A Vicarage Family: A Biography of Myself

  ‘You will be the one to surprise us all.’

  Victoria never knew what her father and Miss French had said to each other, only that they had met. It was the last day of term and Victoria was with the rest of her class tidying her desk, when a message came that she was wanted in Miss French’s study. All her class knew how bad her report had been, for exhibitionist Victoria had not been able to resist telling them, so they made sympathetic faces. Outwardly brave though respectful, but inwardly trembling, Victoria knocked on the study door. Miss French, looking frighteningly smart in a dark shade of blue, was sitting at her desk.

  ‘Come in, Vicky.’ She pointed to a chair. ‘Sit down.’ She clasped her elegant, long-fingered, ringed hands.

  ‘You and I have got to start again, Vicky,’ she announced.

  Victoria gasped:

  ‘What?’

  Miss French ignored the interruption.

  ‘Your father is a very fine man, my child, and a very devoted father. When talking to him the other day I realized that both you and I have let him down – you as my pupil, I as your headmistress. It is quite hard for him to find the fees for even a day girl, but he has found them. What have we given him in return?’

  An answer was clearly expected.

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘Only a girl who is as ignorant as the day she entered my school. At your age, Vicky, it is very easy to be misunderstood, for it is difficult for you to express what you feel. I am afraid this is just what has happened, and perhaps I am partly to blame.’

  There was another pause. Victoria was sure she should have said ‘Oh no’, but she could not bring herself to say it. Instead she said:

  ‘You were rather mean about my ankle when I sprained it, and …’

  Miss French stopped her with a gesture.

  ‘We are not here to rake among the ashes. We are here to make a fresh start. I want us next term to work together, so that at Christmas you can give your father the present of a good report. He is a fine man; he deserves it, Vicky.’

  Victoria thought of Miss Brown stealing her free time for violin practice, and all the other pinpricks which were her daily lot.

  ‘I could try,’ she said, after thought. ‘But I shouldn’t think it would happen. It’s like New Year resolutions, I make those – but I always break them.’

  ‘I was not expecting you to achieve what by present standards would be a miracle – alone.’

  Victoria was disgusted. Having a father who was a clergyman she had to put up with a lot of talk about God, but, except at morning prayers and scripture lessons, she did not expect such talk from a headmistress. She sounded resentful.

  ‘I know about God.’

  Miss French looked for a second as if she were going to laugh.

  ‘I was not at that moment meaning God – I am sure a daughter of your father knows how to pray. I was thinking about myself. Starting next term would you promise me, when you think you have been treated unjustly in any way, to come and discuss the situation with me?’

  Victoria could hardly believe her ears. Nobody as far as she knew, except the outside teachers, talked to Miss French.

  ‘How could I? I couldn’t just walk in.’

  Miss French opened a drawer and took out a pad of pink paper. She passed it to Victoria.

  ‘If you need me write me a note. Just say: “May I see you please?” and sign it.’

  Victoria turned the pad over; it was pretty paper, but she could not see herself writing such a note.

  ‘Thank you very much.’

  Miss French gave her a friendly nod.

  ‘Run along, dear. I have no intention of letting your father down, even if you have, so if I feel I should have had a note and do not receive one, I shall send for you. Oh – and, Vicky, please tell no one about this conversation. It is our secret.’

  16

  Another August

  The summer holiday was spent in North Wales. The weather was kind, but the house the children’s father had rented was isolated and a mile from the sea. The scenery, however, was exquisite, and there was fun in talking to the few locals, who spoke with a lilt and phrased their sentences so curiously, so the holiday turned out better than some. Isobel certainly enjoyed it, for she was out sketching from morning to night, and was often joined by her mother, who could paint quite pleasantly. The children’s father, as often happened, spent his first week being ill, for he was so overtired that the sudden relaxation was too much for his system to take. But after that, his daily bathe over, he too often joined the sketchers, for he was quite clever with a pencil.

