‘Last week a lady interested in the school was passing through one of the slum streets to the west of Tottenham Court Road. Much good work has been done there by many agencies. But in August most of the workers are away. Dirty, ragged, fighting or querulous children covered the pavement, or seemed to be bursting out of the grimy houses. The street was filthy, the clothes of the children to match. There was no occupation; the little souls were given up to ‘the weight of chance desires’; and whatever happiness there was must have been of rather a perilous sort. The same spectator passed on, and half a mile eastward entered the settlement building in Tavistock Place. Here were nearly 300 children (the children of the Evening Session), divided between house and garden, many of them from quarters quite as poor as those she had just traversed. But all was order, friendliness and enjoyment. Every child was clean and neat, though the clothes might be poor; if a boy brushed past the visitor, it would be with a pleasant ‘Excuse me, Miss’; in the manual training-room boys looked up from the benches with glee to show the models they had made; the drawing-room of the settlement was full of little ones busy with the unfamiliar delights of brush or pencil; in the library boys were sitting hunched up over Masterman Ready, or the ever-adored Robinson Crusoe; girls were deep in Anderson’s Fairy Tales or The Cuckoo Clock, the little ones were reading Mr. Stead’s Books for the Bairns or looking at pictures; outside in the garden under the trees clay modelling and kindergarten games were going on, while the sand-pit was crowded with children enjoying themselves heartily without either shouting or fighting. Meanwhile in the big hall parents were thronging in to see the musical drill, the dancing or the acting, or to listen to the singing; the fathers as proud as the mothers that Willie was ‘in the Shakespeare,’ or Nellie ‘in the Gavotte.’ The visitor had only to watch to see that the teachers were obeyed at a word, at a glance, and that the children loved to obey. Everywhere was discipline, good temper, pleasure. And next day the school broke up with the joining of 600 voices in the old hymn ‘O God, our help in ages past.’ Surely no contrast could be more complete.”

And in conclusion Mrs. Ward made her characteristic appeal:

“Shall we not enter seriously on the movement and call on our public authorities to take it up? Who can doubt the need of it, even when all allowance is made for country holidays of all sorts? Extend and develop country holidays as you will, London in the summer vacation month will never be without its hundreds of thousands of children for whom these Vacation Schools, properly managed, would be almost a boon of fairyland.”

The Vacation School had indeed been watched with much interest by the London School Board, which had also co-operated by the lending of furniture and “stock,” but the transference of its powers to the London County Council made a bad atmosphere, just at this time, for the adoption of new experiments, and the new “London Education Authority” which arose in 1903 was only too glad to leave the carrying-on of the Settlement Vacation School to Mrs. Ward. Every year it seemed to increase in popularity. Mr. Holland remained director for thirteen consecutive Augusts (1902-1914); the numbers of the school rose to 1,000 per day in later years, when an additional building became available, and Mrs. Ward could have no greater pleasure, when the pressure of her literary work permitted, than to come up from Stocks for a day to watch her holiday children. But in spite of the universally recognized success of her experiment, this and the “Holiday School” organized by the Browning Settlement from 1904 onwards remained practically the only efforts of the kind carried on in London, until at length, in 1910, the L.C.C. followed suit by opening six Vacation Schools in different parts of the metropolis, housed in the ordinary school buildings and playgrounds. They were an enormous boon to the children of those districts, but the Council did not persist in its good deeds, for after two years these Holiday Schools were allowed to drop, and have never, unfortunately, been revived. Indeed, in June, 1921, a resolution was passed, prohibiting any expenditure on Holiday Schools or Organized Playgrounds. So does the London child pay its share of the War Debt.

But the Vacation School at the Settlement has never lapsed, since the first day that Mrs. Ward opened it in August, 1902, although in these times of forced economy the numbers are less than of old. But there, under the great plane-trees in the garden, the trestle-tables are still set up and the children still congregate, bearing their laughing testimony to the memory of one who knew their little hearts, and who, seeing them shepherdless in the hot streets, could not rest until they were gathered in.

