn, inherited the splen-
dors which Roland had outgrown. But my wardrobe was supervised
by the nurse, whose aesthetic taste was not of the best,

"It seems to me, m'say, the only thing that matters is for every-
thing to be serviceable," she would say, as she fitted me out in the
.unexciting navy blue sailor suits I detested. "Once a little girl
begins to get ideas into 'er 'ead about wanting frills and satins, it
opens the door wide to the world, the flesh and the deviL And it's
always the plain, fat children like Miss Clare what gets carried away
by finery.*'

204 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

One winter Lord Rothermere's party happened to take place on
a wet day. The Heighten family was terrified of rain, and both our
mother and the nurse hinted that we might not go to the party
unless the weather cleared. All morning long they looked at the
sky, but the rain fell unceasingly.

"What do you think about it, Robert?" we heard our mother
repeatedly ask of our father. But he went on writing. We did not
hear him give an answer.

"If the children are wrapped up well, perhaps it won't give
them pneumonia," our mother finally decided. "I've been having
a few difficulties lately with Northcliff e, and frankly I don't want to
annoy him just now."

And so we went to the party. But beneath my party dress I wore
black woollen stockings and high black boots,

"That there Miss Clare always was delicate in the stomach and
susceptible to chill," Nanny said. "And for a delicate inside in the
rain there is nothing !ike flannel drawers, flannel petticoats and
thick woollen stockings. And on a soaking wet day Hke this, even
though we carries 'er right down to the carriage, she's as like as not
to turn her ankles, what are so delicate. The only safe thing to do is
to make 'er wear 'er boots to the party."

I sat on my chair at this party, among boys and girls in white
silk socks and satin slippers, and pulled my accordion pleated dress as
far down over my knees as I could, while I kept my black legs under
the chair.

"Surely you're the little Leighton girl," said a voice I recog-
nized.

There stood Lord Northcliffe, looking straight down at me. I felt
certain he was staring at my black woollen stockings and my high
boots.

Ever after that, I dreaded seeing him. He reminded me of my
suffering.
i But though our mother always appeared anxious not to displease

A MEW CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE 205

him, she never seemed to be reaUy afraid of him. In talking with our
father she laughingly referred to him as "the Chief." More often he
wa%"Alfred," and she did not scruple to make fun of him.

But suddenly Lord Northcliffe and our mother quarreled. No
longer would she be writing her stories for his newspapers. The
Daily Mail and the orange-colored weekly paper called Answers,
which she and NorthcEffe had inaugurated together, would carry no
more serials signed "Marie Connor Leighton."

She was not worried. She had unfailing belief in Destiny. And
Destiny just now seemed to be busy.

"What* s the use of making oneself look old and wrinkled by
worrying about things beyond one's control?'* she asked. "In that
way one would defeat one's own ends. Destiny has something up its
sleeve for me, and it's no good my fighting it. How do I know that
this break with Northcliffe isn't intended so that I can have time to
produce the things that are worth while? Now, perhaps, I can write
my play."

This play had been in the back of her mind ever since the visit
to Cheiro, the celebrated palmist For not only had he told her of
the gruesome nature of her early death, but he had informed her
that before this death she was to write a successful play.

"Apparently Tm to go out in a fanfare of riches and fame," our
mother laughed. "If I wanted to delay my untimely death, I suppose
I'd put off writing the play. But you can't trick Fate. And after all,
I admit that it will certainly be most pleasant to make a fortune
even if I do have tEe example of Northdiff e's continuous unhappi-
ness before me."

The mirage of this play was one of the excitements of our child-
hood. As we lay in bed, before falling asleep^ we acted the most
glamourous first night, and surrounded ourselves with indescribable
splendors. We were convinced that this world of make-believe would
one day beconqte reality.

< Yes," decided our mother, "perhaps my quarrel will turn out to

so6 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

be a godsend. I can see in it the hand of Destiny. Now I shall have
time of my own."

Destiny was very hard at work with the Leighton family. It took
our seventy year old nurse to hospital, with cancer* Within a few
weeks she was dead.

"If there's one thing on this earth that terrifies me it is cancer,"
said our mother, "I'm very much afraid, Robert, that we'll have to
move from Vallombrosa, How do we know the old woman hasn't
left some traces of the disease in the house behind her?"

As if this were not enough, something suddenly went wrong
with the drains of Vallombrosa, so that there was a fear we might
catch typhoid fever. Everything fitted in like the pieces of a jigsaw
puzzle. Fate decreed that we must leave St. John's Wood and go
to Lowestoft.

"You can't go and bury yourself like that, away from the center
of everything," Mr. Bowles kept on telling our mother as the plans
for the removal developed. "You of all people belong to London/* '

She looked at him in consternation.

"Since when have I been dependent upon my surroundings? 3 *
she asked. "Where I am becomes the center of everything. If I chose
to live in Timbuctoo I assure you I could make London and Paris
and Vienna seem as suburban as Balham or Tooting or the outskirts
of Birmingham. You see if all of you don't soon begin to feel drawri
to Lowestoft by some magnetic power of intellectual stimula-
tion."

But certain standards of living were expected of the Ltightofl
family, wherever it might settle.

"We'll have to find a different house, Robert/ 1 our mother told
our father. "It's all very well to live in a semidetached place like
The Red Groft when we are known to have a house in London as
well, btit it's altogether too lower-middle-class for us as our sola
establishment. We must find something with moire dignity. I'll 'get
SUenus to help. He knowsi aU about houses and mortgages. What's

A NEW CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE 207

the good of his being a bank manager in the City if we don't make
use of it?"

Before we knew what was happening, our mother's faithful
Silenus had found us our house.

It was the kind of mansion one might think up in a nightmare.
It's name was Heather CEff, and it stood alone on a bluff over-
looking the North Sea, not more than a mile or two from the lower-
middle-dass semidetached Red Croft We thought it wonderful,
but when Unde Jack first set eyes on it he visibly squirmed.

"It's obvious you have no aesthetic awareness, Bien Aimee, or
you could never possibly have brought yourself to live in such a
place," he said in a superior voice, conscious of being the artist- of
the family. "There's no purity of form or design anywhere about it.
And it's the most absurd, grotesque conglomeration of architectural
styles you ever saw."

"Oh, nonsense, Jack," answered my mother. "Your taste is so
impoverished and anemic that you can't understand the need for
romance in a building. Now passion and romance could be lived
richly here in Heather Cliff far better than in one of those
austerely correct houses you would want me to have. Think of the
many towers and passages in which one could hide one's lover not
to speak of the beauty of the moon shining down through the dome
in the hall. This place is made for love, I tell you, and illicit love at
that"

But nothing would make Unde Jack change his mind.
And it was not surprising that he should have fdt as he did
about Heather Cliff, for one part of the structure was Tudor, with
oak beams patterning the white outside walls, another was like a
copy of a French chateau, with round towers and turrets, while yet
.another part had a number of square balconies and bay windows.
But the central attraction was an enormous dome, like a miniature
copy of the Duomo in Florence. This mixture of strange features
outside was even more amazing from within. The dome was an

2 o8 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

especially impressive affair. Walmy, when she first saw it, put her
finger to her lips.

"Hush," she said to us. "You feel you've got to behave yourself
here. Lo-ar, if it isn't just like some sort of a heathen church."

I didn't quite follow her, but I, too, felt awed. The stained glass
in the dome cast magical colors upon Walmy as she stood there, till
her face was splashed with blue and a band of crimson ran down the
front of her "blouse." I moved to her side, and across my dress
streaked a bar of brilliant green.

Into the pretentious mansion moved the Leighton family,
bundles and servants, dogs and children and all. The annual
migration was as nothing to this. The furniture from two houses
sprawled over the rooms of Heather Cliff, with neither order nor
concern for style. White enameled tables and chairs from the summer
residence of The. Red Croft hobnobbed with old oak settles and
the ancestral grandfather clock. Easels and gramophone, study
table and dog kennels, everything was transplanted from Vallom-
brosa to the clear light of East Anglia. The dome in the hall cast its
magical blues and crimsons and greens upon unpacked crates of
books and manuscripts, model yachts and my mother's winter
dresses. The whole place looked like the backstage of the Metro-
politan Opera House.

But the family did not mind this confusion. My mother and
father had settled upon the room in which they would work, and
the study in Heather Cliff became a near duplicate of the study in
Vallombrosa* The important thing was that the pattern of life
should continue unchanged,

Walmy, though, had other ideas. The splendor of this mansion
had gone to her head.

"Lo-ar," she said with pride in her voice, "this is not a house.
It is a 'place.' We shall have to live up to it. You will see that the
'County' will now call upon us. When we were merely summer
visitors* it was your mother's charm and fame that made her

A NEW CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE 209

accepted by local society. It wasn't where we Eved, Now we shall
'belong.' You see if I'm not right*'

To what extent she was right, I am uncertain. I have a suspicion
* that it was a good deal curiosity that brought people to see us. But
whatever the motive, there is no doubt that we had entered upon a
new phase of life, for vicars and their wives and their curates called
and came to tea, and the local nobility and gentry left their visiting
cards upon the silver salver in the front hall,

My mother, though, did not mean to be trapped into the life
of Lowestoft

"If they think I shall interest myself in all their little comings
and goings, they're quite wrong," she said. And she would take the
train to London with a mysterious little smile, as though she were
disappearing to a world of which these rustic locals could know
nothing.

For she was busy just now, recovering from the break with
Lord Northcliffe. She was writing stories for a rival firm, and writ-
ing with the same terrific output. Though they were appearing these
days in different papers, the same blond heroines emerged from
the clutches of the sair*? dark villains, and the family meals had still
to wait until my mother should have found a means of escape for the
imprisoned hero- Piles of maroon bound volumes already stood in
odd corners of Heather Cliff, as the completed serials appeared in
book form Convict gg, Put Yourself in Her Place, Fires of Love,
Was She Worth It?; they had grown in number over the years, till
they could be counted in scores.

"I wonder what Mother is going to do when she has used up all
the names ending with *ine/ " Roland used to laugh. "Aline, Bettine,
EUaline, Justine; Mother says she'd have no luck if she didn't give
her heroine a name with this termination. But she's bound to come
to the end of them one of these days. And then she'll have to invent
names for herself, Eke Lanoline or Vaseline."

But our mother was serious about this little superstition.

2io TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

"It's all very well for you to be amused," she reproached my
brother. "Actually I did call one of my heroines something without
this ending. And what do you suppose happened? Why, that was the
very story I was writing when 1 quarreled with Northcliffe, which
only goes to prove that there is something in the superstition. Never
again wiU I be so stupid as to tempt Providence in such a matter. 3 '

Although my mother had established herself in this new setting
and was working just as if no change in her surroundings had taken
place, I was not able to do so.

I was unhappy. I had been taken away from The Elms. My
school days were ended. What was even worse, I had been snatched
from my adored Miss Rooke. I felt that I knew the fullest extent of
sorrow. I spent my time writing sonnets of grief and lovesick letters
to my music teacher. When the postman came each morning I
shared my mother's anticipation of what he would bring,

For though she might no longer be in London among her
adorers, she kept in close touch with them* Letters arrived with
handwriting that "danced" before her eyes. Understanding now
how she was feeling, I watched her those mornings at breakfast, as
she waited for the meal to be over in order that she might open the
envelopes. There was an unwritten law in the Leighton family that
nobody should b< so ill mannered as to open his mail at the breakfast
table. I saw her glance with impatience at my father. Would he
never finish eating? Why should he want to choose this moment,
now, to discuss the plot of his next book

"I wonder, Chummie, if it wouldn't be more exciting if I were to
Blake the Indians kidnap the boy," he asked over his bacon and
eggs. "What do you advise me to do?"

But my mother's answer was casual. Her mind was on the pile
of envelopes by the sids of her "empty plate. In the middle of that
pile was an enchanted letter* I watched her turn the pile over and
over, hurrying past the business letters and biHsl I knew that as sbon
as the breakfast was finished she would carry all her letters with her

A NEW CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE 211

to the study and there, while appearing to glance at the business com-
munications and the bills, she would subtract the one precious
envelope and, tucking it down the front of her morning jacket, take
it with her to the privacy of the lavatory,

She did not intend to be isolated from her admirers.

If I had not been so unhappy just now on my own account I
would have enjoyed this new life. Here, upon our premises, we
owned an ornamental pond, a tennis court, a croquet lawn, stables,
a greenhouse and terraces with stone urns to hold flowers, A drive
curved from the front gate round by the house and past the stables
and the greenhouse to the back part of the place, and then out to
the gate on the Gorton Road, We possessed, in fact, entrances upon
two roads.

"Silenus" had done well by us.

But although my mother was always making her little trips to
London, to see publishers, dressmakers and admirers, she was not
able to escape the visits of the local gentry. She pretended, to be
bored by them, but actually I think she would have felt piqued if
they had not called upon her.

