Читать книгу Bricks and Flowers - Katherine Everett - Страница 6

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The nursery was in an attic of our large house, and we spent many hours looking out of its window, where so often the view of lake and mountains was hidden by rain. The rainfall at Killarney is the second highest in the British Isles, and a gloomy explanation of this was given us by Archdeacon Wynne, vicar of our church, who kept weather records and who told us that the Atlantic lies west of Ireland and the prevailing winds blowing across it gather moisture which forms clouds; these are then blown over the low coastlands till they strike the Killarney mountains, where they break and are dissolved and rain pours down upon us. While one mass is being emptied, the wind has been gathering more from the sea, so it seldom stops raining here. The air was damp and heavy, and there was a dreamlike, brooding calm about the landscape, with its lush, almost tropical growth and immense trees. The wood-pigeons’ mournful note, heard so often from the shelter of the woods, seemed to express the spirit of the scene. Raging storms could shatter this calm, but when the wind had passed, and the rain fell gently and steadily once more, the land resumed its depressing, brooding air.

As a child I was vaguely conscious of a sadness in our surroundings, but the earliest emotion that I can remember was fear, and that fear was focused on my mother. I was not alone in this; for my father—a grey-headed, white-bearded giant—was afraid of her, too. We sometimes watched him standing outside the glass lobby doors which protected her rooms, waiting for a moment when she would go into a dressing-room where she kept medicines, and, having seen her shadow pass, he would hurry into her bedroom to wind the clock. He had a passion for clocks, but he would resist the lure of any clock if she reappeared too quickly.

She was an unhappy woman; often ill and always neurotic, she suffered from headaches and, because she was unable to bear pain, doctors gave her morphia injections, or she would sometimes give them to herself. She never attacked us physically, but I think we might have accepted that sort of treatment better than the intangible sense of her suppressed fury. I find it difficult to explain why she dominated and terrified everyone in the house, down to the humblest servant; possibly her mind was unhinged, and this, together with her religion, made her spirit into a battlefield which everyone sensed but could not understand. She had been urged by her family to marry my father, her parents clearly having been glad that she should marry anyone, even a man more than twice her age, who seemed to be rich and had a large property in another island. On her marriage she was transported to a gloomy house in Ireland, accompanied by a husband with whom she had not a thought or taste in common, whose main interests were hunting and looking after his estate, and who kept out of her way as much as possible.

Having no country interests, she was irritated at seeing lavish expenditure on things for which she cared nothing, while she had very little money; but perhaps her greatest trial was being deprived of the religious ritual she loved. She disliked the local church, with its Low Church services, yet this was the only one she could attend. Often she slept badly, and would wander about at night carrying a bedroom candlestick and talking to herself, dressed in a grey dressing-gown, her prematurely grey hair, which matched her light-coloured eyes, hanging loosely round her white face. I would sometimes wake to find her stooping over my bed, and would lie petrified, hardly breathing, and though I pretended to be asleep until she went away, I would hear her as she moved about the room muttering to herself about her sorrows or saying verses from the Penitential Psalms.

Years later I asked one of her sisters, to whom I had become attached, why she, who was so kind, had done nothing to help us when we were children.

“We were so thankful, my dear, to get rid of your mother,” she had explained, “that we all decided to have nothing to do with her or her vipers.”

Poor, helpless little vipers!

As a very young child, my German nurse, Maria, gave me affection, and I was devoted to her. She would take me into her bed and tell me stories of her home in a forest and of her family; sometimes she described the horrors and the sufferings of the 1870-71 war, and I felt the deepest pity and admiration for the noble German soldiers when they were wounded and suffered from the brutal treatment wreaked on them by the cruel French! Every story ended in a talk on religion of the emotional, evangelical, sentimental type. I suppose she was a Lutheran; she certainly inspired me with unquestioning faith, and I longed to be in the Heaven we sang hymns about, where all was tenderness and love. We seem to have done a lot of weeping together, which culminated in the awful night when Maria told me she was going away because she was dismissed. I felt abandoned, my world shattered, and I thought my beloved nurse was wronged. I believed I had cried all night in her arms—probably actually for about half-an-hour—while she kept begging me to bring my sorrows to Jesus, who would understand and comfort me, for He loved children.

After Maria left I was put in the care of German governesses, and we had a series of these unhappy women who complained of “Heimweh”, “Herzschmerz”, and “Sehnsucht”. I can still picture their shadowy figures sighing beside the schoolroom fire, while the gentle rain, which seemed ceaseless, raised the level of the lake and river, seen from the misted windows. They taught us about events and periods immeasurably remote from our own, and our confused minds swung from the progression of the Heilige Grail and descriptions of the Nibelungen Lieder, to the Heptarchy and off again to Greek mythology with its many strange relationships, headed by Jove, which my perplexed mind thought was another name for Jehovah and whom I pictured as being exactly like my father. Then there might come a session with the Merovingian kings, and another day we might discuss the Ptolemies or the possible origin of the Sphinx, all this being imparted eagerly in German to rather listless pupils.