CHAPTER X
LONDON LIFE—THE BEGINNINGS AND GROWTH OF THE CHILDREN’S PLAY CENTRES
1904-1917

BOTH Lady Rose’s Daughter and The Marriage of William Ashe, which appeared in 1903 and 1905 respectively, are novels of London life, reflecting in their minor characters, their talk and the incidents that accompany the tale, that intimate aquaintance with the world of London which Mrs. Ward had acquired during the many years that she had spent in observing it, in working with it, and in sharing some of the rarer forms of the rewards which it has to give. The central theme in each case is a broadly human one, but the setting and the savour are those of London—that all-devouring London which she loved so well, but from which, after a few weeks of its turmoil, she was always so thankful to escape. It was now twenty years and more since she and Mr. Ward had come to live in the pretty old house in Russell Square where they had first gathered their friends around them, and where her Thursdays had first become an institution; but time had not dimmed her zest for friendship and for talk, so that the Thursdays and the frequent dinner-parties continued at Grosvenor Place through all the years that followed. She would never have claimed that they amounted to a salon, for, in spite of Lady Rose’s Daughter, her belief was that a salon, properly so-called, was not in the English tradition, and could hardly survive outside Paris; yet I think that if one had taken the opinion of those who frequented them they would have said that Mrs. Ward’s afternoons or evenings made a remarkable English equivalent. She herself did not disguise the fact that she regarded good talk as an art, and enjoyed nothing more than the play of mind on mind and the quick thrust and parry that occasionally sweeps across a dinner-table; but she had no illusions as to the natural inaptitude of the English for the art, and would often quote the exasperated remark of her great friend in Rome, Contessa Maria Pasolini, after an evening spent in entertaining English visitors: “You English, you need so much winding up! Now, if I were merely to tear up a piece of paper and throw it down among my French friends, they would talk about it delightfully all the evening!” Hence her injunctions to her children, when they began to take wing and go forth to “social junketings” of their own, not to be stuck-up or blasé, and above all “not to sit like a stuck pig when you get there!” To exert one’s wits to make a party go was part of one’s social duty, just as much as handing the tea-cake or opening the door, and she herself, in spite of a natural absence of small talk which made her formidable sometimes to new acquaintances, would faithfully follow her own precepts. But with her the effort was second nature, for it sprang from her inborn desire to place herself in sympathetic relations with her neighbour, to draw out the best in him, to set him going. And so the talk that was heard at Grosvenor Place, whether at her small luncheon-parties, her Thursdays, or her dinners, always took from her first and foremost the quality of reality; people talked—or made her talk—of the things they knew or cared about, and since her range was so wide, and there was always, as an old friend expressed it, “so much tinder about” among her guests, the result was a certain vividness and vitality that left their mark, and have been long remembered. And, as one of those who knew her best said once on a public occasion,[26] she had the secret of making you feel, as you left her house, that you were a much finer fellow than you thought when you went in; she made you believe in yourself, for she had, by some subtle magic—or perhaps by the simplest of all—brought out gifts or powers in you which you hardly knew that you possessed.

As to the persons who came and went in that pretty room, looking out on the garden of Buckingham Palace, how is it possible to number or name them, or to recall the flavour of their long-vanished conversation? Many have, like their hostess, passed into the unknown: figures like Leslie Stephen, who wrote to her often, especially after his wife’s death, and came at intervals to Grosvenor Place for a long tête-à-tête, sitting on the sofa beside Mrs. Ward, his ear-trumpet between them; or like the much-loved Burne-Jones, who came at an earlier stage and too soon ceased to come, for he died in 1898, leaving her only a little bundle of letters which she affectionately treasured; or again, like Lady Wemyss, the deep-voiced, queerly-dressed grande dame, whom Mrs. Ward loved for her heart’s sake, and of whom she has recorded a suggestion, perhaps, in the Lady Winterbourne of Marcella; and ah! how many more, of whom it would be unprofitable for the after-born to write. Mrs. Ward has left in her novels the mirror of the world in which she lived and moved, and in her Recollections a more intimate picture of her friends. To try to add to these records would be but to tempt the Gods.

But at what a cost in fatigue of body and mind even her entertaining was carried on, those who passed their days with Mrs. Ward may at least tell. It was always the same story. She put so much of herself into whatever she was doing that the effort produced exhaustion. And so, after her Thursdays, or perhaps after some gathering of Settlement workers to whom she had been talking individually, she would collapse upon the sofa, white and speechless, only fit to be “stroked” and left to gather her forces again as best she might. There was one Thursday in the month when, after her own “At Home,” she was obliged to attend the Settlement Council meeting at eight o’clock. This meant that there was no time for recuperation between the two, but only for a hurried meal, filled with hasty consultations as to the evening’s notes, letters and telephonings that must be done during her absence; then she would go off, and some time towards eleven would return, worn out and crumpled, though perhaps with the light of battle still in her eye over some point well raised or some victory won. At the Settlement she would have given no hint of any disability, and would have been the life and soul of the meeting. Perhaps only her friend the Warden knew what a struggle against physical pain and weakness her presence there had implied. We used to chaff her sometimes about the physical ailments of her heroines, who, according to our robust ideas, were too fond of turning white or of letting their lips tremble, but this trick of her novels expressed only too deep an experience of her own, since never, in all the years that she was writing, did she know what it was to have a day of ordinary physical strength. On many and many of her guests she made the illusion of being a strong woman, but could they have seen her when the talk and the excitement were over, they would have known that it was only her spirit that had carried her through. The body was always dragged after, a more or less protesting slave.

Her way of life at Grosvenor Place was naturally one which involved a good deal of expenditure. Sometimes she would have searchings of heart over this, or even momentary spasms of economy, but it sprang in reality from two fundamental causes—one her delight in beautiful things, inherited even in her starved childhood from her mother, and shared to the full in later years with her husband; the other this constant ill-health, which made her incapable of “roughing it,” and rendered a certain amount of luxury indispensable if she was to get through her daily task. Good pictures and the right kind of furniture gave her a definite joy for their own sakes, while the arrangement of the chairs and tables in the manner best calculated to encourage talk was always a fascinating problem. Clothes, too, were not to be despised, and though she liked to sit and work in some old rag that had seen better days, it amused her also to go and plan some beautiful thing with her dressmaker, Mrs. Kerr, and it amused her to wear the “creation” when it was finished. Her faithful maid, Lizzie, who had been with us since the early days of Russell Square, and who was often more nurse than maid to her, cut and altered and renovated in her little workroom upstairs, while every now and then Mrs. Ward would issue forth and make a raid upon the shops, coming home either triumphant to face the criticism of her family, or very low because she knew she had been beguiled into buying something which she now positively hated. She was extremely particular, too, about her daughters’ clothes, nor could she make up her mind, when they came out, to give them a dress allowance, being far too much interested herself in the problem of how they looked; but even when she was fully responsible for some luckless garment of theirs she would often break out, on its first appearance, with the fatal words, “Go upstairs, take that off, and let me never see it again until it’s completely re-made!”—usually uttered amid helpless giggles, for this had become, by long use, a stock phrase in our family.