"After all," she sighed as she said good-bye to a curate's wife
who had wasted most of her afternoon, "one should be willing
to pay for one'c sense of glamour and romance. These poor creatures
have so little opportunity to see what it is they have missed in Kfe
that one has no right to deprive them of this chance. And it is
enormous fun to see how quickly one can shock them. I had an
especially amusing time this afternoon with this visitor. I told her
the wildest stories about St. John's Wood and the actresses that
Edward the Seventh used to visit there. And of course she couldn't
really say anything, for he was our king. The trouble is, of course,
that I have probably whetted her appetite so much that I shall be
pestered with her from now on. As Mamma always said, $6 truly,
if a woman doesn't do naughty things herself she delights in hear-
ing how other women have done them. If I'm not more careful

212 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

I shall find myself used as a source of enlightenment and entertain-
ment by all these little curates* wives. And then 111 get no work
done. Yes, I really must be more careful."

To this end, she managed to find out when they would be away
from home before she returned their calls. Then she could merely
leave cards and know that she had behaved as was demanded of her.

Pretty soon, though, the splendors of Heather Cliff began to go
to her head as they had gone to Walmy's. My mother decided to
enter into the life of the country and enjoy it.

"This doesn't mean that I shall accept invitations to open
church bazaars or flower shows/ 9 she declared* "Neither does it
mean that I shall be available to any Kttle Tom, Dick or Harry
who might choose to come along and waste my time. If you read
your French literature you will see that the chatelaine of the chateau
in France rarely went beyond the gates of her estate. She surrounded
herself with a mist of inaccessibility, which gave her additional
magic and glamour in the eyes of the people. There is no reason
whatsoever why the same kind of atmosphere should not be possible
here at Lowestoft as in Touraine."

And so my mother, dressed in her flamboyant clothes, and
looking like an illustration to La Vie Parisienne, took her daily
exercise in the grounds of Heather Cliff. But the walks were more
varied than those she had taken up and down the center path of the
back garden at The Red Croft, She went all the way round the
front lawn with its terraced slopes and the stone urns, past the
ornamental pond at the back, and the stables and the orchard.
Rarely did she turn aside to look at the plants in the greenhouse,
except when the pink oleander was coming into bloom. She would
pass our father as he hoed some flower beds, and sometimes, when
she was in trouble with her plot, would stop and shout to him
for advice,

"I can't seem to get the right setting for this new serial, Robert,"
we would hear her complain to him. "How would it be if I were

A XEW CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE 213
the story in Russia this time, and let my heroine get banished
J Robert, listen to me. Do you think that would keep my
ttention, or is it too far away?"

busy with his hoeing, and his reply was apt to
.rfunctory. TO. vexed our mote, who .bought he wa, spend-
mud time in the Heather CM garden.

**

yow F-fa* * *-. ** *"* - r d T"

do all the work here yourself. If s much too big a place, and we

* " ithhl * "" m0nth> "f" ' "5
wch away, and I ten you I'd rate ^ out . l mysd!

I let anv more so called professional gardeners ruin the place.
*". SrTeans ," answer^ my mote, "that you might justa,
wd l L up the idea that you arc a writer who ... hdpmg to earn
If fSfly income. K. bad economics, you know. It wovjd pay

"tutT fir snlThtrOnl, a week or so earUer he had
^ a lole row of seedlings headed, uprated, on . rubbd.

^Tie plce reatty was far too much work for him. The ground, ot

ducive to magic and romance.

0x4 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

There was one diversion that took our mother beyond the gates
of Heather Cliff. During the summer months concerts were held in
the municipal park called The Sparrows Nest* Into the marquee
sailed our mother, to listen to her favorite baritone. As she entered,
all eyes were turned her way, to gaze upon the rows of frills on her
figured silk dress with its short sleeves and perilously low neck, and
the enormous hat with its burden of blossoms and its floating
ribbons,

"Doesn't Mother look wonderful," Evelyn and I would say to
each other, as we watched her step into the carriage that was
ordered three afternoons a week, to convey her to her singer. And
we hoped everybody in Lowestoft would be there at the concert to
see her.

But our mother's adorers were not happy. They were jealous
of her interest in this baritone.

"You think you go up in my estimation by sneering so cheaply
about him/' she said to Uncle Jack one day as she came home with
him from The Sparrows Nest. "Actually, you are damaging your-
self in my eyes, for it only goes to show that you don't understand
real feeling. And then you wonder why it is I find it so difficult
to be emotional about you, . . . This passionate, dark baritone
holds magic for me. The dreams I weave around him help me with
my work. I only have to sit there in my seat and listen to him and
I know exactly what to make my hero say to my heroine, and M

"But Fiorita," interrupted my uncle, "don't you see that he is
just a cheap sentimentalist? What sort of a song is Tosti's 'Good-
bye,' I ask you? Now if only I had a voice I'd sing you songs that
would make you leave all this nonsensical dross behind you. I'd
sing you arias from Mozart, or songs by Schubert or Hugo
Wolf.' 9

The mere mention of these classical composers seemed to do
something to my mother. She turned to Unde Jack with withering
contempt.

A MEW CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE 215

"I'm sick of you, Jack* You damage my power to work. You'd
better leave."

This time Uncle Jack's pride was deeply wounded. He packed
his bags and left

But though our mother was upset at his reacting to her in this
way, it was not long before she found comfort in a comparative
newcomer.

He was a French Baron.

My father was editing the memoirs of the Princess Caroline
Murat This involved getting to know various members of the
Napoleon Bonaparte family. The particular one who was helping
him came to Lowestoft, to be near at hand.

"The Baron so exactly looks the part, that ifs almost ludicrous/'
said our mother. "Why, one could see his double any day at the
gaming tables at Monte Carlo, or sauntering along the Promenade
des Anglais at Nice, or taking the waters at Aix les Bains, or Baden
Baden.

Evelyn and I had lately been reading French history, and it
filled us with awe actually to see in the flesh a relative of the great
Napoleon.

But behind his back we called him Belshazzar.

It was our old nurse who had started the nickname. This
perfumed gentleman with the little blapk waxed moustache and
the suits that curved in at the waist had appeared on the scene just
before her death. She had disapproved of him. In her staunch
Baptist faith she had decided that he was unholy.

"That Frenchy don't bode no good," she had sighed. "Regular
evil I calls 'im, with the wicked look in 'is eyes and all the stinky
perfumes on *im the whole time yes, even at ten o'clock in the
morning. And with that ridiculous long foreign name as no one in
their senses could pronounce* Beelzebub is what I think 'e should
be called. It sounds very nearly the same as 'is own."

"Not Beelzebub, Nuree," our mother had commanded. "You

8x6 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

know what that name means In the Bible. It would never do for
him to hear the children call him that, and they might easily let it
slip out by mistake/*

Our mother had learnt her lesson over her own carelessness
with "Silenus."

"Well then, m'm, if It isn't to be Beelzebub, it 5 ad better be
Belshazzar, which is the next nearest in sound/* Nanny had
answered, "But I tells you what, m'm. If that there evil man comes
around "ere much more, there'll be changes in this 'ousehold. It's
all these stinks I'm thinking of. In my young days no lady would
*ave been seen with scent on *er in the dayKghL She J ad the decency
to wait till the evening, when respectable people were out of the
way. But to *ave a man smelling Eke this weU, as I says, either
*e goes or I do."

"But we have to have him around, Nanny, because of Mr.
Leighton's work," my mother had tried to console her. It would
be disastrous for the old woman to leave.

The nurse had hobbled off, still grumbling. But not before my
mother promised that the study door should be shut tight when-
ever Belshazzar was there, so that the scent of his shaving soap
and toilet waters should not offend her nostrils in the prosaic
hours before the midday meal.

If the old nurse had been still alive during the months at
Lowestoft when Belshazzar haunted us, I don't know what might
have happened. Her crusading spirit was inflamed, and on
those rare occasions when her religious scruples were disturbed she
had been known to forget her "place."

But even as it was, Belshazzar plagued us.

He stayed at the best Lowestoft hotel, in company with one or
two effete English noblemen. They visited us and drank whiskeys
and sodas at times of the day that my mother considered decidedly
degenerate.

"I don't think anybody could exactly call me a Puritan," she

A NEW CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE 217

said, as she shook her head over their behavior. "But I must admit
that I disapprove of drinking whiskey in the daytime. It is some-
thing that belongs to artificial light To drink it before midday,
though, is utterly impossible. And here they go, at eleven-thirty in
the morning, with their Scotch and soda. . . . But then, nothing
would ever make me touch a drop, except medicinally, when I
have the beginnings of a chill in my inside. It is unromantic for
a woman to drink and, besides, it gives you a double chin and a
bloated complexion. I fed the same about smoking. It's all very well
for a man to smoke, but not for a woman. It is only the really
tame, dull, insignificant women like curates' wives who do it,
to try unsuccessfully to prove they are progressive and modem, A
really wise woman knows that her power lies in what she refrains
from doing rather than in what she does."

And so she produced the whiskey and soda, the cigarettes
and the cigars, for Belshazzar and his friends; but she did not join
them in their drinking.

Neither, really, did she enjoy their company, though she de-
lighted in talking French with Belshazzar. Some integrity within
her despised people who did not work. Besides, Belshazzar was too
completely interested in his gentlemen friends to be susceptible
to her charms.

This piqued her considerably. It had never happened to her
before, and she could not understand it

"Am I losing my looks, Robert?" she asked my father, as she
gazed at herself in the bedroom mirror. "This Belshazzar of yours
doesn't seem to have any interest in me whatsoever except to
talk French with* Upon my word, it worries me. You'd think I was
beginning to get crowsfeet around my eyes, or wrinkles on my
forehead, or a few white hairs on my head."

But my father patted her cheek and told her not to be silly,

"There are some people in this world, Chummie, who are so
made that they prefer the company of their own sex," he told her.

si8 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

"And when this happens Venus herself could walk among them
unobserved."

My mother felt better after this; but still she was bewil-
dered.

If Uncle Jack had only known, it was a propitious moment for
him to return. This time, however, he had been deeply wounded in
his pride, and his self-elected absence continued.

My mother was quite deeply annoyed at the way Belshazzar
ignored her, and perhaps it was as a revenge upon the entire race
of men that she flung herself now into friendship with a woman.

This woman was a Russian whom she had met in Londoji.
She happened to be extremely rich. It was rumored that she was
probably a millionaire, but this did not influence my mother, who
had no interest in the worldly possessions of other people. She
took a suite at the best hotel in Lowestoft, near to Belshazzar
and the effete noblemen, and spent a great deal of her time with
us, talking in French with our mother.

"But how can you be so much interested in a woman?" Roland
asked our mother one day, after she had sat throughout an entire
afternoon with this Russian friend. "If she were a man I could
understand it, but you arer't the sort of person to waste your time
upon some one of your own sex."

"Don't you see that she has a very special quality to her?"
she answered him. "She's .a cosmopolitan aristocrat. If she were
only an English noblewoman she might be as dull as ditchwater
they generally are, if the truth were told but a Russian aristocrat
is bound to be vital and exciting. What, I ask you, have Mr. Bowles
or your Uncle Jack to give me that I cannot get far better from
this woman? She has an understanding of life and romance that I
have discovered in very few men."

, Fascinated with her new friend, my mother slipped more and
cmore into the world of Russia. She began to decide that there must,
-after all, be something Russian in her own ancestry.

A NEW CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE aid

"Sonya is so extraordinarily like my Trelawny mamma/' she
said. "And I am recollecting that that time we visited Russia I was
often mistaken for one of tKeir own people. Do you know what I
am beginning to think? I am beginning to believe that some ancestor!
of ours in Cornwall, centuries ago, must have got emotionally in-
volved with a vfciting Slav who had sought tin from the family
mines* They did come to Cornwall for tin, you know. They came
from places like Ragusa. It's an historical fact that you can't get
away from. And, now I come to think of it, that would explain
everything. Yes, I am convinced that is what happened. I am
certain of it" ;

Actually, my mother did behave somewhat like a Slav. In many
ways she resembled Lyubov in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. Her
romantic emotionalism and impetuous generosity were combined
with a complete lack of concern over material things.

"All that matters, my child," she would say to me from time
to time, "all that really matters is to cherish the world of your mind
and your soul. You know how much I love luxury, but I assure
you that I would never allow possessions to dominate me. You
should be able to abandon your worldly goods at a moment's notice,
and remain every bit as rich as you were before and perhaps even
richer, I would say/* :

As my mother spent these hours with her friend, it brought^
back to her mind her holiday in Russia.

This had happened some few years earlier. Both my father
and my mother were boastfully proud about it. ;

"We went there long before anyone supposed it possible to go j
to Russia," my mother always reminded us. "And it was no tourist
agency affair, like the underbred holidays George takes to Switzer-'
land. Neither was it one of the organized trips to the over-frequented
countries of the Mediterranean, such as your Uncle Jack indulges
in. If you are going to travel anywhere the only thing possible is to-
go to the aristocratic parts of Europe, such as Holland and Den-

1220 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

mark, Scandinavia, Germany and the heart of Russia, as your father
and I did."

"Oh, Chummie, what I would give to go to some of those
places again," sighed our father, who had happened to overhear
what our mother was saying.
But she ignored him.

"Most of the rest of Europe has been made commonly popular,"
she went on, "and filled with the sort of English you'd run a mile
from over here in England. But in those Northern countries you may
feel pretty sure you won't meet any of these schoolteachery kinds
of people. Even in Paris you have to be careful where you go s for
fear of coming up against them suddenly* That's why, when I am
staying there, I hardly ever go beyond the doors of the Hotel
Meurice. I know I am safe inside there* But if I were to stray into
Montmartre, and visit places like the Folies Bergres, I'd be certain
to see some English clergyman in plain clothes, or some tittering
English schoolmasters, salaciously watching the naked women as
they paraded before them, and imagining they were seeing the real
Paris. On the whole, of course, it's safer for your soul to stay at
home."

