My brother and I took our morning walks in Dorset Square. In the early sixties Dorset Square was a vast jungle. Speaking from memory, it contained well-accredited lions and bears in its fastnesses. I saw Dorset Square the other day. It has sadly
shrunk. Those giant shrubs that towered over your head, hiding you securely from a distracted nurse, are no longer there. Regent’s Park was my other playground or, rather, that part of it opposite Sussex Terrace called “The Enclosure,” to which we had a right of entrance and a key. I do not know that it is a matter of importance now, but it was of the essence of happiness in those days that our good nurse ex abundanti cautela carried the key of “The Enclosure” in one hand, and my brother and I contested for her other hand, as a prize of great worth. Regent’s Park retains more of its size than Dorset Square, but it is not the illimitable veldt that it was. “The Enclosure” was snobbish, and its snobbery has been very properly curtailed. I well remember how we envied the nurseless urchins in their freedom of the real park across the water. It was on that treacherous lake some forty people were drowned in a terrible ice accident. I remember being hurried out of “The Enclosure” past the tent into which they were carrying the drowned. For many months afterwards there was the draining, levelling, and then the refilling of the lake. All this work I superintended from the banks, and at last watched the water come bubbling up from a huge pipe into the new-made lake with as deep a satisfaction as the chief engineer himself.
But in all these childhood’s scenes I do not recall that my father had any part. He was, of course, at this time a very hard-worked man, but Sunday morning he always devoted to his children. I can
picture his solid, kindly face and see his commanding figure wrapped in a dressing-gown of many colours—an old friend—as he sat at the end of the breakfast-table when we were brought down from the nursery. The only other member of the party was Tiger, a favourite tabby cat of whom my father was very proud. He had a great love of cats, and at one time possessed three, which he named Hic, Hæc, and Hoc. The appositeness of the names came to me with the Latin grammar and years of discretion. Two journals were his Sabbath reading—The Spectator and Athenæum, but he laid down his paper when we arrived, and took that real interest in our affairs which is the only key to children’s hearts. One great task was the skilful arrangement of all the animals of Noah’s Ark on the breakfast-table, which was rewarded with buttered toast. In a spirit of fairness Tiger was requested to walk among the animals. This if he did without mishap earned him the guerdon of cream. Then there was a careful examination on our weekly studies of the pages of Punch, which my father held rightly to be the earliest nursery text-book of history and sociology for the English child. This was followed by dramatic recitals of Mr. Southey’s “Three Bears” and some of Jane and Ann Taylor’s original poems, and other childhood’s sagas. And then when the nurse’s fateful knock was heard at the door to take the young gentlemen for a walk, off went my father’s huge dressing-gown, two wildly excited urchins sprang into the limitless depths of the arm-chair and
were covered up by the garment, and my father with dramatic breathlessness shouted “Come in!” and was “discovered”—to use a phrase of the theatre—calmly reading the paper at the table. The same dialogue was always maintained. The nurse inquired where the children were; the father expressed his astonishment at their disappearance; Tiger was asked if he had seen them, and remained silent. Then an elaborate search with hopeless ejaculations of the searchers was received with ill-concealed shrieks of amusement by the hiders. At last they are discovered, and the curtain falls on the most glorious hour in the whole week. For just as men and women love the old plays and the old ideas of drama, so children will have the same game of hide-and-seek or what not, and play it in the same way with the same absurd ritual religiously carried out, and he alone is worthy of fatherhood who can take an honourable part in such affairs with real solemnity and enthusiasm.
But these baby days departed, and the Sunday mornings had to be passed in Christ Church, Marylebone, surely the most unsociable church I have ever entered. I used to shudder for fear that after all heaven might turn out to be something like Christ Church, Marylebone. It still haunts me in dyspeptic dreams. It was a huge classical building, as cheerful as a family vault, with one painting over the altar—how many hours have I spent gazing at it—and no other memorable decoration. The congregation were penned apart in high boxes. Our box had tall red hassocks. I used to be allowed to stand on
one of these, until I fell off it into the bottom of the pen audibly and demonstratively. After that I was consigned to the floor, from which you could not see even bonnets, and from this limbo I only emerged by gradual growth. The preacher wore a black gown. My earliest meeting with him must, I think, have been at the font. I remember his grave tones, clear voice and dignified presence. I know now he must have preached excellent sermons, for he was the Rev. Llewelyn Davies. But in those days my brother and I fully believed he was the anonymous “righteous man” in the Psalms whose doings and sayings are so carefully chronicled.
From Regent’s Park we moved away to Kensington, and thence to Holland Park. Here it was that in the seventies, during the last few years of my father’s life, I heard in snatches from himself and his older friends something of the story of his career. I was then at King’s College School, which at that time was situated below Somerset House, and as I travelled up and down in the Underground—often with my father—and did my home-lessons in his library and dined with him nearly every night, and often went to the play with him of an evening, I had the good fortune to see more of him than I should have done had I been away at school.
He must have had a keen struggle in his early days to reach the position he did at the Bar. Born in London in 1816, he was only sixteen years old when the sudden death of his father made it necessary for him to earn his own living. He was then
being educated at the Philological School, an old foundation in Marylebone, but he left school at once and went into a merchant’s office. Edwin Abbott, the head-master of the Philological School, continued his firm friend, and years afterwards his daughter Elizabeth married my father, who was then a Serjeant. But I do not propose to write of my mother in these pages, since I could not do justice to the grace of her memory, and the dim vision of it is my own affair.