Our Family Affairs, 1867-1896. E. F. Benson
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I forget, though I have forgotten so much of far vaster import since then, the discovery of an adder on the croquet lawn outside the nursery windows. The gardener attacked it with the shears that he had been using for clipping the edges of the grass: he made fine chopping gestures, and presently disappeared into the belt of wood with the adder slung on the blades. There is the vignette: something terribly vivid but girt about with mist. I have no other knowledge of the gardener but that he killed an adder with his shears and went into the belt of wood with the corpse dangling thereon.
There was an evening when, having had my bath in the nursery I escaped from the hands of my nurse, slippery with soapy water, and looked out of the nursery window. Then a miracle burst upon my astounded eyes, for, though it was bedtime my mother was in the act of putting her foot on her own croquet ball, and with a smart stroke sending the adversary into the limbo of a flower-bed. That was allowed by the rule of 1870 or thereabouts, and it gave me the impression of consummate skill and energy. My mother, you must understand, stood quite still with her own ball in chancery below her foot. The concussion of her violent mallet sent the adversary into a flower-bed, and the calceolarias nodded. … Then Beth, my nurse, caught me, and rubbed me dry, and I went to bed with the delicious sense of my mother’s magnificence, and the marvel of people still playing croquet in daylight when I had to go to bed. I think that this occasion was the first on which I recognised my mother as having a personality of her own. The next confused me again, for on some birthday of one of us, or at Christmas, Beth told me that Abracadabra was coming, and that I mustn’t be frightened. I was then taken to see my mother, who was lying down in her bedroom, and said that she was very sleepy, and I returned to the nursery. Shortly afterwards there was a general hubbub in the house, and on being taken downstairs from the nursery into the hall, I saw a huge bedizened fairy standing in front of the fireplace. She blew a piercing trumpet at intervals, and made dance-steps to the right and left. She had a wonderful hat covered with lilies, and a dress covered with jewels, and in front of her was a thing that might have been mistaken for the clothes-basket out of which Beth took clean shirts and socks, but it could not possibly have been that, because it gleamed with pure gold. A sheet lay on the top of it, and Abracadabra blew her trumpet, and Beth, holding me close, said, “Eh, dear, don’t be frightened; it’s all right!”
Obviously it was all right; for to put an end to all tearful tendencies, Abracadabra, with a magnificent gesture, withdrew the sheet, and hastily presented me with a clockwork train, just what I had always wanted. She turned a key in the engine, and the engine then capsized with loud buzzings, but when Abracadabra put it on its wheels again, it proceeded to draw three tin carriages after it. And it was mine, the very thing I had wanted, and Abracadabra smiled as she gave it me, and I thought that her face was rather like Mamma’s. But the likeness must have been purely accidental, because Mamma was in her bedroom feeling sleepy. And when Abracadabra went through the door into the kitchen passage blowing loudly on her trumpet, and when, after a few excursions of the clockwork train, I was allowed to go up to her room again, and found her still sleepy, it might be indeed considered proved that she was not Abracadabra. Besides, when I told her about Abracadabra’s visit, she was very much vexed that she had missed her, and asked whether Abracadabra had not left any present for her, which she had not. That is the first clear and definite memory I have of Abracadabra, and also, in a way, it is the last, for when next that amiable fairy visited us, I knew, alas, that she was no fairy at all, but my mother, dressed in the amazing garb of fairyland. But though that particular brand of fairyland was finished for me, those subsequent occasions were girt with grandeur, for I, concealing my own superior knowledge, must pretend that this was genuine Abracadabra, thus indulging and buttressing the belief of my youngest brother Hugh, who still, innocent thing, had no grown-up doubts on the subject. … I found those selfsame garments only lately in a trunk stowed away in an attic at the last home my mother lived in; a skirt covered with sprays of artificial flowers, a bodice and stomacher set with gems of pure glass, a hat of white satin embowered in flowers, a pair of wings, gauze and gold, and a pair of high-heeled shoes covered with gilt paper. They were moth-eaten and mouldy, and it was scarcely possible for the most sentimental pilgrim to preserve them. Besides I had the memory of the day when the authentic fairy appeared in them, and that memory was sweeter than the condition, forty-five years later, of the robes themselves. My mother had kept them, I make no doubt, when her own days of Abracadabra were over by reason of our emergence from childhood, in the hope that one day a daughter or daughter-in-law would assume them again for the joy and mystification of grandchildren, but that day never came. So the robes of fairyland stowed away in their trunk were forgotten, until that day at Tremans when I found them, as I turned out the treasures and the rubbish of the vanished years before the house passed into other hands. It was a dark autumn day, and the rain beat softly on the roof, but verily, when I opened the trunk and found them there, the sunlight of the dawn of life shot level and delicious rays from the far horizon, and cast a rainbow over the weeping sky.