My father felt a little sad those days at Heather Cliff at the
mention of Russia. As it might be expected from his writing of
adventure stories, he yearned for foreign lands. It was hard on him
that my mother should feel so strongly against the benefits of travel
I remember the light that came upon his face one day as she
admitted that she would never be quite the same again after her
one week's memory of Moscow and the "queer, sinister people in it"
Was she, perhaps, changing her mind? But he was too wise to say
anything to her about it, and, while she settled down to her own
world of story writing as though nothing could ever take her away
from it, he took comfort in poring over maps for hours at a time,
a soft look in his eyes.

Sometimes he could be seen smiling tenderly at his Gladstone

A NEW CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE 221

bag, upon which was pasted the label of a Moscow hotel. This was
one of his most treasured possessions, and on the infrequent oc-
casions when he used it he took care always to carry it with the label
side outwards. This label was the symbol of adventure. He cherished
it as though it were a relic in a church.

"You may stroke it carefully, Clare," he said to me sometimes.
"It has magic in it, I want you to remember where it came from*
and to think of all the wonderful things it is associated with."

And he would tell me stories of this memorable journey.

But a very cruel thing happened to him. It was the fault of
the good sticking quality of English paste. Once it had occurred
there was no possibility of mending matters. It was irrevocable.

A few years after the visit to Russia, my father had to judge at
a two-day dog show in Croydon.

H'm sorry it should be in Croydon," sighed my mother. "It is
one of those completely common suburbs of London which one
would never even admit to having visited. It is most unfortunate
that you should have to go there and even more so that you should
have to stay overnight."

My father packed his Gladstone bag with the Moscow label and,
at Victoria Station, gave it into the care of a porter. But when he
arrived at Croydon, and got the bag out from the luggage van, he
found that the porter had pasted a Croydon label on top of the
Moscow one. He stormed and raged all over the station, cursing
all porters of all railways for all time. He tried to remove the Croy-
don label; but the paste had stuck it so fast that there was no way in
which it could be taken off. He went to the station master and de-
manded that the label be removed. It was no good. The Moscow
hotel was hidden from sight forever.

But though this tangible sign of the visit to Moscow had been
destroyed, the sudden friendship with this Russian aristocrat was
bringing back to my parents all the glamour of their one great
journey. These three people who knew and loved Russia lived

222 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

within a magic circle, which it was impossible for outsider to
enter.

"What did I tell you, George?" said our mother one day when
Mr. Bowles was staying with us. "You supposed I'd be bored down
here, away from London. Not a bit of it. All the best people live
in the country these days, and those who can't wish they did."

Physically my mother and father lived at Heather Cliff, and
my mother took her daily exercise along the winding drives, past the
tennis court and the orchaid, the greenhouse and the ornamental
pond, and back again to the house; but spiritually they were in a
world of their own, beyond reach of the local inhabitants. It was a
world of Paris and Russia, my mother's romantic melodramas and
my father's Wild West. When the local rector and his wife, the
curates and even the naval officers who were stationed at Lowe-
stoft, came to tea, they saw no more than a shadow of the LeigLton
family;.

13. War Years

It wa& the first summer at Heather Cliff. While our mother and
father lived within their own world of the imagination, Evelyn
and I found excitement in the life of Lowestoft. For suddenly we
were free. No longer held down by the old nurse, we perspired
over bicycle rides with the curates and got drenched to the skin
in boating expeditions on the Norfolk Broads with naval lieutenants.
More wonderful still, we were seeing a great deal of our brother
RolancL

Now that we had emerged from the nursery, this remote god
whom we worshiped seemed to be aware of our existence, and came
for walks with us, and laughed and talked. Joyfully we worked
together. While Roland was writing poetry, I painted pictures of
Heaven or the Day of Judgment, and Evelyn drew warships and
diagrams of the flags of all the nations. Together we made plans
for our future. After triumphs at Oxford, Roland would be a poet
and a diplomat. Evelyn would end up as an admiral, I would be-
come a great painter.

223

224 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

The summer days were golden with promise.

Our Eves were so rich that we did not seem to realize what was
happening in the world. Everything appeared secure.

The weeks of that summer of 1914 passed.

Roland did not go to Oxford. Instead, he became a second
lieutenant, and disappeared to a camp. The god, whom Evelyn
and I had so recently laughed with and played with, forsook us.
We were desolate and inconsolable.

But our mother rebuked us.

"This," she said, "will be your test. It is all very well to be able
to cope with life when everything is going smoothly. The important
.thing is to discover whether you are strong enough to cope with it
when it turns against you. Now look at me. I shall go on as usual,
whatever happens, for as long as I can. Do not let me have to be
ashamed of you,"

And she turned to Walmy, who was sitting before the type-
writer in the study at Heather Cliff, with a look of ^defiance, upon
her face.

"Where was I, Miss Walmisley?" she asked. "This instalment
is already overdue. Let the children mope if they choose to. It won't
do them any good. They'll have to learn sooner or later that there
is such a thing as self-discipline/'

The war gathered force, yet the pattern of our Hfe remained
the same. When we passed the study door we heard the customary
tap of the typewriter and the sound of our mother's voice, as she
dictated to Walmy. Each day she took her exercise along the wind-
ing drives, past the silent tennis court and the orchard, and back to
the house.

It was Evelyn and I who came first against the tragedy of
war.

"Whatever are those little fishing boats?" Evelyn asked me one
morning, as we were looking out of the dining room window after
breakfast "I don't recognize them, and I thought I knew all about

WAR YEARS 225

every boat that passed along the North Sea. They're so tiny. They're
even smaller than some of the shrimpers. And how they're tossing.
It's almost as though they'd get sunk."

We rushed upstairs to the attic, to look through our father's
telescope.

The little boats were filled to overflowing with women and
children, and even babies in arms. They flew the Belgian flag.
Suddenly we recollected some of the war news our father had been
reading aloud at breakfast. These must be Belgian refugees.

"They're heading for the harbor and the fish market," said
Evelyn. "Let's go and meet them. 3 *

The Belgian refugees staggered from the storm-tossed little boats
to the quay, seasick and scared. There was a look in their eyes
we had never seen before. It was something outside of the security of
our childhood.

When we returned home, we heard our mother's voice still
dictating 10 Walmy. But we did not enter the study. Instead, we
crept upstairs to our sepaiate bedrooms. We were confused. Life
was no longer simple. Our mother's world was stamped with
unreality.

The war grew closer to us.

"Funny," said our mother one morning, as she read through a
letter she had opened* "They suddenly say they don't want the next
serial from me. And I was perfectly sure of it, too. This is most
upsetting and vexing. They add that their decision has nothing to
do with the quality of the work I have been doing, but that they
have to cut down the space given to my melodramas to make room
for the casualty lists. This is awkward. I must think things out and
make plans."

It was decidedly awkward. Our father did not earn enough with
his boys' stories to keep the family at our present standard. Besides,
we had always lived above our income. We had nothing to fall
back upon.

226 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

"I suppose some people would say we ought to have saved over
the years/' smiled our mother. "But that's all very well for the great
mass of the population, with its ideas of caution. I was never brought
up to have such notions. My family considered it a sign of lack
of breeding to save, Fm not really worried. Something always has
happened and something always will happen. And at any rate, we
can live for quite a long while on our overdraft,"

It was fortunate for us that there was still that British institution
called the overdraft. For some time we continued to draw chedb
upon a nonexistent bank account

Outwardly the Leighton family went on as usual. We ran up
the same enormous bills, and kept the same number of servants.
The servants' wages, it is true, began to slip into arrears, but our
mother felt confident that she could handle this.

"So long as I treat them as human beings, they won't mind wait-
ing for their money/* she said.

She spent a little longer than usual in the kitchen each morning
after breakfast, talking with the cook

"When you come to think of what those men are having to put
up with in the trenches," I overheard her saying one day, "and
when you pause for a moment to imagine the cold and mud and
danger, you will realize how fortunate anyone is -who has a roof
over his or her head, and food enough to keep from starving."

"Yes'm," answered the cook. But there was a lack of enthusiasm
in her voice. Big money was being paid in the munitions factory a
few miles away.

Rumors began to surround us, over the first months of the war.
Tales of possible German invasion sent the local population slinking
inland each night to sleep. My mother was contemptuous of this
cowardice.

"Poor souls," she called them, as she heard of their flight. "I

'scarcely think they're worth saving, if they've got so little ordinary

sense of courage and adventure. It would almost serve them right if

WAR YEARS 227*

the Germans were actually to land and destroy them all. What really ,
upsets me, though, is hearing that one or two colonels' wives have
been seen on the *heroes train' for Norwich, They are supposed to
be ladies, and ladies should show no fear, I don't know what the
world is coming to these days/*

But in spite of our mother's courageous spirit, we did realize
that we were exposed to special danger.

"Heather Cliff stands alone against the skyline, Chummie,"
our father tried to impress upon her. "It's on a cliff overlooking
the North Sea, and it's probably about the nearest dwelling to
Germany. And the war has only just started. There's no telHng
what may happen to us before long. . , At any rate, I do think
we'd be wise to bury some of our more precious belongings in the
garden."

"You can do it if you want to, Robert," answered our mother.
"But as far as I'm concerned I don't see much point in it. You
see, things don't matter especially in wartime. War elevates one
to the basic values in Hfe, till the only important consideration is
the mind and the spirit. However, if it will make you feel happier,
go ahead and bury anything you want to.'*

Our father had greater interest in possessions. He cherished some'
of our belongings* But it was not so much the intrinsic value of the
thing that concerned him as his associations with it. And thus it
was that he was most worried about the grandfather dock. *

"To think that it may be exposed to a German bomb," he sighed
as he stood in front of it, where it ticked away in the hall, beneath
the dome of many-colored glass. "And after the glory of its past,
too. The hiding place of Bonnie Prince Charlie deserves a worthier
end."

"Well, you can't very well bury the grandfather dock, Robert,"
said our mother as she passed through the hall on her way to the
study. "It would be even more humiliating for your poor Bonnie
Prince Charlie if it ended up as food for the worms, I'd rather

228 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

be dramatically destroyed by a bomb any day than undergo slow
disintegration by earthworms."

Reluctantly my father decided that the grandfather dock would
have to stay where it was and take its chance* But there were other
things that would not be damaged by earthworms. One morning
he was seen to search the kitchen quarters for all the available
empty biscuit tins.

We were going to bury the family china.

Neither the Leightons nor the Trelawnys had ever been rich
in this world's goods. The Trelawnys, though, had a substantial
collection of old Dresden and Sevres china. When Grandmamma
Trelawny died she left this precious china to her sister, our Aunt
Pollie, along with an enormous bronze statue of Phryne and quite
a lot of valuable jewelry.

"I bear Pollie no grudge about all the jewelry/ 5 my mother
had said, "for, as you know, I don't hold with wearing jewels.
Neither do I want the china. But I do think Mamma might have
given me the Phryne. She has left me nothing except a perfectly
hideous heavy diamond ring that is suited to a dowager. But she
knew perfectly well what the bronze statue meant to me. I've told
her many a time how the voluptuous curves of that nude female
figure satisfied my soul. Phryne was 'made* to stand in the corner of
the hall at VaUombrosa, where it could be seen as you entered the
house. As it is, PolKe is ashamed of it, and hides it away in the
downstairs lavatory, where it is in semidarkness."

But one day, without giving us any warning of her extraor-
dinary behaviour, Auntie Pollie vanished. It ^turned out that she
had gone to. Canada, to spend the rest of her life with my mother's
half brother and his family, in Toronto. The first intimation we
had of her sudden disappearance was the arrival at Vallombrosa
of half a dozen big packing cases filled with the china. The jewelry,
apparently, went with Auntie Pollie to Canada. Phryne vanished
as completely as our aunt.

WAR YEARS 229

The fragile, delicate-colored Dresden shepherds and shepherd-
esses were covered with numberless rivets. This had been one of
Auntie Pollie's particular caprices.

"Of course I have broken my china on purpose/' she boasted.
"In this way I can prove that it is genuine. The rivets show that/
Nobody would have bothered to get mere copies of Dresden figures
so abundantly and expensively mended."

And now, during the early days of the war, we wrapped these
much riveted little figures in tissue, and packed them in the empty
biscuit tins. Evelyn and I went to the garden with our father, to
dig holes where we might hide our treasure.

"One of these days, when the war is over, well have a great time
digging it up again," laughed our father.

We had difficulty in deciding where to place these holes.

"Better have them some distance from each other/' Father
advised. "In that way, if a German shell or a bomb should drop
among them it wouldn't be so apt to destroy all the tins at one
time."

Already, during an unexpected German bombardment, our
tennis court had been ripped by a shell.

But I cannot remember exactly where we hid our treasure. It
is still there. Heather Cliff is no longer ours. Today, I believe, it is
an Anglican convent, unless, of course, it has been destroyed during
the Second World War.

