Nan finally got Bron to herself for a long chat in her sitting room on the attic floor. There was so much to be gone through. While she focused on the minute detail (‘Statement of problems of carrying on hospital’, reads one missive from Nan to her brother) he thought in sweeping, broad-brush strokes (‘Don’t please worry yourself over it all. This sounds ungrateful, but you know what I mean’, he writes back). At times Nan must have felt they were living on different planets, but such was her intense devotion to Bron, she did not complain.
His infectious high spirits were, in any case, a tonic. They restored Nan’s pre-war sense of humour–and she had a wonderfully juicy piece of gossip to impart, regarding her housekeeper and his land agent. ‘Never shall I forget Bron sinking back helpless with laughter, when I told him this, and gasping between paroxysms, ‘A of all people, A!’
Why was Argles’s love for Hannah such an object of hilarity for Bron? Was it the preposterousness of the public-school-educated manager falling for a working-class servant from Inverness? Was it that Hannah was way out of Argles’s league in looks, youth and charisma? Or was it that pompous, pen-pushing, church-going Argles, with his name vaguely redolent of gargling and gargoyles, had the temerity to enter into a grande passion–and claim it to be the real thing?
Cecil Argles was captain of the Wrest Fire Brigade. A photograph shows a small, portly man with protruding ears, slight double chin and a kindly face in shadow beneath the Victorian brass Merryweather helmet. There is something almost feminine about Argles as he stands, small hands hanging passively from what now seems a faintly ridiculous outfit, while the other firemen uncoil the hose and bustle about. The fire engine is a splendid Victorian contraption with gleaming brass work: no doubt he was neurotic about its upkeep.
And then there is Bron, with his inherited wealth, his ’petulant mouth and great wondering eyes…like some wild thing tamed and habituated to a garden’,14 according to a friend. Bron the hero, careering around with his wooden leg (he was hit by shrapnel while reporting on the Boer War for The Times in his early twenties), ‘just as fine a sportsman as before’. Bron’s reaction seems to imply, however obliquely, that adventures of the heart are reserved for the Brons of this world, and not for the likes of Cecil Argles.
Nan’s response to Hannah’s apparent love affair is also interesting. ‘It was, I suppose’, she writes in her diary, ‘the supreme moment of her life.’ I imagine Nan covertly watching her housekeeper queening it; observing with some amusement Hannah Mackenzie supremely in control of this ‘sedately married man’ who has fallen under her spell. Yet there is also the slightly sneering, patronising assumption that a servant has to take what crumbs of romance might fall her way. The implication is that if this was a ‘supreme moment’, it was rather a poor one in the eyes of Nan (veteran of the Balkan Crisis, friend of political activist Emilio Bacardi, traveller, heiress, adventurer…and spinster). Her housekeeper hadn’t caught a man before, and was probably unlikely to in the future. It was her last and best chance.
But it was, of course, ill-fated.
By the new year of 1915, Nan was on the warpath. There was ‘general strafing’ if the maids were caught serving breakfast late; there were military-style timetables pinned up for the benefit of probationers–‘The men are to form in line at 7.25 and march to breakfast in charge of the NCOs’, ‘Wards inspected by nurses 8.45 a.m.’, and so on. At the same time that the British Navy was bombarding the Gallipoli peninsula, Nan decided it was time to tackle Miss Martin the Matron. ‘It was obvious that a change would have to be made’, she wrote, yet she quaked at the prospect of having to make it. ‘Informing Matron was the first and worst step to take, but no sooner had I commenced to inform her when she stopped me: “I know what you are going to say, Miss Herbert, and I agree that it is best.” No words can express the admiration and gratitude I felt.’ Nan was to ‘step into the post experimentally, and retain it subject to approval of the medical staff’. So she was to be on trial as matron in her own house, officially running the hospital she had unofficially been running before. Even she was daunted at the responsibility. ‘My dream that night of a huge wave, breaking high over my head, expressed my feelings.’
Was this what Hannah Mackenzie had wanted all along, with her campaign against Miss Martin, or did it come as a surprise? Would Nan now be more involved with the medical side of things, and less obsessed with the housekeeping? Initially, this was so. Nan turned her attention to the ‘mischievous’ and ‘superfluous’ nurses, dismissing troublemakers and putting three formidable women–Sister Ife, Sister Rogers and Sister Warner–in charge of Wards A, B and C.
Three more senior women for Hannah to negotiate–but also five more men to wrap around her little finger, now that Dr Beauchamp had returned to his practice in London. The suave, black-haired chief medical officer Dr William Kirkwood and his four surgeons Mr English, Mr Ewart, Mr Hett and Mr Cargill arrived. The hospital became yet more proficient in its patching up and turning around of wounded soldiers, clearing them off to convalescent homes and admitting fresh cases more frequently than ever before. It began to gain a reputation within the War Office for impressive efficiency.
It is often said that housekeepers ran these big houses ‘like a sergeant major’, orchestrating their smooth management with ‘military precision’. The housekeeper’s office was like a war office, from which she plotted and manoeuvred with pen, ink and trusted personnel late into the night. Bit by bit, Hannah had found these satisfactions taken off her hands. First, the household treasures had been removed –the antique furniture, the books, pictures and window drapes–thus denying her the housekeeper’s essential craft in their upkeep. Next came Nan and Sister Martin, interfering with her staff. Then Mr Argles was doing her accounts, even if this was a boon.
And now a most unwelcome new face–a man–had been introduced into her territory. With the arrival of Sergeant Major Kingsley, life began to get even more circumscribed for Wrest Park’s housekeeper. He was brought into the house in May (at Bron’s suggestion) to deal with the mounting office work and with convalescing soldiers, prone to misbehave. An old non-commissioned officer, he was an imposing man, tough-featured, mustachioed and brusquely military in manner. It was a source of personal satisfaction that, out of the 1,600 men who passed through the hospital under his watch, there were only eleven cases of ‘breaking bounds’.
Sergeant Major Kingsley is photographed writing with intense concentration at a leather-topped desk in the old butler’s pantry. There was now no possible excuse for collaboration between Hannah Mackenzie and Cecil Argles. The household they had run between them, however imperfectly, was under scrutiny.