The Autobiography of Sherlock Holmes (2 page)

1

I came into the world as Sherlock Holmes on Tuesday, 27 January 1852 at half-four in the afternoon—tea time. My mother, Virginie Verénet Holmes, bore me in her canopied bed at our ancestral home, Church Court, in Maiden Wood, Isle of Thanet, Kent, where she had born, in order, my older brothers Mycroft and Wittrell and our sister Juliette. I was last in birthing order. My father, Parkford St. John Holmes was absent.

My earliest memory is of my brother Mycroft placing different lengths of string on the floor of the nursery when I was one-year old. Two years later he explained to me that it was an exercise in learning to judge the lengths of things without needing a measure. To this day, I can determine the length of an object from across a room to within a half-inch.

Wittrell, who became a mathematician with the Bank of England upon his graduation from Peterhouse, Cambridge, taught me to manipulate numbers relative to space and organization when I was four. Like him, my ability to deduce the exact speed of a train by counting the number of telegraph poles passed in a one-minute period of time was a simple calculation of distance and time to arrive at the precise, accurate speed of the train. Wittrell would later serve in the highest ranks of government as an unimpeachable auditor of Crown assets.

Similarly, Mycroft developed his mind to ‘see’ answers to questions that were impenetrable to others, and rose to be not only unimpeachable, but also indispensable to the monarchy, the government, and its ministers; indeed, he
was
the government. His wide network of upper-class contacts was forged during his years at Trinity College, Cambridge where he took his Master’s in Classics.

Juliette was taught by Mycroft and Wittrell at age six to observe the changes that occur to metals when the acid to alkaline balance shifts. In her early twenties, after taking her Upper First in chemistry at St. Andrew’s, she became the sole and final arbiter of authenticity for the precious metals bourses of Great Britain, Belgium, The Netherlands and France. During the Great War, Juliette alone was trusted by the governments of the Allies to maintain the authenticity of gold and silver bullion flowing between Britain and Europe to finance the war against Germany.

The Holmes children were born in 1840, 1844, 1848, and 1852. At my birth, our mother was thirty-nine years old and our father was forty-two. Mother died in 1895. Father died in 1891. Mycroft died in 1926. Wittrell died in 1928. Juliette died in 1924. None of my siblings married or had children. I am the relict of the family. All of us resided in London, that great machine of human excess, depravity, creativity and—rarely—beauty.

Parkford St. John Holmes was a successful international factor. He financed various enterprises and, owing to a Holmes family trait of making accurate deductions through logic and reason, experienced virtually no financial losses over his career. As a prominent Anglo-European factor, he became a wealthy man and, signifying more, he retained and grew his wealth.

Father was imposing. Tall at over six feet and muscular at seventeen stone, he created a powerful impression; yet, he was soft-spoken and reserved. His eyes were an unusual light-hued gray-blue that gazed through anything he looked at, whether a person, an object, or a distant landscape, making him seem detached and almost other-worldly. Mycroft alone inherited his eyes and his formidable size, as well as his detached and reserved nature. In both, however, the outer veneer of detachment masked the roaring minds working within their large cranial vaults. Father could calculate the cost, weight, and profit of a ship’s hold full of coal to the penny instantaneously without setting pen to paper; whereas Mycroft could calculate the entire catalogue of diplomatic chess moves between two political opponents or two feuding nations in the same blink of those familial eyes.

Father belonged to the Diogenes Club in London where Mycroft would succeed him in later years. When he was in the City on business, he used the club’s visitors’ room for occasional firm matters, but was most often found at his accustomed place at the Exchange where he was regarded for his high integrity, his firm negotiations and his flawless financial transactions. His definition of integrity extended equally to his personal life. He neither smoked nor drank, the only exception being a glass of Burgundy or Bordeaux wine during Mother’s formal dinners at Church Court.

At home in Maiden Wood, Father was supportive of his tenant farmers and often extended to them sums of money to better their holdings and increase their production. While recorded in the ledgers as loans, many were either forgotten or payments were never requested. No farmer, however, ever received Father’s favours if he was a drunkard, a lay-about, or mistreated his wife or children.

Virginie Verénet Holmes was Belgian, the daughter of Walloon aristocracy. Schooled in Brussels and Paris, she was, in later years, a philanthropist using her inherited family wealth, gained from European private banking, to benefit and strengthen Belgium’s equality for women and to further the early suffrage movements of Europe. An intelligent, capable and strong woman, she continued to successfully manage the family business for four years after our father died, selling it for a princely sum to a large French factoring firm only a month before her own death.

Mother was above mid-height, slim and possessed her superb figure throughout her life. Her shoulder-length hair was dark, thick and rich, of shades of mahogany and oak, lustrous from many brushstrokes each morning and night. Her features were elegant, with a thin, sculptured nose perfectly placed among aristocratic facial bones and dark eyes of smoky, languid teak. Graceful and elegant, she moved like a swan: efficient, gliding, never disruptive and making no wake. Her voice was gentle, low-pitched and always quiet, demanding one listen attentively to hear what she said.

Juliette received the full measure of Mother’s beauty and graciousness; indeed, they looked nearly twins as they straddled their respective years of early and middle womanhood. Wittrell was a blend of both Mother and Father, the only such blend of us all. I was the male version of Mother externally and the detached calculating machine of my Father internally. A number of my cases resulted in my assuring reasoned justice for the criminal, my Father’s influence; a number resulted in my assuring reasoned compassion for the criminal, my Mother’s influence.

Mother was an accomplished harpist, having studied under the great maestro Parish Alvars during his 1883-1884 hiatus in Paris from his position as First Harpist of the Imperial and Royal Opera of Vienna. As a child, I would stand next her gilded concert grand harp, idly plucking melancholy scraps of sound from the strings, a fascination that would follow me during my years of violin-accompanied intense concentration on criminal problems.