But although I have forgotten where we buried the china, I do
recollect the excitement we felt as we replanted disturbed daffodil
bulbs and irises on top of the biscuit tins beneath the earth. Our
garden housed hidden treasure. Never again would it be a mere
garden. Magic had been added to it.

So excited were We two children over this romantic adventure
that we could not understand how our mother could stay indoors
working, instead of joining us. But she was busy just now with her
play.

230 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

Finding herself suddenly with no serials to write, once more
she perceived the hand of Destiny, This was the heaven-sent moment
to write her play.

"The war won't go on forever," she said, "and even as it is
the world needs to escape into something other than fighting. I
can't help thinking that palmist meant me to get my play written
now, while there is an unavoidable pause in my potboilers."

And so she kept Walmy in front of the typewriter all the day
long, as she plotted her play.

But there were unplanned interruptions. The evening work
was sometimes badly disturbed,

We were troubled by air raids.

Most of the zeppelins intended for raiding London arrived over
England near our part of the East Coast, Some of them hovered in
the sky above us and, hovering, dropped their bombs.

We had a very large cellar at Heather Cliff. Over the months
before the war we had used it to store the many pieces of furniture
we did not need* But now it was to be put to another purpose.
Because it occupied only the back part of the house, so that on one
side it was banked with earth, it was an exceptionally safe retreat
in an air raid, or even a bombardment. The townspeople knew this,
and women with tiny babies walked the three miles out to our
house, so that they might shelter from possible bombs. At the first
news of an approaching zeppelin the electric lights of the town were
extinguished. Somehow or other these people got to know about this
even before it happened, and often when we were working in the
carefully curtained house, we heard high-pitched voices shouting
to us to let them in.

"Dear me," said our mother, as the frightened voices called to

; us. "This means another night of disturbance. And just as I was

in a. thoroughly good working mood, too* Of course,, you might

% say that there is no reason why I shouldn't go on with my dictating,

as though nothing were happening. But apart from the fact that a

WAR YEARS 231

bomb might quite easily fall on the house and kill me, there's far
too much noise about for me to be able to concentrate/*
Our mother joined the crowd in the cellar-
On these nights of air raid alarms, the atmosphere of the cellar
soon became disagreeably close, for there was little possibility of
fresh air percolating into it. But it was not only because of the
airlessness that our mother suffered.

"War most surely does make one put up with things one would
have thought impossible/' she whispered to me one evening, as we
sat huddled in the darkness. "If there's anything I consider impor-
tant, it is the sanctity of the home. And now our home has suddenly
been invaded by the outside world and not the kind of outside
world I would have chosen to come closely against. If I had been
told, at Vallombrosa, that unknown mothers and children were
going to sleep one of these days in the upholstered armchairs that
used to stand in the front drawing room, I would never have
believed it Somehow, it reminds me of the stories of the French
Revolution, I suppose Tm Eving history."

But not only did children sleep in the upholstered furniture.
Babies even wetted the chairs that had been sat in by velvet-gowned
guests on At Home Days in St. John's Wood, while mothers opened
their dresses and fed their infants on a sofa that had stood in the
hall at Vallonabrosa.

Sometimes, when a bomb fell a little way off, one of the women
shrieked and wakened all the babies. It was then that my mother
suffered most For if there was anything in the world she disliked,
it was the crying of a baby*

"It's such an impoverishing sound," she said to us later. "It's
bad enough to have had to put up with your own, when they were
at the screaming age, without being forced to listen to all these
Strange ones. Their mothers ought to be able to control them better
But then, these women have got the psychology of the refugee. It's
a funny thing, you know, but all refugees look and act

23 2 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

Whether it's those Belgians you told me about, or the dismal, dreary
creatures that one sees pictures of in the newspapers these days,
they puzzle me. I find myself wondering where they come from, for
one never notices them in the ordinary courae of Hf e. It's only when
something like a war comes along that they appear suddenly in the
limelight . . . But I do wish they had more self-control. You see if
I'm not right in saying that if a bomb were to fall especially near us
these women who gather here in our cellar on air raid nights will
probably faint and moan and want brandy."

However much my mother might talk like this, though, she
opened her doors to anyone who wanted to come.

"There's a sense of drama even to their dreariness," she decided,
"And whatever you may choose to think, this is an epic age. As I
said before, we are experiencing history,"

Heather Cliff was not an easy house to live in during a war.
Because it stood alone on this bluff, overlooking the North Sea, it
was a conspicuous landmark. As such, it had to be blacked out with
special care. It was difficult enough to darken the countless windows
we had been so proud of, but to obscure the dome seemed an impos-
sibility. Try as we might, we could not prevent rays from shining
skyward and seaward. Soldiers patrolling the coast knocked at our
door at all times of the night, ordering us to turn out our lights.
People even reported they had seen them burning in the early hours
of the morning.

We began to wonder why it was that we were looked at in such
a strange way when we walked through the town. It was the cook
who enlightened us.

"They says as *ow you must be spies, and they'd better be
watchin' you," she told our mother. "Of course, I tells them as they
is all Wrong, and that it's only because they don't understand your
queer ways. But they won't believe me, and they is always asking
me about you* Why did you 'appen to come to Hve 'ere so short a
time before the outbreak of the war, they says, choosing to forget

WAR TEARS 233

all those years at The Red Croft. You don't earn your livelihood in
Lowestoft, so there seems no 'onest and good reason for your decid-
ing to come 'ere and especially to this J ouse with the dome. It's the
dome, m'm, what gets them feeling bad and worried. Why, they
says to me, that *ouse as you works in, it's the very place for a
German spy. If it 'ad been built special, it couldn't be better, what
with all those windows and the dome that is being used to signal
from. And then, of course, I tells them as you is all of you queer,
being writers as you might say. If I don't take care, m'm, I'll be
'aving them suspect me too/*

My mother's appearance scarcely helped to dispel these suspi-
cions, In her Paris clothes and her elaborate hats, she did not belong
to the provinces, and the local people might be forgiven if they mis-
took her for a typical conspirator.

But my father's deafness added fuel to the rumors. One evening
he did not hear the sentry's challenge as he came back from mailing
some letters, and was almost shot. He stormed at the soldier, which
only made matters worse. The neighborhood was getting increasingly
suspicious of us.

Meanwhile, we crept about after sunset with difficulty. If the
dome had been isolated from the rest of the house we could have
managed the blackout more easily; but it was in the center of the
hall, and each time we opened the door of any room the light would
have streamed out and been visible from the sky. For a long time we
felt bewildered as to what to do. But suddenly my father had an
idea.

"N,

"Let's get more of that black stuff we pin over the windows," he
said, "and make hangings across all the doors. Then we can come
in and out of the rooms when the lights are on without even a gleam
escaping to the dome.'*

But already it took so long each night to pin the draperies across
the windows with thumbtacks, that we decided to leave the door
hangings in position during the daytime.

234 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

"I know what it reminds me of, 95 laughed our mother, as she
stood in the middle of the hall with the draperies in place, "All these
black hangings, and with the dome above, make the house look
exactly like a Continental church during a funeral. I find myself
searching in vain for the catafalque,"

But our mother could not see how amusing she herself looked as
she suddenly pushed aside a black drapery after breakfast and
emerged hatless, low-necked and bare-armed, in one of her pink,
frilly morning jackets.

"If you aren't careful, Chummie," chuckled our father, "you'll
find there's a priest lurking somewhere round a corner, ready
to tell you that you are not decently attired for being inside a
church."

The servants in their uniforms seemed equally out of place, and
the "Merry Widow Waltz," played on our gramophone, sounded
deeply sacrilegious. As Walmy had once said, here in this house you
felt you must speak in a hushed voice.

Considering that it never entered our heads to cover the dome
with a coat of black paint, the most sensible thing would have been
to go to bed early and get up next day correspondingly betimes.
But this seemed an impossibility with my mother*

"I have nothing but contempt for people who retire early," she
said. "And why should I change my habits, just because there is a
war on? That would be a form of defeat. I've never gone to bed
before two or three o'clock in the morning, and Pve never wanted
more than five, or at most, six, hours of sleep. There's an old rule
about sleep I believe in: 'six hours for a man, seven for a woman,
and eight for a fool.* You might think I ought to class myself as a
woman, but when it comes to the things of the brain, I class myself
as a man."

My father, though, suffered from this austerity, for he seemed to
need far more sleep.

"Your mother just doesn't seem to understand," he confided to

WAR TEARS 235

me one day, "I'm terribly behindhand in my sleep. I've been adding
up the hours of which she has deprived me, over the years, and they
have reached an unbelievable figure. I'd never be able to make them
up, even if I lived to be a hundred and were to stay asleep all the

time."

Around midnight my father would try to escape to the bedroom,
but my mother was wide awake and intercepted him.

"I would like you to read to me, Robert," she told him, "while
I paste together these fashion pictures from the Daily Mail I never
have time to do it during the daytime, when Walmy is here."

Midnight passed into one o'clock. Two o'clock struck. And still
she acted as though the day were young,

"What your mother never realizes, of course," my father went
on in confidence to me, "is that she makes up for these late nights
by dropping half asleep during the daytime, while she is being
read to* Many a time Fve seen her dose her eyes and nod her head.
But it would never do to let her know I have noticed this, and
you must promise me you won't say a word to her about it."

It must have been because of her nocturnal activity that she did
not seem to see how tired the war was making us children. As the
months went by, the fear of invasion increased. More and more of
the local inhabitants went inland each night to sleep.

"They do say that if the Germans land it will be on ^ the
.particular strip of coast near Heather Cliff, where there is a break
in the sandbanks," our mother told us with composure. "You know
I don't believe in getting panicky, but I am beginning to think ft
might be wise for us to be prepared. Conceivably we may have to
flee-r-and in the middle of the night, too."

And so when we went to bed we were made to place food, warm
clothing, some money and any little treasures we wished to save, on
-the chair by the bedside.

We did not tell our mother of the fear we felt, or let her
how our sleep was broken by nightmares.

236 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

But this sleep was short. She decided that the safe thing to do
was to keep watch through the hours of darkness for the electric
light to be turned off. This would be the signal that something was
wrong. When she herself went to bed between four and five in the
morning having had a short sleep earlier, while our father kept
watch she wakened me and my brother in order that we might
keep a lookout until daylight came.

"It's safer to waken both of you," she decided, "lest one or the
other should fall asleep. Not that I expect you to do so. You are too
well brought up for that. Now it wouldn't be safe for me to make the
servants take their share in keeping watch* They'd have no sense
of responsibility, and the next thing to happen would be the Ger-
mans upon us, with no warning given, and the servants sound asleep
in their beds."

However exhausted we were, our mother considered this good
training for us She did not let us go to bed any earlier the night
before*

"One must be properly disciplined for an emergency/' she told
us. "My papa always impressed that upon me and he was a soldier,
and should have known. That is the way never to let life get the
better of you."

But there were things other than fear of a German invasion
that might be supposed to worry us. Our bilk had been mounting.
Knowing the Leighton habits, the tradespeople had been lenient,
but there was a point past which even our family debts could
not go.

One day the parlormaid came to my mother in confusion*

"If you please, m'm, Mr. Thompson is at the front door, and
wanting to see you," she said apologetically*

"And who is Mr. Thompson?" asked my mother.

"It's Mr. Thompson the butcher, m'm," explained the parlor-
maid, getting red in the face,

"Tell him I'm busy," loftily answered my mother, "Oh, and

WAR TEARS 237

you might mention to him that I shall be writing to him in a day
or two."

It was many months since the butcher had received a penny,
"To think of his daring to come to the house and to the front
door, too/* she said. "It's enough to make me change butchers.
People like that don't seem to realize that it's an honor for them
to be owed money by us. But there you are. That's war. It upsets
civilization. It gives a chance to the common people of the world,
and makes them forget their place. They aren't capable of under-
standing the glory and glamour of war. They only see in it an
opportunity to raise themselves in the social scale. It's always the
upper classes that suffer most in time of war. You see if I am
not right/'

She was deeply outraged* /

"In the glorious days of the Boer War it was different," she went
on. "People knew their places more then. They had a queen they
worshiped, and I don't care what the rest of the world says, a
country is only at its best when it has a king or queen at its head
that it can revere. The whole trouble about this war of ours
now is that it has happened a few years too late. If Edward the
Seventh had still been alive and on the throne you would have felt
a puke and a throb all through England; and Thompson the
butcher would never have dated to come and ask me for payment
of his bill. Wars are no longer the stimulating things they once were*
Now in the Boer War we almost worshiped Lotd Roberts and Lord
Kitchener. That was an aristocratic war."

As far back as I could remember in my earliest childhopd, I had
been told of the greatness of Lord Roberts. My mother, insisted that
his photograph should stand in the place of honor on the nursery
mantelpiece, as an example to us. We had only a vague idea, though,
who he was. We knew he didn't belong to the family, but we never
understood why he was important enough to be placed in the
center of things. As we grew older our mother told us stories of the

238 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

glory of the Boer War, and quoted poems by Rudyard Kipling;
and the man with the row of medals and the elaborate military
uniform, whose faded photograph stood next to Nanny's member-
ship card for the Social Society of her Baptist Church, was woven
into legends of a place called Ladysmith.

