Of course, in the nursery, Hugo and I had endless games of pretending, especially during bath-time (baths were hip-baths), and I remember Hugo refusing to have his bath because when we were playing at fishes I seized the shark’s part and wouldn’t let him be a shark. “Hilly,” he wailed, “I will be a shark.” But no, I wouldn’t hear of it, and he had to be a whale, which the shark, so I said, easily mastered.
Promotion to the schoolroom meant lessons and luncheon downstairs. The schoolroom was inhabited by my three sisters, Elizabeth, Margaret, and Susan, and ruled over by the French governess, Chérie. I thought Chérie the most beautiful, the cleverest, and altogether the most wonderful person in the world. My earliest recollection of her almost magical powers was when she took a lot of coloured silks and put them behind a piece of glass and said this was une vision. I believed there was nothing she didn’t know and nothing she couldn’t do. I was also convinced that one day I would marry her. This dream was sadly marred by the conduct of my sister Elizabeth. Elizabeth was the eldest, Margaret the second, and Susan the third, of my sisters. I firmly believed in fairies. Elizabeth and Margaret fostered the belief by talking a great deal about their powers as fairies, and Elizabeth said she was Queen of the fairies. One day she said: “Just as you are going to be married to Chérie, and when you are in church, I will turn you into a frog.” This was said in the schoolroom in London. The schoolroom was on the floor over the nursery. No sooner had Elizabeth made this ominous remark when I ran to the door and howled in a manner which penetrated the whole house from the housemaids’ rooms upstairs to the housekeeper’s room in the basement. Screams and yells startled the whole house. Hilly came rushing from the nursery; Chérie came from her bedroom, where she had been doing some sewing; Dimmock, my mother’s maid, whom we called D., came downstairs, saying: “Well, I never”; Sheppy, the housekeeper, peered upwards from the subterranean housekeeper’s room; and, lastly, my mother came from the drawing-room. The cause of the crisis was explained by me through sobs. “She says” … sob, sob, yell … “that she’s a fairy” … sob, sob … “and that she’ll turn me into a frog” … sob, sob … “when I marry Chérie…” All attempts to calm me were in vain. Elizabeth was then appealed to, and the whole house in chorus said to her, “Say you’re not a fairy.” But Elizabeth became marble-constant. She said, “How can I say I’m not a fairy when I am one?” A statement which I felt to be all too true and well founded. More sobs and yells. Universal indignation against Elizabeth. My paroxysm was merely increased by all the efforts everyone made to soothe me. Elizabeth was cajoled, persuaded, argued with, bribed, threatened, exhorted, blamed, anathematised, entreated, appealed to, implored, but all in vain. She would not budge from her position, which was that she was a fairy.
The drama proceeded. Nothing stopped the stream of convulsive sobs, the flood of anguish—not all Chérie’s own assurances that the wedding would be allowed to take place.
Elizabeth was taken downstairs to be reasoned with, and after an hour and a half’s argument, and not before she had been first heavily bribed with promises and then sent to bed, she finally consented to compromise. She said, as a final concession, “I’ll say I’m not a fairy, but I am.” When this concession was wrung from her the whole relieved household rushed up to tell me the good news that Elizabeth had said she was not a fairy. The moment I heard the news my tears ceased, and perfect serenity was restored. But although Elizabeth capitulated, Margaret was firmer, and she continued to mutter (like Galileo) for the rest of the afternoon, “But I am a fairy all the same.”
Margaret was the exciting element in the schoolroom. She was often naughty, and I remember her looking through the schoolroom window at Coombe, while I was doing lessons with Chérie, and making faces. Chérie said to her one day: “Vous feriez rougir un régiment.” Elizabeth was pleasantly frivolous, and Susan was motherly and sensible, and supposed to be the image of her father, but Margaret was dramatic and imaginative, and invincibly obstinate.
She knew that for Chérie’s sake I didn’t like admitting that the English had ever defeated the French in battle, so every now and then she would roll out lists of battles fought by the English against the French and won, beginning with Creçy, Poitiers, getting to Agincourt with a crescendo, and ending up in a tremendous climax with Waterloo. To which I used to retort with a battle called Bouvines, won by Philippe Auguste, in some most obscure period over one of the Plantagenet kings, and with Fontenoy. I felt them both to be poor retorts.
Another invention of Margaret’s was a mysterious Princess called Louiseaunt, who often came to see her, but as it happened always when we were out. If we suddenly came into the room, Margaret would say, “What a pity! Louiseaunt has just been here. She’ll be so sorry to have missed you.” And try as we would, we always just missed Louiseaunt.
If we went out without Margaret, Louiseaunt was sure to come that day. We constantly just arrived as Louiseaunt had left, and the inability ever to hit off Louiseaunt’s precise visiting hours was a lasting exasperation.
Another powerful weapon of Margaret’s was recitation. She used to recite in English and in French, and in both languages the effect on me was a purge of pity and terror. I minded most “Lord Ullin’s Daughter,” declaimed with melodramatic gesture, and nearly as much a passage from Hernani, beginning—
“Monts d’Aragon! Galice! Estramadoure!