An Autobiography

  If I heard a snore then, delighted, I went back to bed and to sleep; but if there happened to be none, I remained there, crouching in miserable apprehension. It would have been far more sensible if I had opened the door and walked in to reassure myself, but somehow that does not seem to have occurred to me, or possibly mother always locked her door at night.

  I did not tell mother about these terrible fits of anxiety, and I don’t think she ever guessed at them. I used also to have fears, when she had gone out into the town, that she might have been run over. It all seems silly now, so unnecessary. It wore off gradually, I think, and probably lasted only for a year or two. Later I slept in father’s dressing-room, off her bedroom, with the door slightly ajar, so that if she did have an attack in the night I could go in, raise her head, and fetch her brandy and sal volatile. Once I felt that I was on the spot, I no longer suffered from the awful pangs of anxiety. I was, I suppose, always over-burdened with imagination. That has served me well in my profession–it must, indeed, be the basis of the novelist’s craft–but it can give you some bad sessions in other respects.

  The conditions of our life changed after my father’s death. Social occasions practically ceased. My mother saw a few old friends but nobody else. We were very badly off and had to economise in every way. It was, of course, all we could do to keep up Ashfield. My mother no longer gave luncheon or dinner parties. She had two servants instead of three. She tried to tell Jane that we were now badly off and that she would have to manage with two young, inexpensive maids, but she stressed that Jane, with her magnificent cooking, could command a large salary, and that she ought to have it. Mother would look about and find Jane a place where she would get good wages and also have a kitchenmaid under her. ‘You deserve it,’ said mother.

  Jane displayed no emotion; she was eating at the time, as usual. She nodded her head slowly, continued to chew, then said: ‘Very well, Ma’am. Just as you say. You know best.’

  The next morning, however, she reappeared. ‘I’d just like a word with you, Ma’am. I’ve been thinking things over and I would prefer to stay here. I quite understand what you said, and I would be prepared to take less wages, but I have been here a very long time. In any case, my brother’s been urging me to come and keep house for him and I have promised I will do so when he retires; that will probably be in four or five year’s time. Until then I would like to stay here.’

  ‘That is very, very good of you,’ said my mother, emotionally. Jane, who had a horror of emotion, said, ‘It will be convenient,’ and moved majestically from the room.

  There was only one drawback to this arrangement. Having cooked in one way for so many years, Jane could not stop cooking in the same strain. If we had a joint it was always an enormous roast. Colossal beefsteak pies, huge tarts, and gargantuan steam puddings would be put on the table. Mother would say, ‘Only enough for two, remember, Jane,’ or ‘Only enough for four,’ but Jane could never understand. Jane’s own scale of hospitality was terribly expensive for the household; every day of the week, seven or eight of her friends were wont to arrive for tea, and eat pastries, buns, scones, rock cakes and jam tarts. In the end, in desperation, seeing the household books mounting up, my mother said gently that perhaps, as things were different now, Jane would have one day a week when she could have her friends. This would save a certain amount of waste, in case a lot was cooked and then people did not turn up. Thenceforward Jane held court on Wednesdays only.

  Our own meals was now very different from the normal three-or four-course feasts. Dinners were cut out altogether, and mother and I had a macaroni cheese or a rice pudding or something like that in the evening. I’m afraid this saddened Jane a great deal. Also, little by little, mother managed to take over the ordering, which formerly had been done by Jane. It had been one of my father’s friend’s great delights, when staying in the house, to hear Jane ordering on the telephone in her deep bass Devonshire voice: ‘And I want six lobsters, hen lobsters, and prawns–not less than…’ It became a favourite phrase in our family. ‘Not less than’ was not only used by Jane but also by a later cook of ours, Mrs Potter. What splendid days for the tradesmen those were!

  ‘But I’ve always ordered twelve fillets of sole, Ma’am,’ Jane would say, looking distressed. The fact that there were not enough mouths to devour twelve fillets of sole, not even counting a couple in the kitchen, never appeared to enter her head.