On the mantelpiece in my mother's bedroom, next to the photo-
graph of Lily Elsie as the Merry Widow, stood a picture of Lord
Kitchener. He had as many medals as Lord Roberts. In addition,
he had a more imposing moustache. He, too, was one of her
idols.

"When you grow up," she said to me, "you'll know or you
should, if there isn't too much of the Leighton side in you that
the only man worth giving yourself to is the man who has kept aloof
from women. There is no satisfaction in seeing yourself as one of
many, but if you are the great passion in the life of a man who has
managed to live independent of sex, then you may know the gods
have been good to you. I always fed that about Lord Kitchener,
He never found the woman who was worthy of Mm or of his love.
He could have been one of the world's greatest lovers* He would
have been like Nelson with his Lady Hamilton, I teU you, if you
want real passion you must go to the man of action. It is there you
will find tenderness and love. You've only to look at people like
your Uncle Jack to see how right I am. Intellectuals aren't any
good. They're always thinking of themselves, and analyzing what
they are feeling. They never lose themselves in the woman they
love."

But Lord Kitchener had just been drowned. The World War
did not produce heroes for my mother.

Meanwhile, there was the visit from the butcher.

And it was not only the butcher. Somehow or other, the grocer
and the fishmonger, the coal merchant and the fruiterer must have
heard of the butcher's visit, for we received communications from
all of them, in letter and in person. The ring was tightening around

WAR TEARS 239

us, The casualty lists in the papers grew longer each day, and still
there was no need for my mother's melodramas.

Suddenly everything came to a head. The bank had foreclosed.
We dismissed all the servants. Cook, parlormaid, housemaid,
kitchen maid and my own maid Martha, they left us in a bunch,
their wages still in arrears.

"You are victims of the war," my mother told them. "Never
before have I had any of my servants leave me except to get
married. But there are forces which are stronger than we are."

Walmy decided to stay with us for a while longer, although her
salary was owing*

"Lo-ar, Mrs. Leighton," she said, "As if I'm the sort to be
worrying about money. It'd be more than I could face, to think of
you having to move from Heather Cliff without me to help you.
When I remember the move from Vallombros^, and the muddles
we had, I know perfectly well how muph you'll be needing me.
Don't you think any more about it. I'm staying."

We were leaving our pretentious mansion. My mother's adorer
"Silenus" was ill, and had retired from the City. No longer did we
have a friend to help us.

Day after day we read through the advertisements of cottages in
the newspapers.

"It's really rather exciting, if you come to think about it/'
smiled our mother. "There's absolutely nothing in the world to stop
us from going to live anywhere in this entire island. What's that
you have found? An inexpensive furnished cottage in the Lake
District? The climate there would make me lethargic and romantic,
and that isn't good in wartime* And not the Midlands, either. They
are unstimulating and dull. I think our choice had better be nar-
rowed down to the South of England. It wiH save time if you bear
that in mind."

One day we found an advertisement of what seemed the ideal
cottage. It was at the foot of the South Downs, in Sussex,

24 o TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

"Fm not half as much interested in how many rooms it has as
in where it is," said my mother, "This sounds perfect. It is only
about ten miles from Brighton, and Brighton is even more fashion-
able than London. I think we'd better telegraph straight away and
take it. How much did you say they are asking for it?"

Without even seeing a photograph of the place, we rented this
tiny cottage in Sussex.

My mother was not unhappy at this turn of events. It mattered
very little to her what our setting might be, for she carried her own
world around with her always, and that world was the center of
things.

"After all," she said, as we first set eyes on our new home, "the
war won't last for ever. And coming here only goes to prove that if
you're all right in yourself it doesn't matter whether you live in a
palace or a hovel. I consider that this cottage in Sussex is exactly
the right place in which to spend the war years. Anyone who lives
in grander quarters elsewhere is acting unpatrioticaUy."

And so the family moved in. Considering the smallness of the
place, it was fortunate that we had sold most of our possessions
and that almost all of the dogs had died by now of old age. But
even as it was, there was congestion. Trunks cluttered the miniature
rooms, and my mother's bundles lay around all over the cottage.
They had arrived unsorted front Heather Cliff. The contents of
some of them went back to the early days in St. John's Wood. This
time they even strayed into the kitchen. For there was no longer a
cook to keep us and the bundles in our place.

"Really, you know, there's something to be said for being free,"
decided our mother. "If Nellie were still cooking for us we'd have
to keep out of the kitchen. As it is, I find it the most inspiring room
in the entire cottage, and I shall turn it into my study. You may
work wherever you choose, Robert, but I mean to stay here, in the
kitchen. Besides, this is the only good-sized table in the place. All
those in the sitting room are so ladylike and tiny. I can spread my

WAR TEARS 241

papers out here, and not have to pile them up every time we need
to lay the table for a meal/*

My mother's work covered everything in the kitchen except the
cooking range.

It turned out to be a most sensible arrangement. We could
combine work and cooking with the least amount of inconvenience.
While my mother dictated her play to me for now that Walmy
had left I had taken her place as typist we could watch the pots
on the stove and even peel the potatoes for the next meal.

Neither my mother nor I knew how to cook. We children had
never been allowed inside the kitchen. But now we did not even
own a cookbook.

"That doesn't matter," said my mother. "If you have brains
and imagination for one thing you have brains and imagination for
another. We'll manage somehow. In fact, I shouldn't be surprised
if we didn't turn out to be most ingenious cooks. After all, it's in
our family. Think back to my mamma and Pollie. Have you ever
tasted more perfect food anywhere? And they despised cookbooks.
I don't suppose any of the world's great chefs follow printed
recipes, any more than the great dressmakers use paper patterns.
I am certain we can invent wonderful dishes."

One of the first things we made was a suet pudding,

"We must begin by deciding what the ingredients are," my
mother told me solemnly. "Undeniably there must be suet, else it
would not be called a suet pudding. Then, too, there must be flour
... I suggest you chop the suet while I think over what else to
do . . . Yes, I know. Surely we need something liquid, to bind the
mixture together. How would it be if we were to use some milk?
That would anyhow make it nourishing."

We stirred the contents of the milk jug into the mixture, tied
the result into one of my father's handkerchiefs and dumped it into
boiling water. No suet pudding had ever tasted so good before.

My mother's time sense, however, was unreliable. Never was

242 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

she ready for any meal at the proper hour, and I have known us to
sit down to the midday dinner around four In the afternoon, just as
the rector's wife was walking up the garden path to pay us a call.
There was a scramble to remove the dishes of food to the kitchen
before we should open the front door,

"Not that I'm ashamed to be seen eating at this .time of the
afternoon/' my mother said as she sailed out of the sitting room
with the steak and kidney pie, "It is, in fact, fashionable to eat late
rather than early. You've only got to think for a moment of the sort
of people who indulge in high tea, instead of late dinner, to realize
this. No, the only thing that makes me take these things away is that
there is something unpicturesque about a half-finished meal It is
even somewhat sordid/'

By this time the rector's wife had waited at the front door, and
might have supposed the Leightons were out had she not seen dim
figures moving around within the house and heard Mother's voice.
When she entered the room y there was only the tablecoth left, upon
\vhich stood a cruet containing salt and pepper, and a few knives
and forks. But I knew that the house must smeU strongly of steak
and kidney pie, and I was not surprised when I saw the nostrils of
the rector's wife unwittingly dilate, as though trying to discover what
was being cooked at such a queer hour of the afternoon. She was
f ar too polite on this occasion to make any comments.

But as time went on, the rector's wife grew fond of us, with
our unorthodox ways, and named us "the dear disreputables."

"What can you know about cooking, when your mind is on
your writing all the time?" she laughed at my mother* And, suppos-
ing us to be half starved from lack of any sense of domesticity, she
would bring pies and cakes and vegetables and leave them on the
front doorstep.

"I really can't think why she should imagine I don't know how
to run an establishment," said my mother. "I've given far bigger
dinner parties than she'll ever be called upon to have. Just because

WAR TEARS 243

I'm what she calls a 'Bohemian,' is no reason why I can't cook.
When you come to think of it, some of the world's greatest creative
people have been the best cooks. If I chose to I could feel really

insulted."

Remembering this, I never told my mother that occasionally,
when I met the rector's wife in the village, she would haul me into
the Rectory for what she called "a good square meal at the right
time." I knew my mother would be angry. But I was often quite
glad of this food, as she grew increasingly careless about mealtime.

"What about supper, Chummie?" my father would ask, as the
clock showed it to be half-past eight. "If you're busy 111 go along
and get it ready."

; "Oh," answered my mother, "it's far too early for supper. Why,
in the old days at Vallombrosa Walmy never stopped work until
nine o'clock. Besides, it must have been nearly seven o'clock before
we finished tea. Let me go on for a little while longer."

Actually my mother was not working. She was in the mood to
talk. The hands of the clock moved round in a complete circle and
then nearly into a second circle, before either Father or I could
find a pause in her conversation during which we might suggest
that as it was now past ten o'clock, supper would be a good idea.
Over the years her structure of living had been held in place by the
punctual sounding of the dinner gong, or the arrival and departure
of Walmy. Now that these supports no longer existed, the days

sprawled.

They were strange days, in their busy shapelessness. They were
'filled from morning to night with cooking and scrubbing and wash-
ing. Though my mother was publishing a few short stories, in
addition to plotting her play, there was little money for anything
except actual food and rent. But we did not seem to care;

"A lady can remain a lady whatever housework she may have to
do," my mother continually reminded me. "And this applies to a
'gentleman, too," she added, turning to look pointedly at my father,

244 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

whom she never considered as quite a gentleman, "Why, when I
remember how my mamma and papa used to wash dishes and cook
and scrub while the family finances were low, I assure you that
they made it into the right thing to do. They even made it seem
underbred not to do it. But there is no need to let the whole world
know what you are doing. Mamma was very wise about this. When
she went out anywhere she looked exactly as though she employed
at the very least a dozen servants. Nobody would have supposed
she had just finished scrubbing the sink,**

My mother took her full share of the housework. The type-
writer was moved from room to room according to what she was
doing. When she made their bed it was hauled upstairs to the little
bedroom with the dormer window, and although she probably did
no dictating, yet she felt happier when she could see the machine.

"It reminds me that I really am a writer/* she said. "Otherwise
I might find myself getting caught up into the entanglements of
domesticity and, before I knew it, I would be concerning myself
with the dust on the mantelpiece or thinking up cakes to make for
tea."

As it was, she used the cooking as a background for working.
Interested in the story she was dictating, she stood at the kitchen
table kneading the dough for an apple pie*

"I find myself almost sorry I never had this chance those years
at Vallombrosa," she said, as the kneading went on over an hour or
two. "It's an interesting thing, but my mind works much better
when I'm doing something with my hands. I wonder if I have made
an important discovery, or whether anyone else had known this?'*

The apple pie was ready for the midday meal around the middle
of the afternoon. It was unexpectedly good. No one could possibly
have said that the pastry had been made in too much of a hurry.

But behind all these domesticities hung the background of war.
Brought up by a military father, my mother had no horror of war.
She was a romanticist, and saw in it color and drama. The world

WAR TEARS 245

was peopled with heroes. She belonged to the sanctified community
of women throughout the ages, whose sons had fought the enemy
in foreign lands. And it was well for her that she felt this, for,
though we had left behind us on the East Coast the immediate
danger of zeppelin raids, and the fear of invasion, the war was still
close to us. As I went to the farm to fetch the afternoon milk I heard
the guns from France, ceaselessly pounding. The farmer's wife said
it was the well that carried the sound. When I walked along the
ridge of the Downs the boom of the guns echoed among the hills.
Casualty lists filled the daily papers, and more and more of Roland's
friends were being killed.

But my mother held her head high, and quoted Byron and

Rupert Brooke.

"Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!
There's none of these so lonely and poor of old,
But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.'*

Roland was out in France, among the guns. He was a Knight of
the Round Table, a shining knight in armor, a dreamer, an inheritor
of all the glories of the world.

If she were afraid for him, she kept this to herself. Outwardly
she assumed a certainty that he would not be killed.

"He'll come through it all right," she said with lightness in her
voice. "Nothing has ever gone wrong for him. He has a charmed
life. The gods couldn't possibly let him die, even though they
must love him so. There's so much for him to do in this world.
Besides, didn't Cheiro tell ufc that he would end up as an important
military figure and die in battle at the age of sixty? And he's
only just twenty now. No, there's absolutely nothing to worry

about." ,

And so she took her walks gaily along the little Sussex lanes.

Our cottage garden was too small for this daily exercise.

"But you must go some little way in front of me," she told me.

246 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

"I've got to be absolutely sure there are no bulls about in the fields.
Take good care to look over the hedges/*

Even in the midst of war and bombs and shells, she still felt
certain that it would be through some member of "the second order
of creation" that she was to meet her death.

She walked through the village street, wearing her ermine stole
and her sable-trimmed velvet coat, as though she were treading
upon the pile carpet of a palace. She sailed into the village post
office, carrying her ermine muff. But the Parma violets upon that
muff had had, these days, to be imaginary* Who was to say that the
imagination could not produce Parma violets as magical as any
that could be bought at a florist's? And what did it matter that the
sable-trimmed velvet coat was growing shabby and worn with time?
She looked around her in the village post office, at hobbling Miss
Gander who sold the postage stamps, and at rosy-cheeked Mrs.
Heathorn who kept the bakery at the far side. She smiled at them
and at the doctor's wife who had just entered the shop in severe
tweeds; and it was the smile of indulgent graciousness.

