Autobiography Page 6

  From 1907 until my coming out in 1911 were years of galloping expansion and happiness. Puppy-fat was being dropped by hard effort of running and banting, urged on by vanity. I must learn Greek to be worthy of Oxford. I strode along well enough until I sought and found a teacher who killed my ambitions by bewildering me. I had no experience of teachers and they (the Greek one and a music one) tore my nerves to shreds. I had at one period been taken to Miss Wolff’s classes for young ladies, but my autocratic spoiltness made so many provisos—no German, no mathematics, no essays particularly—that fetching and carrying me became impossible and undermined the morale of the class.

  We had our first motor-car about now, a blue-green Renault limousine with a peacock crest on the door. The Trees had been pioneers with Panhards, into which one climbed from the back under the hood and sat on the door’s strapontin which made the third back seat. A wicker umbrella-holder was attached to the outside of the car, which gleamed with brass. We were goggled, dust-coated and hatted with peaked motor-caps, attached with a six-inch safety-pin. There was a fearful smell and dense clouds of dust, causing the horses to shy and the adventurers to be jeered and scoffed at. The cars always broke down, but by 1907 they had become adult and except for occasional breakdowns we travelled in style all over Derbyshire. This widened the pony-cart’s periphery. My mother had been enterprising and in infant days we had explored new roads, churches, manors, farms and curiosity shops. We drove in turn. We covered a lot of ground, returning after dark behind the steaming pony, everyone but delicate me getting out of the tub when the hill was steep. The Renault now took us to Midland towns to look for Haddon’s lost furniture in the old antique shops of Sheffield, Manchester and Derby. (When the family built the new Belvoir they abandoned Haddon Hall, and stacked its furniture in an unguarded barn, from which it was gradually stolen. From then until my father’s death the sad shell was untenanted save for hordes of tourists. My brother John realised his life’s ambition when, for his wife and five children, Haddon again became a roof-tree, invisibly modernised and furnished with purest taste.)

  Now at last we had a telephone, and a neighbour to telephone to. He was called Mr Green (“Mr Frank” to us). He was our fairy godfather, and we, during those years at The Woodhouse, were his chief interest in life. He gave my sisters hunters. To me he gave antiques, Battersea snuffboxes and paste brooches. He sported a large Daimler and would take us to run with his beagles at Beresford Dale. I watched from a hilltop. He was a big-fortuned eccentric who taught us about furniture and architecture and ornament. He owned the Traveller’s House in York, decorated as a house of its period. He gave me a narrow four-poster bed for my new room at Belvoir, which was to be painted black. The bed was upholstered in red damask. An alcove was scooped out of the wall for my jug and basin and painted by me with stylised sea-waves. A stone shell, once a holy-water stoup, held the soap. The black walls were hung with swags of everlasting flowers à la Crivelli. The table and chair were Savonarola-esque and the window, granite fireplace and coalbox solid Victorian. There were coloured reproductions of Madonnas in gold Italian frames and the candlesticks from Florence, regilded and burnished as planned. I thought it beyond compare, but greatly feared criticism. My mother never damped our taste—she who had so influenced it. An unexpected addition to this strange room was a removable punch-ball attached to two hooks in the ceiling and floor. This I would batter until I weakened from exhaustion, dressed in a jockey’s rubber jacket and light boxing-gloves.

  Mr Frank took us to cathedrals and old houses, and we thought he was as sound as a bell until one day he admitted to veering towards Victorian taste. We stopped our ears. We had not yet come to Regency, though Belvoir was converting us to its elegance. What a dear man he was! We lost sight of him forever in the first war when everything broke up, although he died but two years ago at an immense age.

