The Puppet Show of Memory. Baring Maurice
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constantly, gave me two tickets for a ballad concert at which she was playing. The policeman was told to take me into the artists’ room during the interval. D. was to take me, but for some reason she thought the concert was in the evening, and it turned out to be in the afternoon; so as a compensation my father sent us to an operetta called Falka, in which Miss Violet Cameron sang. I enjoyed it more than any concert. The next day Madame Neruda came to luncheon and heard all about the misadventure. “And did you enjoy your operetta?” she asked. “Yes,” I said, with enthusiasm. “Say, not as much as you would have enjoyed the ballad concert,” said my mother. But I didn’t feel so sure about that.
I used to do lessons with Mrs. Christie, and have music lessons from Mademoiselle Ida, and in the afternoon I often used to go out shopping in the carriage with my mother, or for a walk with D. But I will tell more about her later when I describe Membland.
The girls had a maid who looked after them called Rawlinson, and she and the nursery made up the rest of the inside world in London.
In the outside world the first person of importance I remember was Grandmamma, my mother’s mother, Lady Elizabeth Bulteel, who used to paint exquisite pictures for the children like the pictures on china, and play songs for us on the pianoforte. She often came to luncheon, and used to bring toys to be raffled for, and make us, at the end of luncheon, sing a song which ran:
“A pie sat on a pear tree,
And once so merrily hopped she,
And twice so merrily hopped she,
Three times so merrily hopped she,”
Each singer held a glass in his hand. When the song had got thus far, everyone drained their glass, and the person who finished first had to say the last line of the verse, which was:
“Ya-he, ya-ho, ya-ho.”
And the person who said it first, won.
Everything about Grandmamma was soft and exquisite: her touch on the piano and her delicate manipulation of the painting-brush. She lived in Green Street, a house I remember as the perfection of comfort and cultivated dignity. There were amusing drawing-tables with tiles, pencils, painting-brushes; chintz chairs and books and music; a smell of potpourri and lavender water; miniatures in glass tables, pretty china, and finished water-colours.
In November 1880—this is one of the few dates I can place—we were in London, my father and mother and myself, and Grandmamma was not well. She must have been over eighty, I think. Every day I used to go to Green Street with my mother and spend the whole morning illuminating a text. I was told Grandmamma was very ill, and had to take the nastiest medicines, and was being so good about it. I was sometimes taken in to see her. One day I finished the text, and it was given to Grandmamma. That evening when I was having my tea, my father and mother came into the dining-room and told me Grandmamma was dead. The text I had finished was buried with her.
The next day at luncheon I asked my mother to sing “A pie sat on a pear tree,” as usual. It was the daily ritual of luncheon. She said she couldn’t do “Hopped she,” as we called it, any longer now that Grandmamma was not there.
Another thing Grandmamma had always done at luncheon was to break a thin water biscuit into two halves, so that one half looked like a crescent moon; and I said to my mother, “We shan’t be able to break biscuits like that any more.”
CHAPTER III
MEMBLAND
To mention any of the other people of the outside world at once brings me to Membland, because the outside world was intimately connected with that place. Membland was a large, square, Jacobean house, white brick, green shutters and ivy, with some modern gabled rough-cast additions and a tower, about twelve miles from Plymouth and ten miles from the station Ivy Bridge.
On the north side of the house there was a gravel yard, on the south side a long, sweeping, sloping lawn, then a ha-ha, a field beyond this and rookery which was called the Grove.
When you went through the front hall you came into a large billiard-room in which there was a staircase leading to a gallery going round the room and to the bedrooms. The billiard-room was high and there were no rooms over the billiard-room proper—but beyond the billiard-table the room extended into a lower section, culminating in a semicircle of windows in which there was a large double writing-table.
Later, under the staircase, there was an organ, and the pipes of the great organ were on the wall.
There was a drawing-room full of chintz chairs, books, potpourri, a grand pianoforte, and two writing-tables; a dining-room looking south; a floor of guests’ rooms; a bachelors’ passage in the wing; a schoolroom on the ground floor looking north, with a little dark room full of rubbish next to it, which was called the Cabinet Noir, and where we were sent when we were naughty; and a nursery floor over the guests’ rooms.
From the northern side of the house you could see the hills of Dartmoor. In the west there was a mass of tall trees, Scotch firs, stone-pines, and ashes.
There was a large kitchen garden at some distance from the house on a hill and enclosed by walls.
Our routine of life was much the same as it was in London, except that the children had breakfast in the schoolroom at nine, as the grown-ups did not have breakfast till later.
Then came lessons, a walk, or play in the garden, further lessons, luncheon at two, a walk or an expedition, lessons from five till six, and then tea and games or reading aloud afterwards. One of the chief items of lessons was the Dictée, in which we all took part, and even Everard from Eton used to come and join in this sometimes.
Elizabeth won a kind of inglorious glory one day by making thirteen mistakes in her dictée, which was the record—a record never beaten by any one of us before or since; and the words treize fautes used often to be hurled at her head in moments of stress.
After tea Chérie used to read out books to the girls, and I was allowed to listen, although I was supposed to be too young to understand, and indeed I was. Nevertheless, I found the experience thrilling; and there are many book incidents which have remained for ever in my mind, absorbed during these readings, although I cannot always place them. I recollect a wonderful book called L’Homme de Neige, and many passages from Alexandre Dumas.
Sometimes Chérie would read out to me, especially stories from the Cabinet des Fées, or better still, tell stories of her own invention. There was one story in which many animals took part, and one of the characters was a partridge who used to go out just before the shooting season with a telescope under his wing to see whether things were safe. Chérie always used to say this was the creation she was proudest of. Another story was called Le Prince Muguet et Princesse Myosotis, which my mother had printed. I wrote a different story on the same theme and inspired by Chérie’s story when I grew up. But I enjoyed Chérie’s recollections of her childhood as much as her stories, and I could listen for ever to the tales of her grand-mère sévere who made her pick thorny juniper to make gin, or the story of a lady who had only one gown, a yellow one, and who every day used to ask her maid what the weather was like, and if the maid said it was fine, she would say, “Eh bien, je mettrai ma robe jaune,” and if it was rainy she would likewise say, “Je mettrai ma robe jaune.” Poor Chérie used to be made to repeat this story and others like it in season and out of season.
She would describe Paris until I felt I knew every street, and landscapes in Normandy and other parts of France. The dream of my life was to go to Paris and see the Boulevards and the Invalides and the Arc de Triomphe, and above all, the Champs Elysées.
Chérie had also a repertory of French songs which she used to teach us. One was the melancholy story of a little cabin-boy:
“Je