As I write this, I find myself back in a pension at Cannes, on
the Riviera. This pension was kept by a Russian princess. The
man in the green baize apron, who carried my luggage to my room,
was her son, with whom she had escaped when he was a few days
old. All around me, at the dinner table, sat Russian nobility in exile,
dressed in shabby splendor that had belonged to the pre-revolution
era. Their minds lived in the past, too. They addressed each other
with a graciousness and ? courtesy that was very moving. In the
next room, upon an easel, stood a large painting of the Tsar and
the Tsarina, heavily draped in black. Looking then at these people,
I had found myself placing my mother among them. These were
the people who had outlived their age. They were people who no
longer belonged . . . They sat there and bowed in exactly the same
way in which my mother bowed to the doctors wife*

There was something all of them carried which life could not

WAR TEARS 247

strip from them. Inside their hearts they nursed the same desolation.
Their worlds had been destroyed* But upon their outward persons
they would wear the ermines and velvets of their former glory. No
one should ever see what had happened to them.

And so, as my mother walked down the street of this little SUBSCX
village in her shabby sable-trimmed velvet coat she, too, carried an
emptiness within her. But, holding her head high, she did not mean
to show her suffering. The world must never know.

For Roland had been MUeA

He had been MEed in France half an hour before he was to
start home on Christmas leave.

My mothers love for him had amounted almost to idolatry*
He was the child of her atonement. Married when she was only
seventeen, she had let her first baby die from a nurse's neglect. In
Roland die determined to make amends. Besides, bad he not loved
things like scarlet silk stoddngs* red carnations and poetry? And
was he not beautiful, Kke a knight in shining armor?

My mother went about ia a state of exaltation, prottd at the
remembrance of ham.

But suddenly she was ill

'This is strange/* she said, after being many weeks in a
dangerous condition* **I can't think what has happened to me.
They say it's my heart, but I have never been iU in my life except
when my babies came* These stepid doctors seem to be worrying
about me, keeping me flat ia bed all this long time^ as though they
expected me to die if I were to stir, little do they know how strong
I mi. m fool them yet* Ycm see if I don't , . . Where did you put
those last poems of Roland's? I'd like to look at them again."

As she lay reading some of these poems that had been returned
to us with Roland's belongings f torn France, sh discovered one that
had 21 weak line in it.

"How could he have written it," &he sobbcct "It must have been
the Army life that affected him. He would never have put such

248 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

a line down on paper in the old days before the war. He was always
so aware of Ms standards. I simply cannot get over it He would
have been so ashamed of it himself* I know he would."

She wept over the line that did not scan. She was beginning to
recover,

"People are so queer in the way they take their grief/' she said
"They seem to expect you to go all to pieces. Now I know enough
about Roland to be perfectly certain he'd much rather have me go
on living my Hfe than just lie down and moan* It will be a far
greater tribute to what he and I have always considered worth
while. As soon as the wretched doctors will allow me to do so and
perhaps eveii before that, if they get to be a nuisance I mean to
begin work once more, and finish my play/'

A few days later she started dictating the third act of the play.
Not even the entreaties of my father could stop her.

I was able now to spend more time at the typewriter, for, during
my mother's illness, we had discovered someone to work for us,
: She was an extraordinary woman with long gold earrings and
intricately plaited shiny black hair. She looked as though she should
be telling our fortunes, and it seemed strange to see her innpcently
washing dishes or making a bed.

"There's no doubt about it, Mrs. Chatfield must be a gypsy,"
my mother decided. * 'Whenever she comes into the room with my
tray I seem to see a background of caravans and circus tents, and
baskets of lace and clothes pins, and white day pipes, I even fed
I have to be careful not to annoy her, lest she should cast an evil
spell upon me. And I don't mean this only in fun, for we have, as I
may remind you, cause to be scared of gypsies/*

It seemed that the day before the young nurse accidentally
smothered my mother's first baby, a gypsy had come to the house in
St. John's Wood, with laces and ribbons to sell. The servant who
answered the door had sent her away with anger, and the gypsy had

WAR YEARS 249

spat upon the dooratep and said, as she left: "Very well. There'll be
a death in this house within twenty-four hours,"

If Mrs, Chatfield had only known, she could have twisted iis
round her little finger.

But there was one important thing she did do. During those
drear days in the Sussex cottage it was she who kept our spirits high,
and diverted us with her gaiety. It was impossible to stay gloomy
with her about the house* In the frilled calico skirts that swirled
around her ankles, and her gaudy-colored bodices, she was like some
one from the chorus in the second act of // Trovatore. Gypsy music
seemed to surround her, even while she emptied the slops, and when
she answered a ring at the front door she stood there in the entrance,
her arms akimbo, as though she were about to break into a wild
Romany dance.

"Sometimes it amuses me to imagine what these ultrarespectable
local people must think .when they come to call on us," laughed our
mother, "They would expect, to see a severely uniformed servant
open the door to them, instead of this figure who looks as though she
were waitiiig for hei* cue to whirl herself behind the footlights."

But the neighborhood was beginning to get to know us, and little
would have surprised them. It was a good thing for the respectability
of the Leighton family, though, that Evelyn returned from Osborne
for his holidays, wearing the uniform of a ca4et in His Majesty's
Navy*

The guns still echoed from the well at Mrs. Bye's farm, when
I fetched the milk. They thundered night and day, in March 1918,
and every young man we: knew had been killed. I had grown afraid
to walk alone over the Downs, against the sound of these guns-;
the air seemed blurred with ghosts.

November brought the Armistice. I could get the milk now with?
out fear. The well was silent. War was over. The men were coming

250 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

But to us no one returned* My mother walked along the Sxissex
lanes like a creature in fancy dress that had strayed from some car-
nival, and lost its way*

Life had been unable to defeat her. She did not even fed bitter-
Be about Roland's death. The powerful alchemy of a sense of
drama had infused a cosmic quality into her desolation.

"Why won't people see that it isn't what life does to them that
matters, but how they cope with what life dom?* she said. "Women
ifaave had their sons kffled in battle from time immemorial, and they
have not whined. And why should I be inferior to them in my
spirit?"

She began to go to Brighton. In that seaside resort which
retained its Regency atmosphere, she seemed more completely at
home. There she entertained her London friends and admireiu, Mr.
Bowles, who was the only one of "Mothers Old Men" still living,
again pinned Parma violets upon her ermine muff. Even Unde Jack
had grown gentle and understanding.

She was enjoying Brighton.

^Ifs one of the few places in England which km had the power
to retain its true values," she said, "It has been able to withstand the
rising tide of that drab thing called democracy. No sooner do you
emerge from the railway station than you fed you are in a world to
which you bdong. If Brighton begins to succumb to this new-
fangled glorification of the middle dass, I shall begin to worry
about Hie."

And she smiled her most engaging smile to the new friend oppo-
site her, a Grenadier Guardsman just back from the trenches, who
could have stepped straight out of a novd by Ouida.

Sitting there in this Brighton hotel, dothed in her mourning for
Roland, she was enjoying herself with this you&g captain. She was
touching the fringes of war. Life had lost none of its drama. Her
personal grief had been merged in the common pool of human
suffering. The violets on her ermine muff were still sweet.

* The Last Edwardian

A new sense of protection had come into our feeling for our
mother. Though she did not know it, we were aware of the desola-
tion within her. I had seen her sometimes, when she thought she
was alone, standing bleakly in the pose of the Tragic Muse, her
head held high like a challenge.

We were doing everything we could to occupy her mind*

And so we were glad when a new adorer appeared.

It was my father who had introduced him. They had worked
together in an Army camp*

"I look upon him as a perfect godsend," my father confided to
me* "What your mother needs just now is to get interested in some-
one who never knew Roland, It will switch her mind into fresh
channels.**

But this adorer caused considerable consternation among jny
mother's friends. Uncle Jack was openly jealous.

"If you had chosen a man who was my superior or even my
equal I could have put up with it better,' 5 he fumed, "But this

252 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

is a downright Insult. Why, the fellow is completely devoid of in-
tellect. He has never read a real book. He knows absolutely nothing
about music. In fact, he isn't even educated."

Mr, Bowles took a more definite stand. He refused to visit us.

The newcomer was a handsome Welshman, with the dark
bullet-shaped head and the blue eyes of the Celt. He had neither
intellect nor education. So far Uncle Jack was right. My mother
though, rejoiced in this.

"I am so tired of all these people who think they have minds,"
she sighed. "At last I have found a man who knows how to love.
For true love comes from the heart, and not the brain. As I've
always said, the brain is the enemy of passion.**

The Welshman was a man of action. He had lived recklessly.
This fascinated my mother for, despite her outward appearance of
abandon, her own behavior remained exemplary. But she found it
exciting to live adventure through someone eke,

Her Celt was the son of a parson in Wales,

"And isn't that exactly like life?" our mother said. <e You will
see that it is from the rigid, inhibiting rectories of Great Britain
that r our swashbucklers emerge. And have you ever noticed how
the severe military families throw up our wildest eccentrics? It's
almost as though drastic pruning is as necessary for the human
being as it is for the plant."

Llewellyn Hughes had run away from school when he was very
young, and gone to sea. Now, on his weekly holiday from the Army
camp, he sat by the hour before our cottage fire, telling us stories
of his seafaring years. What did it matter that we had scarcely any
money? We fed upon tales of the last of the blackbirding days,
when his sailing ship went to Africa to seize Negroes for slaves.

"You have simply no idea, Pattie, how gorgeously beautiful
the bodies of those colored girls were," he told my mother.

And as he described them she would turn to him, with a worried

THE LAST EDWARDIAN 255,

look in her eyes, wondering how many women had interested him

before he fell in love with her.

These days were lived to the rhythm of sea chanteys he had
learnt while he climbed the riggings of a sailing ship.

Sally Brown was a bright mulatto,

Way-ay roll and go,
She drinks rum and chews tobacco .

As the cottage fire sank to embers, the sea chanteys merged into
fabulous accounts of Ms o^eriences in the lowest seamen's dives of
San Francisco and Shanghai, the East End docks of London and
the seaports of Australia.

"Quiet, Lew/* urged my mother, "AH this is very well for me
to hear, Fm a married woman. But I won't have you teaching
Clare too much of the wickedness of men. She's far too young to
realize that there is one code of behavior for seamen and quite
another for the men she will come up against. You know my views
about the bringing up of young girls. I hold with shielding them
from everything I possibly can. That's the only way to keep them
alluring and romantic/*

But the Celt looked across at my mother with a soft twinkle
in his eye, and went on singing his unexpurgated chanteys.

Llewdttyn had a wife. She was a Frenchwoman he had married
on one of his voyages abroad We had not yet met her. I think
we were somewhat afraid of doing so. For were not Frenchwomen
proverbially jealous? And how could we be sure she would under-
stand that all men always fdl in love with our mother? We seemed
to be Evmg the plot of one of our mother's own melodramas, Any-
thing might happen. J rather think she herself was apprehensive,
for she kept on questioning the Celt about his wife.
, "But you haven't told me yet what Celeste looks like?" she
asked Mm. "Is she dark and tragic, or small and chic? And can't

254 ' TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

you show me a photograph of her? Then I*d know what to expect
and how to treat her/*

But Llewellyn seemed to have no interest in discussing her. His
mind just now was on our mother.

The French wife, meanwhile, had written a letter to my mother
in which she thanked her with polite impersonality for the kindness
we had shown her husband. But this did not reassure us. On the
contrary, my mother, who professed to know the wiles of women,
read into the lines aH sorts of hidden meaning,
i *Tm afraid there's going to be difficulty with Celeste until I
manage to win her over/* she confided to me one day. **But I'm not
seriously worried. I shall know how to treat her.**

Celeste arrived. A plump, squat fittfe middle-aged woman stood
on the doorstep, looking Kke an ugler version of our Aunt Poffie.
She had, it is true, the same high breasts that, Grandpapa had once
said, possessed such allure for men. Perhaps it was these that had
won the Celt's heart. They seemed, though, strangely out of fashion,
for women at this time were making themselves appear as flat
chested as possible*

1 "I'm sorry she's so ugly," my mother said. **Ug!y women are
always the ones to boast about the great and wonderful love their
husbands bear than. Now if she were a beauty she would fed
fundamentally sure of herself, and could afford to be humble and
generous. Yes, it's a pity she*s so hideous/*

But Celeste was not going to be the trouble we feared. From
tibe first moment she looked at my mother she became her willing
slave.

The Celt, though, could not Hve on love alone. His wife was
aware of tikis. Now that the Army camp was closed, she found work
for him in London* They went off and left us.

My mother looked about her in the Sussex cottage. While her
Welshman had been there he had chased away the ghosts. But
they surrounded her now, and she was afraid.

THE LAST EDWARDIAN 255

She did not admit to this fear. Perhaps she was scarcely aware
of it herself, so dctennined was she to hide it. But suddenly she
decided to leave and go to London.

"It's absolutely essential for my work that I should live within
reach of possible editors/* she told my father. "The remote country-
side was all right during the war, but it would be cultural suicide
to stay here any longer. Somehow, I'd rather like to go to St. John's
Wood. What do you think, Robert?"