  The Woodhouse months became our favourite in the year. The express trains to the North would be stopped especially for us at Rowsley station. We tumbled out, laden with the paraphernalia of art and sport, into two or three flies and a pony cart: the tumbling had to be at full speed as the engine was screaming to be off. This could not happen today, but we thought it quite as natural a privilege as when we went to Belvoir the Flying Scotsman, if not scheduled to stop, also threw us out at Grantham to oblige. The guns, rods, cameras, easels, books and opera-scores were trotted through the village where the children, pouring en masse out of school, would cheer and wave us home as though from a long and precarious absence. Shooting parties and picnics on the moors, fishing for trout with worms on the Lathkill river, photographing, printing, squeegeeing, casting our own hands and feet and those of visitors in plaster of Paris, with always the danger of a boot or glove of solid plaster hanging like a prisoner’s ball and chain, that had to be chiselled off. There too we had our first gramophone. Another of my idols, Melba, to whom I must have declared my love, gave me a gramophone and all her records. It had a mahogany megaphone three feet across and we had the same concert nightly for six weeks, unless it was a fine warm night. Only then would the young ones leave Melba and Caruso and Kubelik and Kreisler and wander up to the Great Elm swing. Girls were swung high by the boys and we would sit on moonlit grass reciting Keats’s odes and sonnets in turn, and revel rustically on the way home. We would go to empty Haddon Hall most afternoons for water-colour sketching and gardening and, best of all, at full moon for an after-dinner drive in brother John’s open screenless racing-car packed with young men and girls—fears and excitements, cries and claspings. My mother was strongly against these expeditions, perhaps more from fear of cold and the fast car than from disapproval of escapade, but my brother invariably had his way. There too was my first election at Bakewell, a Derbyshire constituency. It sounded surprisingly bloodthirsty. I wrote:

  “Booh! Suffragette!” is the taunt. They say “Why should you have such pretty furs?” and the Liberals’ refrain is:

  Up with your spears,

  Into the Peers.

  Up with your swords,

  Into the Lords.

  I must have been wonderfully happy at fifteen or sixteen. I did not know it, having no yardstick, but the proof was there. I wanted time to stop. What could be better, even with the shades and inner glooms thrown in? I marvelled that I could run downstairs as unconscious of doom as a spring lamb, and climb up half an hour later slow with care and apprehensions of all kinds. I felt unfitted to be independent, when I would be without help, when I would have no pilots, no moorings, no one to ask, no one to comfort me. My ugliness weighed upon me, and indeed with reason—a cauliflower (“a bled pig,” said Margot Asquith), not tall enough for a goddess, so I must hang on a trapeze—but I could not, having weak muscles. I was dressed curiously unbecomingly by my mother (who recognised that I had outgrown Vandyck) in Rumanian peasant shirts and ill-fitting skirts hung on a pinched-in waist, and black stockings of course. As to my hair, I hate to say how dreadful it was.

  There was a craze in our family for the fabulously beautiful Cavalieri, the luscious Italian who was to become a successful opera singer. Marjorie bought all her pictures. There being then no stage postcards, one would cut out one’s favourites from magazines or buy in the Royal Arcade glossy photographs mounted on cards of stage celebrities and even of society beauties. Cavalieri became Marjorie’s mirror of fashion. We only saw her once in the flesh (I must have been fifteen) when my mother asked her to a ball and was criticised for exposing her daughters to this Babylonian beauty. Cavalieri’s raven hair was parted in the middle and waved symmetrically round her face, low as the lobes of her pearled ears, to be gathered in a shining knot behind. She wore a riband like a wreath (would it be a snood?) to keep this neatness intact. So all three of us wore ribands round our hair. They are to be seen in our three drawings by Sargent. But at sixteen my shortish ashen hair was still by convention hanging down my back, so though from the front this band only looked unnecessary, from the side and the back it looked absurd.
To make things worse I back-combed my hair to thicken it. I could not rely on my adolescent complexion and would steal Marjorie’s rouge, which she kept from scrutiny in a hidden dressing-case. My mother pointing her finger to her cheek once said in a whisper, “Do you think Marjorie…?” She could not use the word “rouges.” Lady Helen Vincent, the most beautiful of her generation, we believed to have had her mouth tattooed by her mother’s orders and to have slept in stays since childhood.

  My mother was disappointed only in my hair. She had wisely wanted to keep it Joan of Arc length, but I had insisted that it must grow into long golden plaits to the knee like Isolde or Guinevere. I meant to thread them with pearls for best. It had not grown, in spite of endless hair-brushings and massage with Harlene.