  None of these changes were particularly noticeable to me. Luxury or economy mean little when you are young. If you buy boiled sweets instead of chocolates the difference is not noticeable. Mackerel I had always preferred to sole, and a whiting with its tail in its mouth I thought a most agreeable looking fish.

  My personal life was not much altered. I read enormous quantities of books–worked through all the rest of Henty, and was introduced to Stanley Weyman (what glorious historical novels they were. I read The Castle Inn only the other day and thought how good it was.) The Prisoner of Zenda was my opening to romance, as it was for many others. I read it again and again. I fell deeply in love–not with Rudolf Rassendyll, as might have been expected, but with the real king imprisoned in his dungeon and sighing. I yearned to succour him, to rescue him, to assure him that I–Flavia, of course–loved him and not Rudolf Rassendyll. I also read the whole of Jules Verne in French–Le Voyage au Centre de la Terre was my favourite for many months. I loved the contrast between the prudent nephew and the cocksure uncle. Any book I really liked I read over again at monthly intervals; then, after about a year, I would be fickle and choose another favourite.

  There were also L. T. Meade’s books for girls, which my mother disliked very much; she said the girls in them were vulgar and only thought of being rich and having smart clothes. Secretly, I rather liked them, but with a guilty feeling of being vulgar in my tastes! Some of the Hentys mother read aloud to me, though she was slightly exasperated by the length of the descriptions. She also read a book called The Last Days of Bruce, of which both she and I approved heartily. By way of lessons, I was put on to a book called Great Events of History, of which I had to read one chapter and answer the questions about it set in a note at the end. This was a very good book. It taught a lot of the main events that happened in Europe and elsewhere, which one could link on to the history of the Kings of England, from Little Arthur onwards. How satisfactory to be firmly told So-and-So was a bad king; it has a kind of Biblical finality. I knew the dates of the Kings of England and the names of all their wives–information that has never been much use to me.

  Every day I had to learn how to spell pages of words. I suppose the exercise did me some good, but I was still an extraordinarily bad speller and have remained so until the present day.

  My principal pleasures were the musical and other activities into which I entered with a family called Huxley. Dr Huxley had a vague but clever wife. There were five girls–Mildred, Sybil, Muriel, Phyllis and Enid. I came between Muriel and Phyllis, and Muriel became my special friend. She had a long face and dimples, which is unusual in a long face, pale golden hair, and she laughed a great deal. I joined them first in their weekly singing-class. About ten girls took part in singing part-songs and oratorios under the direction of a singing-master, Mr Crow. There was also ‘the orchestra’ Muriel and I both played mandolines, Sybil and a girl called Connie Stevens the violin, Mildred the ‘cello.

  Looking back on the day of the orchestra, I think the Huxleys were an enterprising family. The stuffier of the old inhabitants of Torquay looked slightly askance at ‘those Huxley girls’, mainly because they were in the habit of walking up and down The Strand, which was the shopping centre of the town, between twelve and one, first three girls, arm in arm, then two girls and the governess; they swung their arms, and walked up and down, and laughed and joked, and, cardinal sin against them, they did not wear gloves. These things were social offences at that time. However, since Dr Huxley was by far the most fashionable doctor in Torquay, and Mrs Huxley was what is known as ‘well
connected’, the girls were passed as socially acceptable.

  It was a curious social pattern, looking back. It was snobbish, I suppose; on the other hand, a certain type of snobbishness was much looked down upon. People who introduced the aristocracy into their conversation too frequently were disapproved of and laughed at. Three phases have succeeded each other during the span of my life. In the first the questions would be: ‘But who is she, dear? Who are her people? Is she one of the Yorkshire Twiddledos? Of course, they are badly off, very badly off, but she was a Wilmot.’ This was to be succeeded in due course by: ‘Oh yes, of course they are pretty dreadful, but then they are terribly rich.’ ‘Have the people who have taken The Larches got money?’ ‘Oh well, then we’d better call.’ The third phase was different again: ‘Well, dear, but are they amusing?’ ‘Yes, well of course they are not well off, and nobody knows where they came from, but they are very very amusing.’ After which digression into social values I had better return to the orchestra.