My mother had definite views about our education, which did not accord with those held by any of our governesses, except perhaps on the importance of foreign languages; these my mother thought essential, believing that they would act as a deterrent to our acquiring the native brogue, of which she had a horror. She held, I think rightly, that any deviation from correct English was wrong and a loss of caste. We were forbidden to use any nicknames, or to overwork any one word or misapply a word. I remember when I must have been very young, sitting at luncheon and seeing a jam roll pudding brought in, oozing rich jam, and saying in my usual frightened whisper, “Oh, what a lovely pudding!”

Instantly my mother’s pale eyes were fixed on me with what we used to call her gimlet look as she announced, “If you think it ‘lovely’ you can look at it and not eat it,” and for the rest of the meal I sat looking at my empty plate, struggling to hold back my tears while listening to my mother making that unattractive smacking sound so many Victorians made when eating something they liked. But I do not call food beautiful or lovely now.

Another of my mother’s educational ideas was that we should understand the Peerage, the order of precedence, and how to address each degree in speaking and writing. She questioned us on this subject herself.

“What is a Marquess’s wife called?” she asked me.

“A Marquesette,” I answered firmly. The glint in her eye shook my assurance.

“And how do you address his second son?” she continued.

“Sir Christian—Sir Christian name,” I faltered, but I knew I was lost.

“Go away, stupid, ignorant child. You are almost unteachable, if not non compos. Write the question and the correct answer twenty times and bring the paper to me before you go to bed.”

Indifferent to the English Peerage, we took to chanting triumphantly, “We are illustrious lords,” in reference to the derivation of our name.

On one occasion our mother, hearing us do this, interposed, “I don’t think you have much to be proud of on that score; all that the Herberts have ever done that I can see is to dissipate their fortunes. Through me,” she continued, “you have distinguished ancestors; my father was descended from many great Scottish families and some great English ones; indeed, my two brothers were educated as King’s scholars at Winchester without cost to their parents, for they could trace their descent directly back to the Plantagenets.” (Many years later I learnt that there were so many others with such claims that my uncles were the last boys to benefit from this privilege.)

My mother went on to explain that even the Sackville link with the Herberts came to us through her. She went on to say, “Lord George Sackville’s unfortunate daughter had miserable health and spirits after her marriage, partly owing no doubt to this wretched climate. I have been told she used to walk about old Muckross house at night, wailing and wringing her hands, with her head tied up in red flannel. What a different fate from Lady Glandour’s, her beautiful sister!”

It was not snobbishness on my mother’s part to value her ancestry so highly; it was the fashion of her day. Indeed, for long after that time profound interest in genealogies continued, more especially in Ireland. At any social occasion you might hear a remark such as, “Wasn’t the wife of Maurice O’Meara of Ballyduff the daughter of Tom Cassidy of Castle Cassidy? and that would make her our cousin to Sir Timothy ...”, etc., and the topic would be followed up in all its ramifications with the eagerness of hounds on a hot scent.

Even the servants were interested in such discussions. One day when I was a child we were in the pantry watching the butler cleaning plate, and he said something about a tenant not having paid his rent, and then added, “There was some as thought as how the master should have married a fortune, but for all he chose breeding, for it was well known of the mistress that her blood was so blue a silver spoon would stand up in it.” At the time I believed that this referred to a physical fact, which I thought added to my mother’s alarming qualities. Another educational idea of my mother’s was that we should understand Bradshaw and learn to make our way by its guidance from any given point in the British Isles to any other. I have instinctively fought shy of railway guides since those days.

When we were older she made us write letters, some for use and some for practice. A letter in the third person to a Duchess was of the latter kind; while those describing the character of a cook or governess were for use and had to be correctly expressed, spelt, and written before they were passed for signature and posting. Another exercise was to read a leading article from The Times at speed and then to write out a précis of every salient point in a compressed form, omitting all platitudes; which was good training, for I now read leading articles and skip the many platitudes automatically. Another effect of this training was perhaps not so happy, for it tended to produce a rather telegraphic way of expressing things, avoiding trimmings and losing the grace and ease of pleasant writing. But every medal has its reverse side, and the exercise sharpened our wits.

From a very early age we were made to play whist for money. I was supposed to be delicate, and this annoyed my mother, who I think felt it was poaching on her special preserve, so at seven or eight years old I was sent to the south of France, where an ex-governess ran a boarding house. I can remember the basement and a wistaria which was of enormous size and incredible loveliness. Between tea and dinner-time I was allowed to go to the drawing-room, where the guests, who all seemed old, sat knitting or talking or occasionally playing cards.

One evening a white-haired General exclaimed: “Anyone like a rubber?” and two old ladies responded. “Who’ll make a fourth?” he asked.

