The Brontes Went to Woolworths (2 page)

But with Sheil I am able to satisfy my craving to relive the best bits of childhood. Christmas trees and stockings (though we neither of us have ever been able to believe in Santa Claus); toyshops in country towns; the look of fruitballs in glass bottles in village shops; the delicious smell of children’s parties – tulle and gauze, warm candle grease and iced cake, and soft young hair, beautifully brushed; the bitter flavour of the gelatine on crackers; penny masks and fire-works in London side-street windows, and letting off harmless ‘starlights’ in the schoolroom when the governess is out of the way.

I often wonder if I am giving Sheil a fair exchange for all these things. I think I satisfy! She absolutely sees the fun of my ‘doing the grown-up’ at her parties, and handing her cream horns; knows that I am longing for one, too, and hoping that there may be a cracker left over for me; understands my keen disappointment when name after name is called to the tree, and the lights are blown out at last, and I had nothing. The twenties aren’t supposed to be interested in tiny spangled fans and drums full of little sweets. I spend all the time I can in the schoolroom. I even go through the lesson-books sometimes, and am really beginning to learn something at last, though the arithmetic and grammar is eternally beyond me. How right was Humpty-Dumpty to abuse words and then pay them on Saturday night! It was a really magnificent gesture, and one which slaves to split infinitives would do well to copy.

And then I play with Sheil’s theatre, when she is out on
her afternoon walk. Our theatre (The Diadem) long ago scrapped the fairytale nonsense-literature which is written for puppets.
I
write our plays, and we have pantomimes with genuine illusions and ballets and properties we all make. Even Widow Twankey has her two-inch handkerchief with low-comedy fingermarks on it, in indelible ink. And we have charity
matinées
, because they sound so sonorous. Sometimes we invent the charities, too, and whenever I have finished a new play some benevolence springs into being. The Tabbies’ Protection Union has offices in Great Cream Street, and The Insolent Widows’ Aid (Sheil’s contribution) has premises in Crape Yard, EC. Others include The Depressed Charwomen Society and The Nautical Sailors’ Rest. As a result of a
matinée
for the latter, we were happy to be able to announce that our new wing of dormitories in Chatham was now completed, ‘and,’ chimed in Sheil, ‘the dear lads can now sleep in contagious rows, freed from the sadness of the sinful gutter.’ And we have a resident ballet troupe, called ‘The Kensington Palace Girls’.

I often rootle in the toy-box. Mixed with Sheil’s toys are Katrine’s and my own. As a family, we have never liked dolls, never believed in fairies and all rather hated Peter Pan. Poor Sheil, the latest victim of the whimsical, could make neither head nor tail of it, and the only doll we ever unitedly esteemed was the plainest one of the collection. Ironface. She was given to me when I was seven. Her face and forearms were of painted tin and she had a well-made kid body. Ironface, unfortunately, outgrew us. She developed an intolerably overbearing manner, married a French Count called Isidore (de la So-and-so, de la Something Else), and now lives in feudal state in France, whence, even to this day, she makes occasional descents upon us by private aeroplane-de-luxe, patronising us in an accent enragingly perfect and bearing extravagant gifts which we have to accept. Me she addresses as ‘Ah, Trotty!
Ça marche,
hein
?’ She has composed two songs, both in praise of herself. The first, picturing the delight of heaven at the event of her death, began:

The angel at the Golden Gate
Says, ‘The Countess tarries late,
We want her hither.’

The second (immensely popular, thanks to Ironface, in the Parisian music-halls of the early nineteen-hundreds) ran:

This was one of my good-night songs, with mother tossing it off in the vaudeville manner at the foot of my bed; hands on hips, a rakish, challenging leer for the conductor. We sing it to Sheil, still. Ironface was lost, or given away, quite thirteen years ago, but it’s no good. Like the poor, she is ever with us. We’ve tried, half-heartedly, to humanise the other dolls, but their characters won’t emerge. They are rather like the servants and governesses who come and go; they won’t immortalise. But occasionally they get their own back on me. Miss Martin has only been with us about a month, but I rather think she is going to take toll of me. The devil of it is that her home is in Cheltenham, and I once spent a day there, and picked up its vibrations in no time and remember it photographically, and now the Martin has planked down her dreadful family in frames and my sympathy is going out to her quite against my will, in streamers, like seaweed. It’s a horrid nuisance. And, though we seldom talk for long together, I already know the feel of Cheltenham’s main avenue in July, and the way the light struck the teapot when, at breakfast, Captain Martin broke it to his daughters that they must clear out and earn . . . and I rather think the girls dispersed about the house and avoided talking much, that day. But they probably met in the town. One is always liable to run against people in stewpan sorts of places like Cheltenham. It’s part of the damnableness of it – and the fascination. Improvident, pathetic, reprehensible and blasted Captain Martin! How my heart aches for him and his heavy-faced brood. Will one never be allowed to possess oneself in peace?

3

Last summer we all went to Skye, where father was born, and I caught Katrine’s eye in our hall and muttered the ‘all clear?’ and she nodded.

The holiday was a success. The place got at me a bit, of course, but that wasn’t a tribute to its quality of eerieness, for a garden suburb can do the same thing, but, that year, I had a guard, a buffer.

I’ve always envied those people who own a place the moment they arrive. In my own experience, new places invariably own me, until I have fought them down. I remember one summer in a furtive Gloucestershire village and how it fairly pulled me out of the train before I set foot on the platform. And it wasn’t a pull of welcome.