People in those very early days, with the exception of Beth, were more part of the general landscape of life than human beings, similar in kind to myself, with an individuality of their own. They were not loved or feared: they were but a part of the general environment, like the walls of the nursery, or trees or dinner or beds. But, as by some superior swiftness of evolution, Beth ceased to be landscape, and became a human being, wholly to be adored and generally to be obeyed, sooner than any of the family. She was well over fifty when first I remember her, and had by now almost completed the nursing of a second generation, for she had been nursery-maid with Mrs. Sidgwick, my mother’s mother, when her family came into the world, and had gone to my mother when at the mature age of nineteen the first of her six children was born. Thereafter Beth remained with my mother until the end of her long and utterly beautiful life of love and service. Very soon after she came to my grandmother, at the age of fifteen, she gave notice because she wanted to go back from Rugby to her native Yorkshire, and did not settle into more southerly ways. But my grandmother encouraged her to think that she soon would do so, and so Beth, instead of leaving, stopped on till the age of ninety-three, in an unbroken devotion to us of seventy-eight years. That devotion was returned: we were all her children, and the darlingest of all to Beth’s big heart was Hugh.
Beth then, to my sense, emerged first of all into the
MY MOTHER, AET. 20 [Page 19
ranks of human beings, servant and friend and to a very considerable extent mistress. But she gave us no weak and sentimental devotion, and though she never inspired the smallest degree of fear, her rare displeasure caused an awful feeling of loneliness and desolation. If we had done wrong, she demanded sorrow before her forgiveness was granted, and if to her wise mind the sorrow was not sufficiently sincere, she was quite capable of saying, when we said we were sorry in too superficial a manner, “I don’t want your sorrer,” and the day grew black, until she accepted it and beamed forgiveness. That granted, there was never any nagging, and next minute she would be running races with us again until panting and bright-eyed she would stop and say, “Eh, dear, I can’t run any more: I’ve got a bone in my leg.”
She mingles in almost every memory that I have of those days, a loved and protecting presence. She it was who lifted me up to look out of the nursery window when a sham fight was going on, perhaps at Aldershot. There were reports of guns to be heard and, so I fancy, flashes and wreaths of smoke, and like George III I got it firmly embedded in my mind that this was the battle of Waterloo that I had witnessed. The connection I think lay through the fact of this place being Wellington. She it was who led me through a delicious sandy piece of waste ground near the house called the Wilderness, and allowed me to pick and eat a blackberry from a bramble that grew by a rubbish heap on which was a broken plate. Never have I seen such a blackberry. I can still hardly believe it was not of the size of an apricot, for I know it entirely filled my mouth and the juice spurted therefrom as out of a wine-vat. She too consoled me for the loss of two front teeth which came out into a piece of butter-scotch that she had given me. She removed the teeth and I proceeded with the toffee. She too allowed me to take out of the Noah’s ark with which we played on Sundays a brown dog remotely resembling a setter, two of whose legs had been broken.