And so we went back to St* John's Wood. The years we had
spent in the Sussex cottage were sealed away, as a thing of the
past.

"How wonderful it wiU be to walk down Elm Tree Road again,
and hear the birds singing, and smell the lilac in bloom," she said,
as we settled into the furnished house we had found.

But St. John's Wood did its utmost to betray her. Progress had.
stepped in, and standardization, and the thrushes sang no more
in the blossoming pear trees. For great blocks of flats had been,
erected, hiding the sky* Vallombrosa had been demolished, and
where our thirty-six IHac bushes once blossomed stood a row of

My mother, though, was not going to allow herself to be upset
by aU this.

"If you have the right kind of vision, you can see the spirit of
a place even through bricks and mortar," she declared. "I refuse to
be depressed by the changes here since we left. St. John's Wood
will always be St. John's Wood, even though it were leveled to the
ground. Progress is powerless to destroy it. Believe it or not, I can
see our row of linden trees and the high garden walls just as clearly as
if I were to touch them with my hand. Anything that was so fuU
of magic as the Hfe of St John's Wood could never really disappear.
It is indestructible within the memory."

The Celt and his French wife came to live with us. As we moved
firom furnished house to furnished house, they moved with us. Lew

j2 5 6 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

ivent to work each morning and Celeste cooked our meals with
the skill of a Frenchwoman. My father wrote Ms boys' stories, and
my mother went on with her play*

It was significant that my mother had asked her Celt to call
her "Pattie." This had been the name of her childhood, and not
even my father was supposed to use It, There seemed to be some-
thing in common between this Welshman and her own Irish father.
Both had an aggressive contempt for intellectuals, and both were
men of action. It was as though my mother were being drawn more
and more Into the shelter of her past. As she sat beside this latest
adorer, listening to his tales of hunting and shooting in Wales, on
the family acres, her face took on the expression of an enraptured
child.

"You know the cry of the little hoi pheasant when she is dis-
turbed on her nest, Pattie?" asked the Celt* And he would imitate
it so exactly that the living room seemed as though it had been
transformed into the wind-blown wilds of Wales, and I held my
breath and waited for the rustle of a gun dog among the bracken,
or the whirr of wings as a bird was flushed.

"You see if you can't imitate it," said the Celt My mother tried
to, but failed.

And then, as I laid the table, I would be startled by the sudden
call of a quail, and know that the man sitting by the fireside was
still out among the heather and the bracken, and that it would not
be easy to draw these two Celtic creatures in from the moors, to the
evening meal.

Neither my father nor Celeste felt any resentment against my
mother and the Welshman for their preoccupation with each other*
They lived in the background, serving with devotion these two
human beings they loved so deeply* The only time there was any
sense of friction was when Unde Jack appeared.

For Unde Jack was stiU feeling bitter*

"That only goes to show what a little man he is," said my

THE LAST EDWARDIAN 257

mother, **He is ungenerous and possessive. But he defeats his own
ends. It gets him nowhere."

"Don't you realize you are letting yourself slip out of life?"
he asked one day, when he failed to interest her in a new French
play he had brought for her to read.

But my mother gave a little laugh.

"Slipping out of life?" she questioned him.

"But you never even go to a theatre these days, or talk with me
about ideas," complained Uncle Jack.

My mother was not hearing what he said. Someone had opened
the front door. It was time for the Welshman to return home.

And then, as Unde Jack went on grunting in vexation, up from
the hall of this house in St John's Wood came the call of a quail.
The walls of the Hving room seemed to vanish from sight, and
Unde Jack sat in an armchair among heather and bracken, as his
Bien Aiin6e let out her answering call.

He knew now that she had left him.

But he failed to realize there was so much else she was leaving
these days, that he took it as a personal insult. From time to time he
made a valiant effort to bring her round to what he called reason.
But always, just at the moment when he f dt he was succeeding, the
Welshman returned home, and up from the front hall came this call
of a quail. My mother's face ceased to be the face of his Fiorita Mia,
as she answered from the bracken.

"The funny thing %" laughed my mother one day, "that I don't
really bdong among the moors and the heather except in so far as
they are the background for aristocratic house parties in Scotland,
with trains running North for the Twelfth. 9 I'd hate to be living
out there in the wilds myself."

This Cdt held the power to lift her out of her own world into
his own. His clergymen brothers visited us, and gentle, shabby
little Welsh sisters came to London for the first time in their lives
and cooked and sewed for us. My mother wrote lengthy letters in

25 8 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

her wild handwriting to their aged deric father, and the entire
family saw in her a power for good. Their wandering boy had come
home at kst A paean of praise to this strange woman who had
worked such a niirade went up to heaven from a remote rectory in
Wales, and little parcels, tied together with old pieces of knotted
string, brought us sweet-scented violets, and the first wild daffodils
Df the year. We dined, in the autumn, upon Welsh partridges and
pheasants.

There was only one thing that somewhat troubled my mother.
The Celt had Httle interest in her clothes.

"And this is really rather serious/' die said, "It takes away my
chief impetus in earning money. Money to me means beautiful
dothes. But why should I want them just now? Lew doesn't even
notice it when I dress up for him. All he does when I put on some
Fashionable garment IVe looked after with such care for many
years, is to laugh a little and give his pet call of a quail. And that
makes my stylish dothes look actually vulgar* For who could be
among heather and bracken in velvets and furs?**

She did not even have Mr. Bowks to dress for. Although we
were now living within easy reach of Mm, he continued to stay
away. But this did not do him any good in my mother's estimation,
for if there were anything she despised it was someone who
sulked.

"If George only knew how completely stupid he looks," she
said, 'Tie'd give it up* I fed the same contempt for him that I used
to feel foe your Auntie Pdflie when she indulged in her fits of the
sulks. They ksted three days, and during that period she locked
berself m her bedroom and -came out for food only at nighttime,
when the family was in bed. We all laughed at her behind her
bade. She looted thoroughly undignified***

But Bvdjta and I were sorry for Mr, Bowles, Surreptitiously we
saw Mm and tried to console Mm. We were deeply attached to him.
In this changed world, whore everytJaiag o our childhood had van-

THE LAST EDWARDIAN 259

we clung to him as to a link with the past, and our allegiance
never faltered.

We did not feel so well disposed towards Uncle Jack. We knew
he could fight his own battles. But he would not seem to realize
that vituperative beffigerence was the wrong weapon these days.
Our mother turned from him to the Celt, who was gentle and un-
derstanding.

But die ako made a great friend of Celeste.

The two women held many of the same ideas* They spent hours
together at a stretch, talking, ova: the remains of a meal, till they
would notice that the table was still uncleared, and decide that it
wasn't worth while removing the dotifci, because already it was about
time to set things for the next meal*

Celeste shared my mothers views on purity and perfect woman-
hood.

"It's m way," she said, in her broken English accent, looking
double her real size in the wide-striped woolen jacket that followed
the curves of her voluptuous bosom. "It's zis way, I say. If I 'adn't
been pure as a Hy when Lew met me, 'e say 'e would nevair 'ave
loved me* Men dieu, *ow *t loved me ! I was a little pocket Venus, 'e
say. And Lew's love, it will last for evair. If evair I was to feel that
*is love for me *ad died I would leave 'im. I would leave 'im and
nevair come back* But *e is not like zat. I could nevair 'ave loved a
man like zat"

My mother gave her a curious little smile. Later in the day,
when she was alone with me, she put into woreb what, earlier, she
had put into that smile*

"What did I tell you?" she said. "It's always these women who
are as unattractive as sin who talk like this. It's so ridiculous that it
doesn't even make me angry. The only time I get enraged with
Celeste ia when she dares to tell me about Paris* As if she could
know anything about Paris. She may have Hved there for years, but
she has never been there in spirit. It isn't where yotfve been in your

260 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

body that counts. It's where your mind and spirit have taken you
She's got all the pettiness of a French provincial And believe it or
tiot, I can speak French better than she can. There are several words
she's never heard of, and her accent is decidedly common. What-
ever Lew saw in her I can't imagine. Fve always meant to ask him.
I really must do so.' s

The only time 1 got angry with Celeste was when she agreed
with my mother about the bringing up of a young female. Together
they determined that I should remain as innocent as a wild rose bud.
Lew's French wife carried on where Judge Talbot had left off,

"It's zis way, Pattie," she would say, "It's wiser always to be on
ze over-careful side, where young girls are concerned. Nevair should
zey be given a latchkey until zty are safely married* Now even you
are not as watchful as you should be. Perhaps you don't know
zat Clare is going about wiz someone? And I don't like ze look of
J im, I can tell you* Foreign looking, *e is, I would say. No good evair
comes of a foreigner. If *e were a nice, clean, upright Britisher, Kke
Lew or Robert, you could feel 'appier about it- Zese foreigners are
evil where women are concerned* What I could tell you!"

I was made to confess that I had found a new friend, who was a
Serbian poet.

"Serbian!" said my mother, in a shocked tone of voice. "But
that's even worse than I feared. They're the sort of people who are
always having massacres. They aren't civilized. And they have the
strangest ideas about women, too* They're half Eastern, And how
do you know that he is even clean I mean, of course, he might
perhaps have unmentionable insects on Mm. I hope you don't get
too close to him?"

The two women shook their heads in deep concern.

"We'd better not tell Robert or Lew about it," decided my
mother. "We don't want blood about the place, and there's no
telling what they might not decide to do, to defend their women-
folk. The best thing m to lock Clare in her bedroom for a few days."

THE LAST EDWARDIAN 261

And so my meals were handed to me through the bedroom door,
for the better part of a week, lest the Serbian poet should kidnap
and seduce me.

Although I resented Celeste's interference in the matter of my
virtue, I had to admit that her cooking was superb. When the family
finances fell exceptionally low she was invaluable in producing an
attractive meal out of practically nothing.

And the family finances most certainly did fall low, though my
mother refused to admit it.

"You are an impoverisher," she scolded me, as I voiced my
worry. "It's the Leighton in you that gets so upset. It makes me
angry when you talk about our being poor. We're not poor. We're
temporarily impecunious. Just wait until my play is produced, and
you'll see what I mean. Then we'll have more money than we know
what to do with. The difference between being impecunious and
being poor is all a matter of class."

My mother was searching for the emerald ring we were dis-
posing of, to pay the rent that was due.

"Thaf s the one difficulty the war has made/' she went on.
"Before the war one could run up bills and nobody thought any less
of one. In fact, one was esteemed. But nowadays it always has to
be ready money* In those days one scarcely saw actual ready money.
Once or twice a year one made out a check, and hoped there was
some money in the bank to meet it, and then thought no more
about it. But today we have to bother our heads with silly little
shillings and sixpences. It's all so humiliating. And it's such a waste
of time, too.**

The overdraft at the bank was a thing of the past. My mother
felt that the structure of England was cracking.

But more important things than family finances were occupying
our minds. Suddenly the Welshman was transferred to the country.
A change was imminent.

"Do you know, Robert," our mother said to our father, while

26s> TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

Lew and Celeste were packing their belongings, "I have been won-
dering for quite a long time whether it really is healthy to live in a
city. When we were at Vallombrosa we were kept strong by the
good air at Lowestoft, during the summer. But both you and Clare
are looking pale these days. How would it be to move to the coun-
try? We needn't go very far away from London, Somewhere like
Bishop's Stortford where, by the way, Lew and Celeste happen
to be going would be ideal. It's only twenty*nine miles from Liver-
pool Street Station. And Liverpool Street is my favorite railway
station. Do you remember how all the porters knew us there, those
days we went to The Red Croft? Fd feel much safer living on the
Great Eastern Railway Hne than somewhere in the West. Yes, I
really do thing it's a good idea/*

"But Chummie," pleaded my father* who hated change, "you
used always to say that the air of St. John's Wood wasn't city air"

"Oh," answered my mother, "that was before they went and
spoiled the place by building all these enormous blocks of flats that
use up far more air than they're entitled to/*

Within a week or two we had packed and joined the Welshman
and his wife in a furnished house in the little market town of
Bishop's Stortford,

And there we lived for several years* Each morning Lew went
to work, and each evening, as he returned, the front door was
opened to the caU of a quail.

It was a somewhat uneventful existence. My mother made no
friends in the neighborhood*

"And why should I?" she asked. "There seems to be nobody
here with any sense of beauty, romance or class. If you can't find
someone really worth knowing it is always better to Eve with your-
self, You can at least be sure, then, of not coming up against spir-
Uml impoverislnnent Upon my word, I can't understand people
who always seem to have to go gadding,"

As she finished bar sentence, she looked pointedly at Celeste.

THE LAST EDWARDIAN

Lew's French wife was finding this little Hertfordshire town Iboring,
She was growing restless.

"But Pattie,** she said. CC I feel my mind is shrinking to ze size
of a pea. If we go on like zk, Eving completely alone, we won't know
what's 'appening all around us. I should 3 ave zought zat you, as
a writer, would need to expand. You don*t even go to ze cinema."

No sooner had she said this than she realized she had made a
mistake. The less said about the cinema the better.

For friendship had sprung up between Celeste and my father*
Ifs roots were in the cinema.