  Did we make an awful noise, I wonder? Probably. Anyway, it gave us a lot of fun and increased our musical knowledge. It led on to something more exciting, which was the getting up of a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan.

  The Huxleys and their friends had already given Patience–that was before I joined their ranks. The next performance in view was The Yeomen of the Guard–a somewhat ambitious undertaking. In fact I am surprised that their parents did not discourage them. But Mrs Huxley was a wonderful pattern of aloofness, for which, I must say, I admire her, since parents were not particularly aloof then. She encouraged her children to get up anything they liked, helped them if they asked for help, and, if not, left them to it. The Yeomen of the Guard was duly cast. I had a fine strong soprano voice, about the only soprano they had, and I was naturally in the seventh heaven at being chosen to play Colonel Fairfax.

  We had a little difficulty with my mother, who was old-fashioned in her views about what girls could or could not wear on their legs if they were to appear in public. Legs were legs, definitely indelicate. For me to display myself in trunk hose, or anything of that kind, would, my mother thought, be most indecorous. I suppose I was thirteen or fourteen by then, and already five foot seven. There was, alas, no sign of the full rich bosom that I had hoped for when I was at Cauterets. A Yeoman of the Guard’s uniform was adjudged all right, though it had to be made with unusually baggy plus-four trousers, but the Elizabethan gentleman presented more difficulties. It seems to me silly nowadays, but it was a serious problem then. Anyway, it was surmounted by my mother saying that it would be all right, but I must wear a disguising cloak thrown over one shoulder. So a cloak was managed out of a piece of turquoise blue-velvet among Grannie’s ‘pieces’. (Grannie’s pieces were kept in various trunks and drawers, and comprised all types of rich and beautiful fabrics, remnants which she had bought in various sales over the last twenty-five years and had now more or less forgotten about.) It is not terribly easy to act with a cloak draped over one shoulder and flung over the other, in such a way that the indelicacies of one’s legs were more or less hidden from the audience.

  As far as I remember I felt no stage fright. Strangely enough for a terribly shy person, who very often can hardly bring herself to enter a shop and who has to grit her teeth before arriving at a large party, there was one activity in which I never felt nervous at all, and that was singing. Later, when I studied both piano and singing in Paris, I lost my nerve completely whenever I had to play the piano in the school concert but if I had to sing I felt no nervousness at all. Perhaps that was due to my early conditioning in ‘Is life a boon?’ and the rest of Colonel Fairfax’s repertoire. There is no doubt that The Yeomen of the Guard was one of the highlights of my existence. But I can’t help thinking that it’s as well that we didn’t do any more operas–an experience that you really enjoyed should never be repeated.

  One of the odd things in looking back is that, while you remember how things arrived or happened, you never know how or why they disappeared or came to a stop. I cannot remember many scenes in which I participated with the Huxleys after that time, yet I am sure there was no break in friendship. At one time we seemed to be meeting every day, and then I would find myself writing to Lully in Scotland. Perhaps Dr Huxley left to practise elsewhere, or retired? I don’t remember any definite leave-taking. I remember that Lully’s terms of friendship were clearly defined. ‘You can’t be my best friend,’ she explained, ‘because there are the Scottish girls, the McCrackens. They have always been our best friends. Brenda is my best friend, and Janet is Phyllis’s best friend; but you can be my second-best friend.’ So I was content with being Lully’s second-best friend, and the arrangement worked well, since the ‘best friends’, the McCrackens, were only seen by the Huxleys at intervals of, I should say, roughly two years.