“I will,” I said, not at all nervous, for no general was as alarming as my mother.

“What?” he said, staring down at me. “Have you learned to play?”

“Oh yes, long ago; we have to play for money to make us attend.”

“And for what stakes do you play, child?”

“Ha’penny a hundred, and it sometimes takes all our moth money—we catch clothes moths at twilight and stick them on gummy paper and get wages, two moths a farthing.”

We played, and at the end of the game the General, who had been my partner, gave me our joint winnings and said, “That’s for playing up well,” adding, “Upon my word, I should as soon have expected a white rabbit to sit up and say it played whist; and she attends too, which is more than can be said for some people,” he added, looking round the room.

I suppose it was the unexpected riches, the praise, and being compared to a white rabbit that have left that scene etched on my mind.

The lesson with my mother that we dreaded most was scripture, for it was very different from the teachings of Maria, who had inspired me with real unquestioning faith which my mother destroyed, although her own belief in the Anglo-Catholic movement was ardent. Our daily lesson was based on a book of questions and answers on the doctrines of the Church, the compiler of which must have had a sadistic temperament, for the questions would start with apparent simplicity and then double back, contradicting all you thought you had understood. They seemed devised and planned to trip the pupil, and in this they succeeded all too well with me. The intricacies of the Real Presence, Transubstantiation, the Virgin Birth and the Trinity reduced my childish mind to such entanglements and confusion that my mother seemed really convinced of my hopeless imbecility, and I can still remember muttering over those incomprehensible answers before going into her presence with the feeling that I really was imbecile or at least non compos, which I thought was a sort of half-way state.

Once I found a satisfactory answer to a long, involved question: it simply said, “That is a mystery,” and I felt I had found a raft in that stormy sea. I applied this same answer to other questions, where indeed it might well have fitted, but my mother was not one to be taken in with this expedient, and I was forbidden ever to give that answer again, was ordered to write out and learn two pages from the hateful book, and, what was worse, to return to be examined on what I had written.

We did not see much of my father, but he was always kind to us, and if we were alone with him at luncheon he would be cheerful, telling us where he had been riding and talking about our ponies. When my mother was well enough to come down we were all more silent. She would sit at one end of the table with her special diet of chicken or game, jellies and creams, while we had mutton—fresh mutton, salt mutton, roast or boiled mutton, for we killed our own sheep—this meat usually being followed by a milk pudding.

In Victorian days many parents shouted at their children in a way that is never heard to-day, and my father had this habit, a favourite trick of his being to let us go up the back stairs to the schoolroom at the top of the house after we had been to his office on the ground floor, and then bellow without ceasing till we had rushed down again, when he would whisper, “Shut the door.” There was no anger in this manœuvre, as there often was when dealing with my brother, for he and my father did not get on. Sometimes at luncheon my mother would comment on some practical thing my brother had done very badly. We knew this meant trouble, and before long my father would be shouting at him while he sat slouched in his chair till, unable to bear it any longer, my brother would leave the room, clutching his glass of wine, and my mother would say the noise had given her a headache.

I hated these scenes, and a kind old servant, trying to comfort me after one of them, explained, “Don’t be fretting about the master roaring; sure, he’s like the thunder, making a grand noise and no harm in it. Now, the mistress is like the lightning: one look and it would near kill you.”

Such was the atmosphere of our home. It is easy to condemn my mother as an odious woman, for she had a difficult character, but her lot as a young bride would have tried any girl of her temperament, and it helped to make her the self-centred invalid she became. Ireland in the 1860’s, when she married, was a century behind England in amenities, and life was lived almost as in feudal times. My father had his own interests and cared nothing for social life, of which there was little enough; she was intellectual, and there was no one with whom she could exchange ideas. The climate was enervating and depressing, and the old Cahirnane House, where she started her married life, was devoid of the most elementary comforts, the only sanitation when she first arrived being a series of erections like sentry boxes.

“It really was horrible,” she said when describing the place to me years afterwards. “There wasn’t a tap or a closet in the house, and I had to make my way out past all those great wet laurels to huts—eight of them, beginning with a giant-sized one down to one for a dwarf or an infant. I wanted, of course, to slip out unseen, but an old man—Patrick Doran was his name, though everyone called him Patsy the Bucket—would be at my side directly I appeared, with an old carriage umbrella as large as a tent, and would insist on coming with me and choosing which booth I should occupy. ‘The middle one, I should say, my lady—that’s three up from this end—would just suit your ladyship, and they are all fine and clean,’ he would point out. It was no use my telling him quite stiffly, ‘You can go now, Doran’, for he would only answer, ‘Faith, I wouldn’t do that and be leaving yourself to go back in the rain; I’ll be waiting for you.’

“It was all odious, and I made your father see how much I disliked it, and everything else about the place.” She paused a moment, and added, “The first present he gave me after our marriage was a w.c. from Cork, which he had fitted up in time for Christmas.”