"Your mother doesn't seem to see that I can enjoy the moving
pictures because that is the only time I am not bothered by my
deafness,'* Father explained to me.

But my mother very definitely disapproved.

"You'll only catch some infectious disease there, among all those
common people, 91 die said. "For only common people frequent such
places. I woiddn*t object to your going to a real theatre. That's
completely different That can enrich your spirit. But a cinema is
a sign of the times, and not an mcouraging sign at that."

The tea hour was supposed to be five o'clock. Rarely, though,,
did we sit down until five-thirty, at the earliest The picture began
at sbc

"How about a little visit to ze cinema zis evening, Robert?" sug-
gested Celeste after the midday meal. "Zere's a good Western
showing at ze Royalty.**

Father and Celeste would bustle around in the kitchen early
that afternoon, preparing the tea* They did nof intend to miss the
opening*

I think it was this hurry with the tea that vexed my mother as
much as anything. She did not approve of punctuality at meak

"It's a waste of time/' she said, "for whenever you may chance
to sit down to the table, you always get up from it at the same
moment"

2264 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

Bui perhaps the worst aspect of these visits to the cinema was
the way Celeste, next day, spent several hours telling us the entire
story of what she had seen*

"It zis way, Pattie," hex voice trickled on. "After zt 'ero 'ad
found out that *e was being followed V~ ~"

"Oh, Celeste, don't you see Fm not interested?** my mother
interrupted, "I believe in living life at firsthand. Don't you agree,
Lew?"

And the Celt, who never went to the movies, smiled back at her.

There was, however, one weekly excitement in our Eves. It was
of a frightening nature. Bishop's Stortford had a thriving livestock
market, which took place each Thursday.

"If I had known about it I am not at all sure I would have come
here not even to be near you, Lew," our mother said. "It looks
exactly as though Destiny has been at work. And, of course, if that's
the case I couldn't very well have avoided coming, try as I might,
I must say, I can see the workings of Fate as clearly as I can see you
sitting there opposite me. I have been brought to this particular
town of Bishop's Stortford in order that my buE may escape one
Thursday from its pen in the cattle market, or from the vehicle
that conveys it to the market, and attack me and gore me to death."

Life may have seemed drab, but it did not lack drama.

And so, though my mother took her exercise each day with un-
failing regularity walking up and down the tree-shaded roads of
the residential district where we lived- nothing would drag her
from the house on Thursdays.

"And I even think it might be wise to bar the front door that
day," she said. "You can never teH The bull might try to break in,
Where Destiny's concerned, anything could happen.**

Every Thursday morning I was dispatched to the cattle market,
in order that we might ascertain the extent of the danger that
week.

"How many were there today?" my mother would ask, on my

THE LAST EDWARDIAN 265

rn "And what are they like? Do they look particularly fierce?''
o convincing was bn- terror, that I had almost as much fear

o he, was .ualified. Had not the palest
ate would write a successful play? Until this should have
T ted 'urcl she was secure from death. For the same reason,

he was buoyed up by

of funds , nothing but prepara^n for
shall have one of these days soon," she sa ld . 'Haven t

*"*

"

hair, and one day-"

*

266 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

one day. "Sometimes I find myself wondering* They belong to
utterly different worlds, I dotft even know what they could have
found to talk about."

As she asked me , this, I knew that the Celfs days were
numbered.

A few weeks before Roland was killed he had become a Catholic,
We had known nothing of thisl until the chaplain paid us a visit
But my mother now was thinking about it a great deal.

"It's the queerest thing, his going and doing that,'* she said.
"And somehow, it has the odd effect of taking me right back to my
own childhood, and those days at the convent in France, when I
wa$ such a good little CathoKc***

**Now then, Pattie ? none of that nonsense/* said Lew, in a sure
voice. f< You know perfectly well you're not suited to tuna Catholic.
Leave that to hysterical people. YouVe too much eommonsense.
Besides, Roland couldn't have known what he was doing out there
in al that danger,"

My mother turned on her Celt with rage* She saw m him a
betrayal of Roland.

efi You, w she said in anger, **And what right have you to talk
about Roland? You never saw him. 1 *

It was* fortunate that outside events were changing the pattern
of our lives* The Welshman^ work was abotrt to take him to another
part of tike country. Already Lew and Celeste had started packing
their trunks.

But tMs time we did not move with them.

Celeste was badly worried.

*ItV 2fe way, Fattie," she said. ^K you stay on *ere in Bishop's
Stortford it won't do you any good, YouVe been *ere far too long
already. Now in Croydon, where Lew and I are going, you could be
nearer to London, You could get to Piccadilly Circus in a very short
time. And you could 'ave all ze lower part of ze 'otise to yourself.**

*Cfaycfca! M sneered my mother. My dear Celeste, how can

THE LAST EDWARDIAN 267

you suppose for one moment that I would live in such a common*
place neighborhood, It*s aristocratic to live right out in the country,
as we do here* but no one with any conception of style would ever
dream of settling in CroydoiL"

Although they did not mention it, both these women knew that
there was more at stake than a mere neighborhood,

"And when it comes to priests, Pattie," Celeste went on with
complete lack of tact, here's nothing I don't know about zem. It's
m way, I say; ze/re after your money ze whole time. Tye lived
among zem so long in France zat I know all about zem. What I
could tell you if you would let me but you won't, I know. Now
Lew is a purer man zan all zese priests put together. Mon Dieu,
what I could teH you-'*

My mother did not deign, to answer. She looked at Celeste with
a cold stare.

But Celeste mailed thinly at my mother and at her husband,
and the smile seemed as if it were straining to bind them doser
together.

For she knew that die was afraid to live alone with Lew.
After they had left us it looked as though my father were going
to have his "Chummie" to himself again. He remstated the teatime
re dings that had ceased over ihe years of the Welshman's dynasty.
He could cherish her now to Ms heart's content

But he was not entirely happy. He wa% in fac^ worried.

My mother was ddeffnined that he should become a Catholic.

*The way yon go on about it, you'd think I was asking you

to plunge into an ice cold pond on a winter morning*" she laughed

at him. "Wheitf & the difficulty? I don't see it Here yotfve always

done everything for lac Fve asked you ever since those dajs we

were first married, awl lived on nothing at all wp in that Jqmely

Highland glen. Do you remember those days, by the way? And

hew we borrowed fifty pounds from Aired Harmsworth, to last us

for a month or two? And how happy we were, writing Gcmmt 99

268 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

together? And how we bought cheap classics, and read them to each
other in the evenings, by candlelight?* 9

She was back in her mind to the far past, when, lonely in her
own home, she had spent her days writing poetry. My father was
editor then of the children's magazine to which she had sent these
poems, and so deeply impressed was he with the poems that, against
the rules of the firm, he had asked the little contributor to visit him
in his office. He fell in love with the seventeen-year-old girl, but lost
his job. She eloped with him, to the lonely glen in Scotland. From
the very beginning they had been bound together by work.

"After all," went on my mother, "Roland became a Catholic
without my even asking him to do so* He didn't seem to find any
difficulty."

But my father's conversion was not going to be easy. The Leigh-
tons were staunch Unitarians.

He tossed and turned throughout the night. He could not
sleep.

"There's nothing on earth I wouldn't do for you, Chummie,"
he moaned. "But, try as I may, I simply cannot seem to embrace
the conception of the Trinity.*'

My mother was not going to faiL

She had discovered a very attractive priest at Bishop's Stortford
This priest was invited to tea with increasing frequency. She would
get him to help her in saving my father's souL

Over the months my father grew attached to the priest. My
mother even thought she had achieved her purpose. But still my
father held back.

"You mustn't ask me to do it, Chummie," he said* "There are
cettain things belonging to a person that nobody has a right to ques-
tion. And religious belief is one of these tilings/*

My mother had a sudden inspiration.

"Very well, Robert," she answered Mm. "I understand. And
I won't say one single word about it. I'm sorry, though genuinely

THE LAST EDWARDIAN 269

sorry. For, you see, we shall be separated in the next world. Roland
and I will be in one place, and you will be in another. Oh, no, I'm
not suggesting that you won't go to Heaven, too, I have no doubt
but that you wiH, even though you do happen to be a Unitarian.
But there's one place in Heaven for the Catholics and another place
for the non-Catholics. And we shall be a long way from each other,
and shan't ever be able to meet."

My father was converted. He surrendered his Unitarian beliefs,
and was baptized into the Catholic Church. He could not face this
separation. It would be no Heaven to him if he were not near his
"Chummie/*

He became devoutly religious. My mother grew more and more
deeply attached to the priest. Both of them looked forward with
excitement to Ms frequent visits. When he was coming to tea my
mother decked herself in her gayest clothes.

"The poor Father," she said, as she wound a bright-colored
ribbon in her hair. a His life must be dreadfully dull always. Most
people who are religious seem to dress in such drab clothes. If they
aren't in deep black, as though they were attending a funeral, they
go about in gaiments that don't hang right, and that have neither
poetry nor beauty. Father Anderson hardly ever has the chance of
seeing a real woman. There can be nothing of the glory of renuncia-
tion for him in denying any interest in the sort of women I see about
me in church. It would be a form of penance to have to make love

to them."

And she gave an extra brush to her yellow hair before fixing
into the ribbon bow the posy of flowers my father had just gathered
for her from the garden. *

Life appeared to run smoothly. It did not seem to matter to my
mother that she was not working much. The untidy bundles still
clutterfcd the house, filled with sprawling outlines for stories she
planned one day to write. Designs for dresses, torn from the Daily
Mail, sti|l worked their way to the top of the particular bundle in

270 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

circulation at that moment; but they no longer gave my mother
the same rlelight.

"And if s nothing wrong with me that I don't feel the same rush
of joy when I look at them," she said- "If s the dresses themselves.
The glory has gone from woman's dothes these days. Everything
seems to aim at hiding the seductiveness of the female figure. And
the strange thing is that just as everyone is supposed today to show
as much arm and leg as possible, so there is no magic in what they
exhibit As I've always told you, my child, romance lies in what s
hidden. Why, if I weren't right in believing this the world would
be a cesspool of lower-class sex these days, when you come to think
of the yards of flesh that are exposed. But oh dear me, not at all.
A man no longer stays awake all night feverishly imagining the
curve of the leg above a certain ankle he had caught sight of, as an
unknown woman lifted her skirts to enter a hansom cab* When he
can see the leg on the street, he no longer wants it* BeEeve me, it
wffl pay you to hide as much of yourself as possible."

In spite of this, my mother continued to show a great deal more
of her neck i and shoulders than even fashion demanded, AU her
dresses carried a hint of the days of the Restoration, They could
easily have been worn by the ladies in a Congreve play.

So devoted was she to the priest, though, that die did not
resent it when he rebuked her for her way of dressing.

"As a matter of fact," she told me one day, "I can understand.
And I can realize too, for the first time, how strong and fine he is in
keeping so true to his vows."

He had remonstrated with her for coming to the Communion
rail in too decollet6 a dress.

"You remember that green velvet one, don't you?" she said.
* c lt reaUy was perhaps a bit kny in the front but there, you see,
I knew I looked attractive in it, and I wanted to please the Father.
Well, after he had told me about it, I suddenly realized how unfair
I was being to him, so next time I went to Holy Communion and

THE LAST EDWARDIAN 371

inelt at the altar rail I was careful to see how I looked, and I filled
in all the space in the front of the dress with a mass of white roses.
And when I saw the look of gratitude on the Father's face I was well
rewarded/ 1

My mother and father loved this priest like two little lost chil-
dren. My father obeyed Mm in everything, but my mother obeyed
him only when she wanted to. If he should exact something of her
that she did not approve of, she would leave him for a moment and
go upstairs to the bedroom. Soon she would reappear in some
.specially alluring dress.

"What you are asking me to do is all right for other people.
Father," she told him in the warm, soft voice she kept for such
purposes. "But of course you can't possibly mean it to apply
to me."

And turning from him, she played the "Merry Widow Waltz"
upon the gramophone,

"Do you know," she said suddenly, as the record came to an
end, "I believe Roland would have loved you. Yes, I really do
believe so."

My mother and her priest sat before the fire. She was dressed in
a pink tunic over her black velvet skirt, a salmon pink ribbon bind-
ing her yellow hair. In her hand she held a lace-edged handkerchief.
It was exotically perfumed, and it had been kept in a cardboard
Roger and Gallet soapbox, along with a pair of dove grey suede
gloves, for "worthy occasions."

As she held the scented handkerchief before her, I knew that she
must consider this a "worthy occasion." She was asking the Father
if it were really a sin to allow men to fall in love with her.

"I will do my best to try to stop them from doing so, Father, if
you want me to," she told him,

The firelight danced upon her beauty. She had the gracious dig-
nity of a great lady of the French Court. She held her salon here,
with one provincial priest, against the background of a shabby

27 2 TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT

sitting room in a,little furnished house in Bishop's Stqrtford. -But it
contained all the splendor of all time.

"Father," she called to him softly. "Father." And the lace-edged
handkerchief was waved towards the austere priest. It was waved
towards him till the perfume should reach his nostrils; for It was a
most special, seductive perfume. "Father," she called to him, still
more softly.

I watched her as she sat there, and knew the privilege it was to
be a man even though that man might chance to be a celibate
priest.

I knew, too, that she was invincible.