  Louise and Dick were always happy as long as they were together. But that holiday they showed a new independence. The bathe over, for that, still supposedly a pleasure, was accepted by all the children to be a must unless there was a health excuse, the two would collect a picnic lunch and, taking Spot with them, would disappear until dark. What did they talk about, those two? Nobody knew. But clearly one subject had cropped up – Jackie – for one day during breakfast the children’s mother said:

  ‘Where’s Jackie, Louise? I haven’t seen him for days.’

  Louise was at that moment eating a plate of stewed bilberries that Hester and Annie had picked. She looked up, her mouth black from the juice.

  ‘He’s gone.’

  Dick too was eating bilberries for stewed fruit for breakfast was a special holiday treat. He said:

  ‘We buried him.’

  Amazed and clearly a little upset the children’s mother asked where.

  ‘Just somewhere,’ said Louise.

  ‘But nicely,’ Dick added. ‘Like a funeral at Granny and Grandfather’s. In a box.’

  ‘The one my sandals came in,’ Louise explained. ‘I put that pink handkerchief I had for Christmas over him.’

  Isobel and Victoria might disapprove of Jackie but he was part of the family life. They could not believe he had just been pushed under the ground.

  ‘But you know where to find him when you want him back?’ Victoria asked.

  Louise shook her head.

  ‘No. Anyway, I don’t want him back.’

  ‘She’s twelve now,’ Dick pointed out. ‘I always knew twelve would be the right age for Jackie to go away.’

  They looked at Dick with new eyes. He was changing. He wouldn’t be ten until October, yet it sounded as if it was he who had decided that Louise was too old for Jackie. Such a strange decision to come from the member of the family who noticed and minded if between one holiday and another even an ornament was moved.

  ‘Of course Dick wasn’t there when Mummy was talking about what we’d be when we grew up,’ Isobel said later to Victoria. ‘But if he had been, I should think she’d say he would be something where a person needs to be extra reliable.’

  Victoria too had been thinking about Dick.

  ‘Aren’t Daddy and Mummy lucky that the only boy is like Dick? Always good, always works hard, as well as being clever enough to be expected to get a scholarship at Marlborough. How awful for them if he’d been like me.’

  ‘Or me,’ said Isobel. ‘It’s all right for me to be an artist, but it’s not the sort of thing Daddy would like his son to be.’

  Victoria had expected to loathe every minute of the holiday. No John to do things with. Even if it was not mentioned and the punishment was waiting until she got home – in disgrace. As she had written to John:

  ‘My expectation of pleasure is low.’

  As things turned out it was a better holiday than she anticipated. Of course she missed John abominably. Every moment of the day there seemed to be something she wanted to tell him or show him. But in so far as he could he had made up to her for not being there by sending her books.

  ‘Knowing what a muggins you are about keeping your reading a secret,’ he wrote, ‘I am sending a parcel of books for you to Annie. Warn her it’s not a gift from a swain, though I will put in the box some of that toffee with nuts in it that she and Hester like …’

 
The books were a mixed lot. Because it was holiday time John had changed Victoria’s diet. For the box introduced her to Arnold Bennett, Wells and Conan Doyle. But there were also the poems of Keats, Shelley and Coleridge.

  ‘Try getting off on your own,’ he wrote, ‘and read one poem out loud each day. It’ll sound fine with a background of waves.’

  Because John ordered it Victoria obeyed and was surprised to find he was right. She also found she grew so fond of some of the poetry that she learnt it by heart. As a result, during a bathe, she would swim away from the family to recite ‘Swiftly walk o’er the western wave, Spirit of Night’ or ‘O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, Alone and palely loitering?’ But even while she was reciting, she never lost sight of herself, for she would often break off to giggle. ‘Miss Brown would drop dead if she knew I said poetry because I like it.’

  Annie, who of course had to know about the books, had some shrewd comments to make.

  ‘Comic you are. Let your poor father fidget himself to death because you aren’t learnin’ anything and all the time you’ve your nose in a book. Why can’t you tell him?’