  All things considered, my position at that time of a grown-up child was a favoured one. I did not want to grow up. Things could only worsen, my melancholy voices told me. I could lie down or go to bed with The Egoist or talk to the servants until I appeared after dinner to accompany my sister’s songs and dance to Strauss waltzes pedalled out on the pianola in the ballroom at Belvoir. I was not very proficient but with practice and enthusiasm somehow got away with it. She sang German Lieder, Fauré, Reynaldo Hahn, César Franck, Debussy, Puccini and Mozart. I even managed the Liebestod. I loved and feared the performance. Dread led me to give myself a voluntary wound in my thumb when the great teacher and composer Paolo Tosti came to stay.

  I could take as much or as little of the young men’s company as I wanted. I didn’t want much alone with them. I needed support. At bedtime we used to have hair-brushing beside the fire in Marjorie’s drawing-room-sized bedroom. The favoured men were allowed to join the throng. This was criticised a lot by staider friends of my mother’s, but she liked the look of it. If one allowed the eligible ones to join, one must perforce admit the riff-raff, and the riff-raff were mine. My mother must have been a little alarmed at my precocity, for in 1908 I wrote to a swain, as usual extravagantly:

  I cried all last night without a break. It’s too depressing things coming to an end—such a summer too of my happy-go-lucky life, which the authorities say must be stopped. The new régime is schoolroom tea, no Oxford friends—instead music and French from snobbish masters and perhaps even solitary confinement at Belvoir.

  This régime was not stillborn but died very young. Life at Belvoir was unrecognisably changed since childhood days. It was warm and one could wash and live like other people and eat less and dance and sing. Still my father kept some tenue—morning prayers in the chapel, feudal Christmases with the waits and bellringers, bells and gongs to warn and announce meals, crowds of servants, the silver tray of “sprays” and button-holes carried round for dressing guests to choose from, jardinières of flowers, a different decoration nightly for the dinner table of gold or silver ornaments trimmed with orchids and cyclamen. There was the Marine service, all crabs and lobsters with Neptune surmounting the shells and tridents (it was made to commemorate our Westminster Abbey hero, Lord Robert Manners, who in the eighteenth century died fighting the French in the West Indies), and there was the Charles II oriental silver, and the Charles II gold, and the Charles I rose-bowl, filled with floating camellias, and for great occasions the Cellini ewer and basin. We knew all their styles and dates from showing them off and we have forgotten them all now. The ladies dressed for tea in trailing chiffon and lace, and changed again for dinner into something less limp, and all the men wore white ties and drank sherry, then champagne (pink, called œil-de-perdrix) and then port and then brandy. In the daytime the men wore stiff collars except for shooting. My father did not like the relaxation of this rule. There would be about twelve people staying for a shooting party, all with maids and valets and large “dress baskets.” So it made a long table-load, with two parents, one son, three daughters, Uncle Charlie Lindsay and Ruby, and probably Mr Knox the chaplain—about twenty-four or so.

  The guests would arrive on Monday and my father would expect them, so that would be all right, but when they left on Friday, and a new dozen arrived, not expected by my father and generally of a much younger generation, he would greet them ashen in the face with: “What train are you taking on Monday?” It was the shock: once recovered he was happy with them all and sad to see them go. We would always be at the shooting-lunches on moors or in fields or the farmer’s parlour, eating mutton pies or Irish stew and jam puffs and Stilton cheese, with sips of cherry brandy or Grand Marnier to keep the cold out, while the head keeper brought in the list of the bag and was rewarded with half a tumbler of neat whisky. I would be at dinner according to requirement for numbers or sexes, and I would go tearing round asking brother and sisters for topics of conversation, always in a panic of drying up.

  On Sunday afternoons it was the practice to take walks through the woods and fields à deux. I have a typical letter received of a morning:

  Dearest Diana, please please come for a walk with me this afternoon—for choice a long magnificent one stretching from luncheon to tea, but if you have guest-conscience then a hole-and-corner one tucked in here or there, but anyway a WALK. P.