Skye was a success for Katrine because she had just ended a term at the Dramatic School and was looking forward to the next, and for me because I was writing my first novel, so nothing could touch me very badly. Meanwhile, I was finding out that writing a book makes one singularly absentminded, and one’s conversation boring and laboured. It’s hard on the family, I suppose, but oh! what an internal lark!
And what an escape from journalism. I shall loathe the word ‘nowadays’ and the phrase ‘modern girl’ till I am dead, and even then my heart will hear it and beat when I’m earth in an earthy bed. What I can never get my editors to realise is that every soul who is alive is ‘modern,’ and that when they use the word they privily mean depraved or racketty.

I never knew what an extraordinary thing it could be to write a book. In the first place, the characters take the bit between their jaws and canter off with you into places you don’t want and never catered for. I had smugly intended my book to be about a family rather like ours, but, lud love you! it’s already turned into an account of a barmaid’s career in an Edgware Road pub, and I can’t squeeze us in
anywhere
!

Odd things happen, too. I had called my pub, ‘The Three Feathers,’ and counted on there being heaps of pubs in Edgware Road, not called that, but looking a bit like my description. Before we left home, I went down Edgware Road to investigate, and found my pub, even down to the old-fashioned phonograph on the table in the upstairs sitting-room. And I thought, ‘
I
built that place.’

I wonder how much one does create by brooding over it? The family is always asking me to read them ‘bits,’ and I always refuse. The general public (if I ever have one) I don’t mind a bit, but reading what one has written is like kissing a lover in a tram. Katrine agrees with me. That’s why the Dramatic School is probably going to be so good for her; you have to strip yourself morally naked there.

The evenings in Skye are rather wonderful. They seem to endure for ever, like the goodness of the Lord, and when the moon is high, one can read quite clearly at midnight. But the boating round Dunvegan is tricky for the amateur because of the narrow natural arches and the submerged rocks.

I came out one night to call in Sheil, for it was long past her time for bed, but didn’t appear to be, thanks to the leisured sunset, and saw her in the distance, sitting on the turf with a man, and my heart turned over. She is very pretty, and anyway, I ran. She seemed to be enjoying herself, and she had a paper bag in her hand, the contents of which they were sharing, their heads on a level. When I reached her she was alone. And then I knew that the creature was one of those nature spirits with which Skye is teeming, and England, too, wherever there are downs or wide quiet spaces. Father once wrote a book about them. He once got lost in Wales, on Cader Idris, and saw one of the members of the little subterranean race whose tappings have been heard by dozens of tourists. I asked him if he was frightened, and he said, ‘Oh no. I just said “hullo,” and the little man bowed and vanished.’

But Sheil?

I lit a cigarette and said, ‘Saffy thinks it’s time you came in, and Polly is in one of her Arbuthnot moods this evening.’

‘Oh,
why
?’

‘Because the shooting in Scotland has fallen through, and she is loathing having to go back to Addison Road.’

‘Oh,
poor
old Polly!’

‘Yes. A bit thick. But if she
will
marry a pierrot
’

‘But – the Macalistairs are
fond
of Polly and the squire! They wouldn’t put her off because of Saffy? She was to have gone on from here. By the eleven-fifteen.’ Sheil’s voice was almost a wail. ‘Well . . . it may be only a hitch,’ I conceded.

‘And is Toddy going to come in after his hotel dinner?’

‘Oh, yes. He met Saffy leaving our digs, and there was the usual snorting match.’

Sheil’s shrill giggle startled a curlew. Then Crellie bounded up to her and her attention was instantly diverted to the dog. His muzzle was slightly gory, so we knew he had been doing something forbidden in the sheep or rabbit line, and that meant his confessional vespers hymn. We chanted:

Four prickles to me toe,

Murdered innocents rahnd me go!

Two sheep, one duck,

Three cats an’ a cluck-cluck.

Crellie drooped mechanically, and looked sly. He is really rather awful at times, and loves rubbing his bosom in frightful smells and then sitting in the middle of them with his head bowed, looking sacred. He is a mass of good-nature, however, and, unlike Ironface, no snob, but only rather a liar. His tiger story is of how he assisted Lord Roberts to relieve Mafeking. (‘Bobs,’ I sez, ‘we’ve done it between us.’ ‘Colonel Crellie,’ ’e says, ‘you’re a ’ero.’). But we smacked him, for luck, Mafeking or no.

4

I first saw and spoke to Lady Toddington two years ago, though I had known her intimately for nearly three years.

A jury summons had commanded mother (on a buff slip, ending ‘hereof fail not,’ for which I forgave it everything), and I had faithfully turned out in attendance, armed with smelling-salts and meat lozenges, at nine o’clock of a misty morning. As a family we all had a horror of ‘the Law’ comparable only to the fighting fear of ‘the House’ that is the universal badge of every broken tramp. The Court happened to be Toddington’s. My jibbing companion was not called, after all, but in spite of that she was compelled to attend as reserve for the remainder of the week. The Law can be extraordinarily insolent and ungrateful. I wouldn’t treat a dog as it treats jury members it can’t use up. But, meanwhile, and even as mother trembled and looked guilty and I drank in the scene, an usher was holding the curtain which was distinctly due at the cleaners and Toddington swept in and occupied the Bench.