  Victoria had no real reason.

  ‘I just don’t want to.’

  ‘Hopin’ to surprise everybody, are you? Well, it will be a nice change. Shan’t know ourselves come Christmas, if you come home sayin’ you was top in everything.’

  Until that moment Victoria had not faced up to the problem of next term, but now Annie had sowed the seed, it took root. Victoria never willingly did things by halves. She had not liked the thought of next term because doing better, interspersed with talks with Miss French, had seemed both tame and embarrassing; but after that talk with Annie she began to plan. She would be a different person next term. She would work harder than any girl had ever worked before. The whole school would talk about her.

  It was easy to find quiet spots in which to read undisturbed, but Victoria had not as much time on her hands as she had expected; and of all people, the one with whom she spent some of what she had was her mother. From the time they could walk all the children had been taught by their mother to enjoy her hobby of flower hunting. In the early days small prizes were given for the largest collection found on a walk of different flowers, each of which must be named. Later, they helped search for rare flowers, for their mother had the Bentham and Hooker books, which described and showed drawings of every flower in the British Isles. When she found a new flower she painted the drawing of it. In North Wales, though August was not the best time of year for flower hunting, there were rare flowers she had never found; so she was out some part of each day hunting, and Victoria got into the habit of going with her.

  At the beginning of the holiday conversation on the flower hunts was confined almost entirely to flowers. Then gradually other topics crept in, until one surprising day Victoria found herself her mother’s confidant. There were plenty of stormy patches ahead when the gap of understanding between them was as wide as ever, but in future after each bad patch closed Victoria was once more someone in whom her mother could confide and, later on, on whom she could lean. A position she was never to lose.

  It started on the day the children’s mother found a Pinquicula Vulgaria. Only collectors know the sense of achievement that comes from finding that for which they have searched. Regardless of the fact that the plant was growing on a wet rock, she knelt down by it to get a closer view. Then she called Victoria.

  Victoria was at that time only a flower collector because she had been brought up to be one, but she could feel triumph at the success of a search. She looked at the bluish-purple flower and the spreading rosette of oblong light green leaves.

  ‘Oh Mummy! It’s it, isn’t it? The Pinquicula?’

  Her mother carefully picked one flower and one leaf.

  ‘Yes. I was afraid it was too late to find one as they flower in the early summer.’

  They turned for home, both slightly exalted.

  ‘I bet Isobel will wish she had been there when we found it,’ Victoria gloated.

  They walked in silence for a little distance, then her mother said:

  ‘I worry about Isobel, Vicky. She’s sixteen next year; even perhaps this Christmas she may get asked to dances and we know no boys to partner her.’

  In Eastbourne parents rented halls and gave what were then called ‘flapper dances’. But there was nothing new in the Strangeways knowing no boys – they never had. Victoria and John had long accepted the fact that he would have to act as escort when Isobel was old enough to be invited to such parties.

  ‘There’s John.’

  ‘It’s not now I’m worried about, but in two years’ time when Isobel is old enough for grown-up dances. John will be away at school except in the holidays, and we know nobody.’

  ‘How do other people get to know partners?’

  Her mother replied with what Victoria found startling candour.

  ‘They entertain. I mean if I was the sort of person they are, I’d ask John to bring some school friends to stay. But I’m so bad at that sort of thing. I hate bothering about meals and entertaining. And Daddy isn’t fond of having visitors in the house – except the Bishop or relations.’

  ‘I wouldn’t bother,’ said Victoria. ‘Isobel’s awfully pretty. I expect partners will turn up.’

  Her mother was again silent for a little. Then she said:

  ‘I don’t worry about you, Vicky. You are the sort that can look after yourself. But Isobel isn’t, and I know I’m not going to make Daddy understand that we ought to be thinking about things.’

  Victoria, having only been to children’s parties, was incapable of visualising a proper grown-up dance with dance programmes, though of course she had heard about them.

