The Puppet Show of Memory. Baring Maurice
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you are older.” An hour later I went up to her room and said: “I am older now. Can I have the ring?” She gave it me. Nobody ever sat at a table so bolt upright as she did, and she lived to be ninety-nine. She came back once to Membland after my sisters were married.
Perhaps the greatest excitement of all our Membland life was when the whole of the Harbord family, our cousins, used to arrive for Christmas. Our excitement knew no bounds when we knew they were coming, and Chérie used to get so tired of hearing the Harbords quoted that I remember her one day in the schoolroom in London opening the window, taking the lamp to it and saying: “J’ouvre cette fenêtre pour éclairer la famille Harbord.”
On rainy days at Membland there were two rare treats: one was to play hide-and-seek all over the house; the other was to make toffee and perhaps a gingerbread cake in the still-room. The toffee was the ultra-sticky treacle kind, and the cake when finished and baked always had a wet hole in the middle of it. Hugo and I used to spend a great deal of time in Mr. Ellis’ carpenter’s shop. We had tool-boxes of our own, and we sometimes made Christmas presents for our father and mother; but our carpentry was a little too imaginative and rather faulty in execution.
Not far from Membland and about a mile from Pamflete there was a small grey Queen Anne house called “Mothecombe.” It nestled on the coast among orchards and quite close to the sandy beach of Mothecombe Bay, the only sandy beach on our part of the South Devon coast. This house belonged to the Mildmays, and we often met the Mildmay family when we went over there for picnics.
Aunt Georgie Mildmay was not only an expert photographer, but she was one of the first of those rare people who have had a real talent for photography and achieved beautiful and artistic results with it, both in portraits and landscapes.
Whenever Hugo and I used to go and see her in London at 46 Berkeley Square, where she lived, she always gave us a pound, and never a holiday passed without our visiting Aunt Georgie.
Mothecombe was often let or lent to friends in summer. One summer Lady de Grey took it, and she came over to luncheon at Membland, a vision of dazzling beauty, so that, as someone said, you saw green after looking at her. It was like looking at the sun. The house was often taken by a great friend of our family, Colonel Ellis, who used to spend the summer there with his family, and he frequently stayed at Membland with us. I used to look forward to going down to dinner when he was there, and listening to his conversation. He was the most perfect of talkers, because he knew what to say to people of all ages, besides having an unending flow of amusing things to tell, for he made everything he told amusing, and he would sometimes take the menu and draw me a picture illustrating the games and topics that interested us at the moment. We had a game at one time which was to give someone three people they liked equally, and to say those three people were on the top of a tower; one you could lead down gently by the hand, one you must kick down, and the third must be left to be picked by the crows.
We played this one evening, and the next day Colonel Ellis appeared with a charming pen-and-ink drawing of a Louis-Quinze Marquis leading a poudré lady gently by the hand. If he gave one a present it would be something quite unique—unlike what anyone else could think of; once it was, for me, a silver mug with a twisted handle and my name engraved on it in italics, “Maurice Baring’s Mug, 1885.” His second son, Gerald, was a little bit older than I was, and we were great friends. Gerald had a delightfully grown-up and blasé manner as a child, and one day, with the perfect manner of a man of the world, he said to me, talking of Queen Victoria, “The fact is, the woman’s raving mad.”
We used to call Colonel Ellis “the gay Colonel” to carefully distinguish him from Colonel Edgcumbe, whom we considered a more serious Colonel. The Mount Edgcumbes were neighbours, and lived just over the Cornish border at Mount Edgcumbe. Colonel Edgcumbe was Lord Mount Edgcumbe’s brother, and often stayed with us. He used to be mercilessly teased, especially by the girls of the Bulteel family. One year he was shooting with us and the Bulteels got hold of his cartridges and took out the shot, leaving a few good cartridges.
He was put at the hot corner. Rocketing pheasants in avalanches soared over his head, and he, of course, missed them nearly all, shooting but one or two. He explained for the rest of the day that it was a curious thing, and that something must be wrong, either with his eyes or with the climate. Some new way of tormenting was always found, and, although he was not the kind of man who naturally enjoys a practical joke, he bore it angelically.
His sister, Lady Ernestine, was rather touchy in the matter of Devonshire clotted cream. As Mount Edgcumbe was just over the border in Cornwall, and as clotted cream was made in Cornwall as well as in Devonshire, she resented its being called Devonshire cream and used to call it Cornish cream; but when she stayed with us, not wishing to concede the point and yet unwilling to hurt our feelings, she used to call it West-country cream.
Another delightful guest was Miss Pinkie Browne, who was Irish, gay, argumentative, and contradictious, with smiling eyes, her hair in a net, and an infectious laugh. As a girl she had broken innumerable hearts, but had always refused to marry, as she never could make up her mind. She was extremely musical, and used to sing English and French songs, accompanying herself, with an intoxicating lilt and a languishing expression. As Dr. Smyth says about Tosti’s singing, it was small art, but it was real art. And her voice must have had a rare quality, as she was about fifty when I heard her. Such singing is far more enjoyable than that of professional singers, and makes one think of Tosti’s saying: “Le chant est un truc.” She would make a commonplace song poignantly moving. She used to sing a song called “The Conscript’s Farewell”:
“You are going far away, far away, from poor Jeanette,
There’s no one left to love me now, and you will soon forget;”
of which the refrain was:
“Oh, if I were Queen of France,
Or still better Pope of Rome,
I would have no fighting men abroad,
No weeping maids at home.”
Membland was always full of visitors. There were visitors at Easter, visitors at Whitsuntide, in the autumn for the shooting, and a houseful at Christmas: an uncle, General Baring, who used to shoot with one arm because he had lost the other in the Crimea; my father’s cousin, Lord Ashburton, who was particular about his food, and who used to say: “That’s a very good dish, but it’s not veau à la bourgeoise”; Godfrey Webb, who always wrote a little poem in the visitors’ book when he went away; Lord Granville, who knew French so alarmingly well, and used to ask one the French for words like a big stone upright on the edge of a road and a ship tacking, till one longed to say, like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland: “What’s the French for fiddle de dee?”; Lord and Lady Lansdowne, Mr. and Mrs. Percy Wyndham—Mr. Wyndham used to take me out riding; he was deliciously inquisitive, so that if one was laughing at one side of the table he would come to one quietly afterwards and ask what the joke had been about; Harry Cust, radiant with youth and spirits and early success; Lady de Clifford and her two daughters (Katie and Maud Russell), she carrying an enormous silk bag with her work in it—she was a kind critic of our French plays; Lady Airlie, and her sister, Miss Maude Stanley, who started being a vegetarian in the house, and told me that Henry VIII. was a much misunderstood monarch; Madame Neruda, and once, long before she married him, Sir Charles Hallé. Sir Charles Hallé used to sit down at the pianoforte after dinner, and nothing could dislodge him. Variation followed variation, and repeat followed repeat of the stiffest and driest classical sonatas. And one night when this had been going on past midnight, my father, desperate with impatience and sleep, put out the electric light. I am not making an anachronism in talking of electric light, as it had just been put in the house, and was thought to be a most daring innovation.
We had a telegraph office in the house, which was worked by Mrs. Tudgay. It was a fascinating instrument, rather like a typewriter with two dials and little steel keys round one of them, and the alphabet was the real alphabet and not the Morse Code. It was convenient having this in the house, but one of the results was that