CHAPTER I
HOME
“And I’ll go away and fight for myself.”
—Eliza Comes to Stay.
As Mr. Wickfield said to Miss Trotwood—the old question, you know—“What is your motive in this?”
I am sure it is excellent to have a motive, and if possible a good motive, for doing everything; and so before I begin I want to give my motive for attempting to write my memoirs of things and people, past and present—and here it is.
Jack, my son, was on tour with his own company of Eliza Comes to Stay; and Jill, my little daughter, was playing at the St. James’s Theatre, her first engagement—and, incidentally, earning more each week than I did when I first played “lead” (and I found my own dresses). I thought that some day they might like to know how different things were in the “old days”; like to read how one worked, and studied, and tried to save; might like to know something of the road over which their father and mother had travelled; and perhaps gain some idea of the men and women who were our contemporaries. Perhaps, if they, my own boy and girl, would like to read this, other people’s boys and girls might like to read it also: it might at least interest and amuse them.
To me, to try and write it all would be a joy, to “call spirits from the vasty deep,” to ring up again the curtain on the small dramas in which I had played—and the small comedies too—and to pay some tribute to the great men and women I have known. It may all seem to be “my story,” but very often I shall only be the string on which are hung the bravery, kindness, and goodness of the really great people; not always the most successful, but the really great, who have helped to make life what it should be, and luckily sometimes really is!
So I determined to begin, and begin at the beginning.
Brighton! when it was Brighton; still retaining some of the glories of the long past Regency; with its gay seasons, its mounted police, and—no Metropole Hotel; when the only two hotels of any importance were the “Bedford” and the still-existing “Old Ship.” The old chain pier, standing when we went to bed one evening, and swept away when we got up the next morning by a terrific gale. The Aquarium, then a place which people really visited and regarded as something of a “sight worth seeing”—does anyone go there now, except on a very wet day? The Dome in the Pavilion, with its grand orchestral concerts, conducted by the famous Mr. Kuhe, whose son is now a musical critic in London. All these things belonged to Brighton of the—well, the exact date does not matter—but of the time when women did not ride bicycles or drive motor cars, because certainly the one, and certainly the other so far as women were concerned, did not exist. In those days men rode a high “single wheel” bicycle: the higher the wheel, the greater the Knut—only the word “Knut” was unknown then!
Those are some of the memories I have of Brighton at the time when we were a happy, noisy, large family living in Regency Square; a really large family, even as Victorian families went—nine girls and one boy. We had no money, but unlimited health and spirits.