  ‘I wouldn’t bother too much yet. Isobel’s only fifteen, it’s two years before she’s old enough for grown-up parties. Perhaps by then Daddy will have a curate that can dance.’

  On that day the subject was dropped there, but on another flower hunt it was picked up again, in a different version.

  ‘What do the older girls wear at Laughton House for best? I mean when their parents take them out.’

  ‘Very tight skirts so they can’t move, and lace blouses and hats with veils – and proper idiots they look.’

  ‘Just like smart grown-ups?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Victoria agreed cheerfully. ‘I expect clothes like that will soon be coming from Ursula.’

  ‘Oh, no. They are going to India. Uncle Paul has been offered a secretaryship to the Viceroy. It couldn’t come at a better time, Aunt Helen says, as she will be able to bring Ursula out while they are there.’

  ‘Won’t Aunt Helen send her clothes back to us from India?’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  They were so used to Isobel being dressed by Ursula that it was almost impossible to imagine her dressed by any other means. Victoria tried to think of something comforting to say.

  ‘Oh well, Isobel won’t care. And anyway I think soon Ursula’s clothes wouldn’t have fitted her. Isobel still looks awfully little-girlish – even her chest doesn’t stick out properly for someone of fifteen.’

  ‘I expect I ought to be buying her corsets and proper bust bodices.’

  Isobel, like her sisters, was still wearing what was called a liberty bodice – a plain garment supported from the shoulders by wide straps with suspenders fore and aft, and buttoned all the way down. Both she and Victoria dreaded the thought of boned corsets, bust bodices and beribboned camisoles and petticoats – so constraining, and doubling the time it took to dress.

  ‘Honestly, I wouldn’t fuss yet. Grand-Nanny told us Aunt Hetty never stopped being a child until the day she met Uncle Samuel. I expect Isobel will be like that.’

  ‘Aunt Hetty had eight brothers,’ said her mother, ‘so it didn’t matter if she looked grown-up or not. And I don’t care if Isobel does or not. But it’s what people say. Those smart women I have to call on are always making remarks like: “You will soon hav
e to be planning to bring that eldest girl of yours out.” It sends shivers down my spine, Vicky, for I haven’t the faintest idea how to do it – and Daddy will be no help.’

  Victoria could only repeat what she had already said; and indeed to her, Isobel grown-up was too remote to imagine.

  ‘I wouldn’t fuss. Two years is simply ages away.’

  Victoria had another occupation which kept her from her reading. Remote as the house her father had rented was from anywhere, there was another house in the area, and occasionally the family staying in it came down to the beach. To Victoria this family was nearly as enthralling as the troupe of child dancers, for their lives were almost as far removed from her own. The family were driven to the beach in a wagonette by a uniformed coachman. With them came a governess, and a manservant who carried the hampers of food to the beach and made himself useful, but he also, after luncheon, played cricket with the children, for he was quite a star bowler.

  Victoria, sitting on a rock pretending to be absorbed in a book, was studying the family, taking in every word they said. The eldest was William, then came Marigold, then Harold, then Daphne and there were two little ones, Agnes and Katherine.

  They were a cheerful, friendly family, except for Harold, who could fly into furious tempers at a moment’s notice, but not especially interesting except to Victoria, who adopted the lot. To each one she gave a character, hobbies, gifts – until sometimes the unknown family seemed nearer to her than her own.

  Then one day at the end of the holiday when Victoria was out with her mother flower hunting, she learned something about them which brought them into even sharper focus, and really did make them as fascinating as the child dancers. They were passing the tiny halt from which in a day or two a small train would take two hours to carry them to the main line where they would catch their train via London home. That day, standing on a side line, was a long coach marked ‘sleeper’.

  ‘That,’ said the children’s mother calmly, ‘must be for the family at The Plas. I heard they were leaving about the same time as we were.’

  ‘Sleepers?’ Victoria asked. ‘What are they?’