As it turned out, the Higgens family did get to live a separate life of sorts. When Vanessa and Duncan were in London, which was much of the time in that decade before the Second World War, the Higgenses had Charleston to themselves. It was as much Peter John’s home as it was Vanessa Bell’s. Photographs from Grace’s albums show a beautifully dressed toddler with buttoned Mary Jane shoes and a cream double-breasted swing coat, sartorially every inch his mother’s son. Walter lounges on the lawn next to him with a magazine. There he is again, Peter John, a little older now and stark naked, dangling his legs in the Charleston fish pond, a wooden toy truck by his side.
Half the time they could lounge by the fish pond in deckchairs. The other half, they had to make themselves scarce. When Grace had lived in London, Vanessa would often refer to ‘the Grace problem’ in letters to Duncan, a problem that by 1930 was beginning to make her lose her ‘reason’. Her servant would suddenly intrude just when she was in the middle of painting and start chatting about some household business, oblivious to Vanessa’s silent concentration. Or else Grace would come in to tidy up and find a nude model posing on the divan. The solution was a large pair of curtains, erected across the entrance to the studio at 8 Fitzroy Street. ‘I don’t mind hearing her as long as I know I’m inviolate.’ Vanessa wanted a servant, but at the same time didn’t want to be constantly reminded that she had one. The ideal was a sort of absent presence.
Peter John grew up to be a gangly little boy, ‘shy and self-conscious, like a spider, all arms and legs’, as he said of himself. He was good at making himself invisible, shrinking back into the shadows and keeping quiet when the mistress of the house approached. This was a potent memory that stayed with him all his life. He remembered playing football in the kitchen, kicking his ball hard against the painted cupboards (now encased in Perspex to conserve the artwork). ‘I used to be kicking or pinging a ball about in there, and would hear Mrs Bell coming through from the other side, and would have to stop, or think about stopping.’ He would also play in Vanessa and Duncan’s old car, left in the apple room throughout wartime due to petrol rationing. ‘I didn’t do it if Mrs Bell was going to possibly come round the corner. No, I’d leap out again! I had good ears in those days.’
Vanessa used to gaze out from her attic studio, deep in thought–only to snap to when she spotted a small boy climbing the wall by the chicken run, hand outstretched towards a juicy pear. A Bell pear. ‘Would you stop Peter John helping himself to our fruit?’ she would say to Grace, who would have to nod her head and bite her lip. When visitors were sitting round the dinner table, Vanessa objected if the Higgenses cut across the garden in front of the house, past the small dining-room window. They were supposed to go the long way round, by the chicken run.
She was a dominant, rather terrifying figure to young Peter John. Mrs Bell had, as he put it, a ‘foreboding appearance’. She was ‘strange with her attire. She struck me as one of the original hippies, long before the hippy people came about, with her large hats and shawls and scarves.’ When he became a father, his young daughter Jacqueline refused to visit the farmhouse because she was convinced there was a witch, even though Mrs Bell was no longer alive.
For all his skulking in the shadows, Peter John enjoyed a childhood of tremendous freedom, playing in the outlying fields and barns with his friends, servants’ sons from the local big houses Tilton and Firle Place. He was allowed to use Vanessa’s piano, although he hated the lessons Grace forced upon him at great expense. She tried him at the piano and she tried him at the violin, but Peter John did not excel in music. He didn’t have an ear. He would nervously knock on Clive Bell’s study door, where the master of the house sat at his desk surrounded by piles of books, to ask for help with some esoteric piece of schoolwork. ‘He was a charming person, but he would be very aloof if he had any of his friends…then I’m afraid you were just a little boy and you were not to be seen.’
His first birthday in May 1936 marked the last blithely hedonistic summer at Charleston. While Grace laboured in the kitchen and the stuffy attic, cooking the food, changing the bed linen, keeping herself, Walter and the baby out of the way, Vanessa wrote letters describing gay house parties and bright young things. Angelica was now a strikingly beautiful 18-year-old who had made her ‘debut’ in Bloomsbury in a hat ‘which she said (and I believe it!) had caused a sensation in Paris’, as Vanessa wrote to her eldest son Julian, who was teaching in China. Charleston, she told him, was
in a state of pandemonium…full of young people in very high spirits, laughing a great deal at their own jokes, singing and playing all the time and lying about in the garden, which is simply a dithering blaze of flowers and butterflies and apples…Everyone has been going about half naked and getting brown, Angelica looks very well and wears hardly any clothes.
By the summer of 1937, everything had changed. When Peter John was two, Julian Bell set off hot-headedly for the Spanish Civil War, despite the anguished warnings of his mother. ‘It can happen so easily,’ she had prophesied that February, ‘but it mustn’t happen to the really valuable people if one can possibly help it.’ Six weeks later, aged 29, he died of a shrapnel wound to the chest while driving an ambulance. Vanessa broke down and took to her bed at Fitzroy Street. Grace wrote to her mistress about her loss–this same teenage boy she had once sat close to at the top of Firle Beacon, seeing the sun rise gloriously. She still had two schoolboy portraits of a brooding, bespectacled Julian, probably pressed upon her that flirtatious summer of 1924. She kept these to her death. It is the only letter from Grace to Vanessa to survive, kept as it was with her mistress’s letters of condolence.
Dear Mrs Bell,
Please forgive me writing to you now, but I wish to tell you, how terribly sorry I am to hear of Julian’s death, & how deeply I sympathise with you. I’m afraid this is not a time, when I can do anything to help you, although I wish I could.
Yours sincerely,
Grace8
When Vanessa was well enough to return to Charleston, Grace found her weeping uncontrollably in the garden. No one understood her need to talk about Julian.