As children, we all had more attention from our mother than from our father, given his frequent absences due to business, as well as his reserved nature which, to a degree, extended to his children. Father was an influence, but we received affection or what was perhaps love from our mother. And, Nanny Dobney.

Nanny Dobney arrived prior to Mycroft’s birth and remained with our family until her semi-retirement when I went to university. She then became nanny to a prominent Surrey family for another twenty years, a career of over forty years with only two families. She retired to Camberwell where she delighted in periodic visits from her then adult charges. Juliette was particularly good about visiting Nanny; they were very close as Juliette was the only female out of the eight children Nanny raised during her career.

Nanny Dobney had a soft, ample figure. As children, we all delighted in her welcoming lap and arms as she read us stories or listened to our questions. Her hair always smelled of violets, even when it had turned silver. She wore a gold locket and only once showed us the picture of a young soldier inside.

Nanny used logic and reason in her life lessons, whether on nature rambles or in discussions of choices and consequences. Her soft voice was never raised and she never resorted to even the mildest forms of punishment; she simply enlisted our cooperation and devotion.

Church Court is an early, eighteenth century, stone, gray pile of a country manor house on the Isle of Thanet. It is built upon the site of at least one prior house dating back to feudal times. The family holdings covered a large portion of land in Maiden Wood, as well as fore-shore and docklands fronting on the English Channel. Our father’s firm, then in its third and last generation of Holmes ownership, factored corn, coal, minerals, and ore between England and Europe and its fleet of cargo ships used our ancestral lands as their home port as they moved between London, Amsterdam and Calais. For many generations before the establishment of the family firm, Church Court had been the feudal
demesne
of the Holmes family which had a long history as the minor squires of Maiden Wood, involved in agriculture and deriving rents from the thirty or so tenant farms across the family lands. As the only remaining member of the Holmes family, I retain ownership of Church Court but have not lived there since my university days. The house has been rented for income since our mother’s death and the farms were gradually sold to the farmers who held the tenant lifeholds.

The year after the birth of Mycroft, Mother and Father removed to a villa in the south of France near Nice where they lived for a year. Similarly, one year after the birth of Wittrell, they decamped to Lake Como for a year. And, a year after Juliette’s birth, they resided in Venice, returning after nine months due to the heat. My first birthday was observed at a villa on Lake Geneva where the now numerically larger Holmes family lived during 1853. It was there, during reportedly pleasant hours of conversation at a lakeside coffee house, that my father became acquainted with, and thereafter maintained a many-year correspondence with, a brilliant private tutor in theoretical astro-mathematics who would, in later years, have a profound influence on my career, and I on his.

As a family, we enjoyed, of course, the privileges of prosperity and class. As children, we were given the manners and social capabilities expected of families in our place in society. Our parents frequently gave parties, dinners and week-end ‘stays’ in the country for a diverse and interesting circle of their friends that included writers, politicians, government ministers, artists, explorers, actors and scions of business. My mother particularly enjoyed inserting strong, passionate feminists into the mix of guests to assure stimulating and lively interchanges during the long and elegant dinners at Church Court. Contrary to the family conventions of the time, our parents always included the four of us at dinner and we soon all learned not only the art of conversational repartee, but the nuances of an intellectual society.

Memory calls up one of my early fascinations with the long dinners. The table, with the six members of our family and numerous guests, was laid with the full array of Victorian-era tableware, china and crystal. From my seat near the end of the table, the flawless order and alignment of the silver and various plates and glasses the full length of the table captured my mind and my growing affinity for precision. I learned to not only memorize the original positions of all the objects on the table, but to memorize the changes to the implements and dishes made by each person during the course of the dinners. Even now, these many years later, I can recall the exact progression of a salt cellar’s migrations during a celebratory birthday dinner for my mother.

In addition to Nanny Dobney, our family was well cared for by a housekeeper, a maid, a cook and a butler. The cook and butler were married—a Scots couple from Inverness, Hume and Mrs Hume. The housekeeper was a highly-efficient woman from Kinlet, Shropshire, Mrs Hodgson, whose proclivities included an intense dislike for tobacco smoke and an eternally gray outlook focused on temperance and moderation in all things. She was a counter-balance to the Humes who were both jolly Scots Pagans who celebrated life and a liberal sampling of the Tantalus and gasogene. The loyal household was brilliantly managed by Mother who maintained equilibrium and equanimity among all.

At age ten I was given a pony that I never liked. It was given to a neighbor a year later. Horses remained thereafter, for me, an essential attachment to a Hansom cab. I did, however, benefit from the close study of the imprints of horse hooves and shoes and, some years later, wrote a detailed monograph on the determination of breed and age from hoof prints and the classifications of the distinctive hammer and punch marks of county farriers.

My youth was solitary. Mycroft took the part of my childhood friend; in reality he was more like my mentor given the twelve years difference in our ages. From age six when I began my schooling to age nineteen when I left for university, my associations were almost entirely those of Nanny Dobney, my family and the family friends and retainers. The child-like innocence so valued by others never found its way to my early years; I was born middle-aged and remained there, a fixed point in unchanged time.

The Holmes squires had a long history of educational progressivism. My great-grandfather established a school for Maiden Wood in 1770 complete with a qualified headmaster and a carefully chosen staff of instructors. Over its now one-hundred fifty-nine years of service, Thanet School has not only educated the Holmes offspring but—due to my ancestors’ successive liberality and vision—those of the tenants and villagers of Maiden Wood, as well as numerous progeny of the landed gentry in the near environs of Kent who were accommodated as tuition-paying day-scholars. Over the years, many of the school’s sixth form graduates went up to Oxford, Cambridge or other desirable universities of the realm.