In 1878, when I was four years old, another brother was born, Rupert, in August, but he died in October of the same year. He was buried in Revelstoke Church, a church not used any more, and then in ruins except for one aisle, which was roofed in, and provided with pews. It nestled by the seashore, right down on the rocks, grey and covered with ivy, and surrounded by quaint tombstones that seemed to have been scattered haphazard in the thick grass and the nettles.
I think it was about the same time that one evening I was playing in my godmother’s room, that I fell into the fire, and my little white frock was ablaze and my back badly burnt. I remember being taken up to the nursery and having my back rubbed with potatoes, and thinking that part, and the excitement and sympathy shown, and the interest created, great fun.
All this was before Hugo was in the schoolroom, but in all my sharper memories of Membland days he plays a prominent part. We, of course, shared the night nursery, and we soon invented games together, some of which were distracting, not to say maddening, to grown-up people. One was an imaginary language in which even the word “Yes” was a trisyllable, namely: “Sheepartee,” and the word for “No” was even longer and more complicated, namely: “Quiliquinino.” We used to talk this language, which was called “Sheepartee,” and which consisted of unmitigated gibberish, for hours in the nursery, till Hilly, Grace, and Annie could bear it no longer, and Everard came up one evening and told us the language must stop or we should be whipped.
The language stopped, but a game grew out of it, which was most complicated, and lasted for years even after we went to school. The game was called “Spankaboo.” It consisted of telling and acting the story of an imaginary continent in which we knew the countries, the towns, the government, and the leading people. These countries were generally at war with one another. Lady Spankaboo was a prominent lady at the Court of Doodahn. She was a charming character, not beautiful nor clever, and sometimes a little bit foolish, but most good-natured and easily taken in. Her husband, Lord Spankaboo, was a country gentleman, and they had no children. She wore red velvet in the evening, and she was bien vue at Court.
There were hundreds of characters in the game. They increased as the story grew. It could be played out of doors, where all the larger trees in the garden were forts belonging to the various countries, or indoors, but it was chiefly played in the garden, or after we went to bed. Then Hugo would say: “Let’s play Spankaboo,” and I would go straight on with the latest events, interrupting the narrative every now and then by saying: “Now, you be Lady Spankaboo,” or whoever the character on the stage might be for the moment, “and I’ll be So-and-so.” Everything that happened to us and everything we read was brought into the game—history, geography, the ancient Romans, the Greeks, the French; but it was a realistic game, and there were no fairies in it and nothing in the least frightening. As it was a night game, this was just as well.
Hugo was big for his age, with powerful lungs, and after luncheon he used to sing a song called “Apples no more,” with immense effect. Hugo was once told the following riddle: “Why can’t an engine-driver sit down?”—to which the answer is, “Because he has a tender behind.” He asked this to my mother at luncheon the next day, and when nobody could guess it, he said: “Because he has a soft behind.” There was a groom in the stables who had rather a Japanese cast of face, and we used to call him le Japonnais. One day Hugo went and stood in front of him and said to him: “You’re the Japonais.” On another occasion when Hugo was learning to conjugate the auxiliary verb être, Chérie urged him to add a substantive after “Je suis,” to show he knew what he was doing. “Je suis une plume,” said Hugo.
We were constantly in D.’s room and used to play sad tricks on her. She rashly told us one day that her brother Jim had once taken her to a fair at Wallington and had there shown her a Punch’s face, in gutta-percha, on the wall. “Go and touch his nose,” had said Jim. She did so, and the face being charged with electricity gave her a shock.
This story fired our imagination and we resolved to follow Jim’s example. We got a galvanic battery, how and where, I forget, the kind which consists of a small box with a large magnet in it, and a handle which you turn, the patient holding two small cylinders. We persuaded D. to hold the cylinders, and then we made the current as strong as possible and turned the handle with all our might. Poor D. screamed and tears poured down her cheeks, but we did not stop, and she could not leave go because the current contracts the fingers; we went on and on till she was rescued by someone else.
Another person we used to play tricks on was M. Butat, the cook, and one day Hugo and I, to his great indignation, threw a dirty mop into his stock-pot.
A great ally in the house was the housekeeper, Mrs. Tudgay. Every day at eleven she would have two little baskets ready for us, which contained biscuits, raisins and almonds, two little cakes, and perhaps a tangerine orange.