  II

  It must, I think, have been some time in March that my mother remarked that Madge was going to have a baby. I stared at her. ‘Madge, have a baby?’ I was dumbfounded. I cannot imagine why I shouldn’t have thought of Madge having a baby–after all, it was happening all round one–but things are always surprising when they happen in one’s own family. I accepted my brother-in-law, James, or Jimmy, as I usually called him, enthusiastically, and was devoted to him. Now here was something entirely different.

  As usual with me, it was some time before I could take it in. I probably sat with my mouth open for quite two minutes or more. Then I said, ‘Oh–that will be exciting. When is it coming? Next week?’

  ‘Not quite as soon as that,’ said my mother. She suggested a date in October.

  ‘October?’ I was deeply chagrined. Fancy having to wait all that time. I can’t remember very clearly what my attitude to sex was then–I must have been between twelve and thirteen–but I don’t think I any longer accepted the theories of doctors with black bags or heavenly visitants with wings. By then I had realised it was a physical process, but without feeling much curiosity or, indeed, interest. I had, however, done a little mild deduction. The baby was first inside you, and then in due course it was outside you; I reflected on the mechanism, and settled on the navel as a focal point. I couldn’t see what that round hole in the middle of my stomach was for–it didn’t seem to be for anything else, so clearly it must be something to do with the production of a baby.

  My sister told me years afterwards that she had had very definite ideas; that she had thought that her navel was a keyhole, that there was a key that fitted it, which was kept by your mother, who handed it over to your husband, who unlocked it on the wedding night. It all sounded so sensible that I don’t wonder she stuck firmly to her theory.

  I took the idea out into the garden and thought about it a good deal. Madge was going to have a baby. It was a wonderful concept, and the more I thought about it the more I was in favour of it. I was going to be an aunt–it sounded very grown up and important. I would buy it toys, I would let it play with my dolls’ house, I would have to be careful that Christopher, my kitten, didn’t scratch it by mistake. After about a week I stopped thinking about it; it was absorbed into various daily happenings. It was a long time to wait until October.

  Some time in August a telegram took my mother away from home. She said she had to go and stay with my sister in Cheshire. Auntie-Grannie was staying with us at the time. Mother’s sudden departure did not surprise me much, and I didn’t speculate about it, because whatever mother did she did suddenly, with no apparent forethought or preparation. I was, I remember, out in the garden on the tennis lawn, looking hopefully at the pear-trees to see if I could find a pear which was ripe. It was here that Alice came out to fetch me. ‘It’s nearly lunch-time and you are to come in, Miss Agatha. There is a piece of news waiting for you.’

  ‘Is there? What news?’

  ‘You’ve got a little nephew,’ said Alice.

  A nephew?

  ‘But I wasn’t going to have a nephew till October!’ I objected.

  ‘Ah, but things don’t always go as you
think they will,’ said Alice. ‘Come on in now.’

  I came in to the house and found Grannie in the kitchen with a telegram in her hand. I bombarded her with questions. What did the baby look like? Why had it come now instead of October? Grannie returned answers to these questions with the parrying art well known to Victorians. She had, I think, been in the middle of an obstetric conversation with Jane when I came in, because they lowered their voices and murmured something like: ‘The other doctor said, let the labour come on, but the specialist was quite firm.’ It all sounded mysterious and interesting. My mind was fixed entirely on my new nephew. When Grannie was carving the leg of mutton, I said:

  ‘But what does he look like? What colour is his hair?’

  ‘He’s probably bald. They don’t get hair at once.’ ‘Bald,’ I said, disappointed. ‘Will his face be very red?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘How big is he?’

  Grannie considered, stopped carving, and measured off a distance on the carving knife.

  ‘Like that,’ she said. She spoke with the absolute certainty of one who knew. It seemed to me rather small. All the same the announcement made such an impression on me that I am sure if I were being asked an associative question by a psychiatrist and he gave me the key-word ‘baby’ I would immediately respond with ‘carving-knife’. I wonder what kind of Freudian complex he would put that answer down to.