  These walks petrified me. If we could only form a group, so that I need not have the sole responsibility and fear of being discovered to be stupid and dull. What shall I talk about? This particular fear seemed to continue down dumb vistas to my life’s end. What shall I say? Today? At dinner? When I’m proposed to? When alone with my future husband? Why was I so inadequate in response and imagination? I’ve never quite lost it. The dearer the friend the greater the fear of their disillusionment and consequent loss.

  Parties caused these frets, but half the time it was family life with only two or three staying with us. Then there was a lot of music and duets and puzzling out opera scores and Mr Knox playing the fiddle badly. There was tennis and letter-writing and reading aloud, and antique-buying in Nottingham and Leicester, and hunting shop and hunting neighbours, whom I am ashamed to say I despised. But we were happier at Rowsley in the summer. It was more romantic, more of a Sans Souci, and the smart visitors were so gloriously incongruous.

  But the place of all others for romance and gathering rosebuds and making hay and jumping over the moon was Sutton Courtenay. This lovely sixteenth-century manor house belonged to my Uncle Harry Lindsay and Aunt Norah. There once a year I was allowed to go before I came out. The garden was famous for its imagination and fertility. Flowers literally overflowed everything and drifted off into a wilderness. The house was furnished impeccably “of the date” and lit by acetylene gas that simulated candles to perfection. We ate under a loggia from great bowls of chicken in rice and kedgeree and mushrooms and raspberries and Devonshire cream and gooseberry fool and figs—all in abundance. I would arrive carrying a letter from my mother entrusting me to Aunt Norah’s great care—not too late to bed and above all not to be alone with young men. The chief object of the visit, as I knew and as Aunt Norah knew, was to drift in a boat all day long with one of the Oxford heroes through the reeds and inlets of the Thames which flowed by the garden—a dinghy full of poetry books and sweets and parasols and bathing-dresses—and better still (or worse!) in the moonlight with the best loved. So the letter was ignored by my aunt, who was younger much than my mother and did not mind anyway if I came to no good. I loved her very dearly and miss her today. She dressed mostly in tinsel and leopard-skins and baroque pearls and emeralds, and her exquisite hands could play the piano with skill and feeling. She had what was called Gepäck—favourite poems and pieces cut shamelessly out of books and stuck into another, and she taught me to appreciate a lot that was new, as I was apt to stick in my own mud. Sutton was quite near to Oxford (my Mecca), so these yearly visits were schemed over and anticipated with ecstasy by me and by the undergraduates I so loved. Uncle Harry had bathing-dresses for twenty of them, and four dozen tennis-balls where other players used six. Never was there such generosity, for the Lindsays had no money and for this reason Sutton did not survive. The moment came when there was not enoug
h money to control the flowers, which rose and submerged the house.

  I wanted first to be loved, and next I wanted to be clever. By clever I meant something dreadfully superficial, I fear. Knowing that I had no education and therefore no power of learning or concentration, I had to make good with tags, like bright-coloured flags that would beckon and please. I wanted to assume learning though I had it not, so I listened with attention to music, went to museums and art galleries, and learnt reams of poetry word-perfectly. Meredith was in high repute in those Oxford days, so we all knew “Love in the Valley” by heart. I managed to recite “Modern Love,” which impressed the few if said in small quantities, all the odes of Keats (I stuck in “Hyperion”), hunks of Shakespeare (Richard II, Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet practically entire), the “Ode to Immortality,” “Annabel Lee,” “The Forsaken Merman,” lots of Browning, A Shropshire Lad and Scotch ballads. It was our fashion to set other men’s flowers in a great book of thick paper in monkish script. I still have mine with vellum back and Italian paper sides and art-strings to tie it. It is rather touching—so much time and effort and love of the poems are there to see—and so is the failure of the little initial keyhole pictures of a “white owl sweeping” or a “bright star.” Some departures from the classic black-and-white lettering are more successful. “On a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose,” for instance, is written with white ink on a black-as-hell ground, and pages of Jehovah speaking to Job from the whirlwind have black letters on leaf-green.