CHAPTER I
CHILDHOOD
Why was I born, ye Fates, and why,
Being born, did I not die?
James Philpot: The Unanswered Question.
I was born in 1915, a great anniversary, but one little kept. Little kept, because at the time of its occurrence England and France, the two protagonists of Waterloo, were leagued in what then seemed a holy alliance, and Germany, whose tardy aid settled the fortunes of that earlier conflict, could find no place, a hundred years later, in the sympathies of either combatant. My sex, it will be seen, belied the omens of my nativity. My father, at that time a commoner, was a Winterhead, of a good old Somerset family, whose ramifications it were poor modesty in an autobiographer to trace out for her own ennoblement. My mother, whose maiden name was Linthorpe, was the daughter of a Westmorland squire of comfortable means but little prominence. At the time of their marriage my father’s business position was so sound (he was a partner in several rubber companies) that no great pains were taken about the drawing up of the settlement; and, by a series of family accidents which I do not propose to set out here, the whole of my mother’s very considerable prospects passed into other hands. Such a deprivation caused, at the time, little foreboding to a man who had an ample income from stocks, quite apart from the position which he enjoyed as squire of Barstoke, a dream-like village that rests, half-hidden among mist-wreathed poplars, in one of the fairest valleys of Somerset.
It would have been my good fortune to find solace in the companionship of two brothers younger than myself, had not a mysterious destiny—which of us can read his life’s record without confusion, when he considers the long tale of infants who never reach maturity?—carried off both in the age of their innocence to a world where innocence has its value. An only child—for such I was, in effect—keeps fewer memories, I suppose, of its very earliest years than one which from the first takes its place among a series. The shadowy forms that people those years for me are the forms of domestic servants, comfort-bringing cooks and awe-inspiring butlers, whose short and simple annals there is no need to record in this book. My nurse, a woman of strong character and decided views, left me little permanent legacy of her care except that which most nurses leave to most English children—a horror of spiders and of the Pope. My mother was known to me as a lady who lived in a comfortable smell of tweeds on a hard, scratchy chair, in front of a table full of shiny things which I was forbidden to touch (not without reason, I found, for they were hot when touched), and appeared to surround herself with a group of similarly dressed ladies whom it was my favourite parlour trick to distinguish, in spite of superficial resemblances, from her. My father was two round legs, with provocative little tags hanging out of either stocking, who must be approached cautiously if it were soon after a meal, because the approach was likely to result in a sudden, breathless elevation to the level of the mantelpiece—the level, but not the proximity, as two Dresden shepherdesses, still unbroken before me as I write, can testify.
My earliest at all datable reminiscence, and that is early enough in all conscience, is of the air-raid over London that took place on Whit-Sunday in 1917. We were, I have been told since, staying in London at the time, and I was hastily roused from sleep and carried into the cellars; for, although the danger from such raids in the Five Years’ War was, judged by the standards of modern warfare, almost negligible, it was a novelty and as such a cause of panic. My only reason for remembering the incident is that, in her hurry to get me downstairs, my nurse ran a pin into me; which immediate sensation meant far more to me at the time than any nocturnal perils overhead. But that refers, of course, to my conscious memory: according to what the doctors used to tell me in the days when mind-curing was fashionable, the air-raid must have left a deep and permanent mark on my subconsciousness. I have been assured that I have to attribute to this cause my dislike of being in the dark (except when I am in bed), my occasional nervousness about loud, sudden noises, my nervousness about other people, especially children, carrying firearms, my preference for having the door shut when I am asleep, my preference for having the window open on the same occasions, my want of ear for music, my inability to face learning the German language, my distaste for sausages, my fondness for lying in bed after I am called, my fear of cellars (which I thought was due to rats), my refusal to wear a maroon dress, my irritability when people whistle much in my hearing, my antipathy to the Tube when it is crowded, and Heaven knows what other sinister characteristics. Really, if this unremembered event made such a portentous difference in my life, so that my character was practically fixed from the moment of its occurrence (as these gentlemen seemed to imply), I am not sure that I ought not to end off my reminiscences here! Whatever follows will surely seem trivial by comparison.
It was while I was still too young to be taking any intelligent interest in our family affairs that my father received his peerage. At a moment when the George Government was in a difficult position owing to the unfriendly attitude of certain of its Liberal critics, my father, who was before all else a patriot, rendered services to the chief powers of the nation which they were not slow to reward with a title. It is pleasant to think that we thus belong to the old nobility, before peerages were actually sold to the highest bidder—it was not until 1928, it will be remembered, that this necessary but regrettable innovation was introduced. My father would not take the title of Lord Barstoke, because our villagers at home pronounced the name in a way that would have made him hardly distinguishable from Lord Bostock; it was characteristic of his easy way of doing things that he simply took down a Bradshaw, ran his finger at random down the index of names, and became Lord Blisworth for the rest of his life.
My girlhood was mostly spent in the country. My father, after his long days and often nights of work at the Board of Rubber Control, felt himself entitled to settle down when the war was over, and direct his financial schemes from a distance. A fatal resolution, could he but have foreseen its consequences! His preference was for the life of the country; he hated, he said, to be jostled by a crowd of strangers, and if the worst came to the worst, in a country place you could always go round with the professional. Hills were dear to him, and woods, and streams (especially the one you crossed in approaching the fifth green), and the little world of Barstoke was all he asked for and all he cared to know.
Barstoke, Barstoke in the ’teens of the century, how shall I ever describe you? How communicate your atmosphere to the generation that will soon have the pride of dating its letters with three noughts? The stone-walled court by which you approached the front door, the mellow façade of plaster, dating from the Fourth William, the terraces, the beds with their quaint, tiled borders, the open lawn on which in those days one used to play tennis, the box-hedges, cut as you never see them cut now, the kitchen garden, with its warm brick walls, wasp-haunted, yet dangling prizes to the adventurous. The wide hall, panelled all through in pitch-pine, surrounded with the trophies of the chase and the spoils of our ancestors; “heads” of stags shot (if you please) on British soil; salmon found in Scottish lochs; arquebuses, flintlock muskets, Mills bombs, and every form of obsolete artillery. The dining-room, with its great maple-wood sideboard, that had facings of beaten copper; all the walls hung with priceless old photogravures from pictures by Landseer and Dicksee (I have seen £150 offered for a pair of these lately at Frosting’s). The “drawing-room,” as it was still called, with its gold-backed velvet chairs, its satin-textured wall-paper, its marble mantelpiece and encaustic-tiled fireplace; where, on a winter evening, my father would sit down with his friends to “bridge” or “auction,” or, as a treat for myself, the then popular gramophone would elicit its curious, drawling imitation of the airs of the day. And over all this, when the curtains were drawn at evening, not the vulgar glare of our modern electrics, but the old acetylene gas that was even then going out of fashion, but used to shed, unless I deceive myself, a more equable and a more desirable radiance.