Daisy Ashford
1881–1972
“I adored writing and used to pray for bad weather, so that I need not go out but could stay in and write.”
That was what the adult Daisy had to say on the subject of rain. Here is a page, spelling mistakes included, likely from an essay assigned by her governess, when she was a lot younger:
“I like a rainy day except it makes the earth wet and flabby. Nurses are always cross on wet days that you feel you could go to sleep. You feel your chest is alive and is thumping you. The best thing to do on a wet day is to drink coffee in the kitchen like I did once. Grown up people had better dance the sailors hornpipe or sew. Gentlemen had better warm thear feet and read.”
It was lucky for Daisy Ashford, and for her readers, that she lived in England—famous for its numerous rainy days. Daisy began her writing career before she could even form letters; her patient parents, Emma and Willie, were happy to copy down her every word. In total, she composed six novelettes, but Daisy stopped writing at the age of fourteen, not knowing that one of her books would become a best-seller still available more than one hundred years after she wrote it.
Daisy’s mother had first been married to a man named Harry, and had three sons and two daughters before he died. As a widow in the 1870s, with five young children, Emma’s hopes for a prosperous future were dim. She felt lucky to meet and fall in love with Willie Ashford. Willie was just as happy to suddenly have a big, boisterous household after many years of loneliness. Emma and Willie added three more daughters to the family, beginning in 1881 with Daisy, whose formal name was Margaret Mary Julia. Vera and Angie soon followed. The older boys were sent away to boarding school, but the large house in the country was busy and noisy. The girls lived a sheltered life while they were young, taking daily lessons with a governess.
As was customary for middle- and upper-class girls, Daisy and her sisters spent much of their indoor time in the schoolroom or day nursery—a different place from the night nursery where they slept. They were taught very little about geography or science or mathematics and a great deal about literature and art. Daisy’s family especially prized being well-read and able to discuss music and theatre, politics and world affairs. The girls had frequent outings, and the household had many visitors.
In a time before television or radio, the family created its own amusements. They put on plays, wrote clever verses, memorized passages to recite, and read to each other aloud.
It was Willie’s sister, Aunt Julia, who first began to write letters to three-year-old Daisy, and Emma who thought of answering them, using the little girl’s own words and even her childish pronunciation, as in this excerpt:
Dear Auntie,
I’m writing a letter for dear Auntie … I like you so much … I can’t be rocked now ’cos I’m 3. I go to sleep wizout rocking all by myself.… There was a little boy at Prior Park & some big boy knocked him down & there was a roller there right at the bottom of the hill. He’s dead, dead now, a roller killed him …
I’ve a lot of words to tell Auntie … You’re a good woman and Father’s a good gekleum,
From
Daydums
Already, Daisy knew enough to intrigue her reader by choosing an exciting incident to report.
According to family legend, when Daisy was four, she sneaked into her father’s study and hid under the desk while he was talking with a visiting priest. After the guest had gone, Daisy emerged and told her father that she wanted to write a story about Father McSwiney. Willie kindly picked up his pen and told Daisy to begin.
“So with hands clasped behind her back, she walked up and down the room and dictated an entirely fictitious biography of four thousand words,” that included an encounter with the Pope on a railway platform and many saintly deeds.
Daisy’s mother, Emma, created an adaptation of “Cinderella,” in rhyme, for the children to perform at one of their family gatherings. Several years later, this inspired Daisy to write a play herself, called A Woman’s Crime. Her sister Vera designed a poster for it. Her sister Angie played the heroine. She was stabbed to death by Vera. The script has been lost, but it was apparently quite funny, despite the gruesome crime: “The butler informs the lady of the house that her daughter is lying dead upstairs: ‘I will go to her at once,’ she announces. ‘Oh, no, madam,’ the butler says. ‘I will bring the body down.’ ”
Daisy’s first book, A Short Story of Love and Marriage, was dictated to her father when she was eight. The following year, she was ready to write down her own words. As she scribbled away in her red-covered notebook, other creative minds were at work elsewhere in the world; during that year, 1890, the game of basketball was invented, as well as the paper clip, the zipper, and the fountain pen.
Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland had been published twenty-five years earlier. The Tale of Peter Rabbit, by Beatrix Potter, The Jungle Book, by Rudyard Kipling, and Peter Pan, by J. M. Barrie, were all yet to be written. But Daisy’s masterpiece was complete, all ten thousand words! Although her spelling and punctuation were not always accurate, she had a good understanding of characters and plot. The book was called The Young Visiters—yes, misspelled—and holds many colorful details, beginning with the opening line: “Mr. Salteena was an elderly man of 42 and was fond of asking people to stay with him …” Daisy went on to tell us that “Mr. Salteena had dark short hair and mustache and wiskers which were very black and twisty …”
The author quickly introduced the seventeen-year-old heroine of the story, who is Mr. Salteena’s ward. (“Keeping a ward” was a frequent practice in upper-middle-class Victorian England. It meant being responsible for a young person’s education and introduction to society.) “Ethel Monticue had fair hair done on the top and blue eyes. She had a blue velvit frock which had grown rarther short in the arms.”
By the end of the first page, Daisy deftly started the plot moving in a letter that arrives attached to a “quear shaped parcel.”
My dear Alfred,
I want you to come for a stop with me so I have sent you a top hat wraped up in tishu paper inside the box. Will you wear it staying with me because it is very uncommon. Please bring one of your young ladies whichever is the prettiest in the face.
I remain Yours truly,
Bernard Clark
In Mr. Salteena’s reply to Bernard’s letter, Daisy revealed the secret longing that propels her main character through the book: “I am not quite a gentleman but you would hardly notice it but cant be helped anyhow. We will come by the 3:15 [train].”
Despite his pretense of not really caring, Mr. Salteena is driven to improve himself, partly because he has a second hidden wish—to marry Ethel. But he makes the mistake of taking her to visit Bernard Clark, where the reader sees at once what the author has in mind: “A tall man of 29 rose from the sofa. He was rarther bent in the middle with very nice long legs, fairish hair and blue eyes.”
Is it love at first sight?
“Oh yes gasped Ethel blushing through her red ruge. Bernard looked at her keenly and turned a dark red. I am glad to see you he said …”
The Young Visiters follows the progress of the love story, alongside poor Mr. Salteena’s efforts to become a gentleman, even when he recognizes Bernard’s claim on Ethel’s affections.
In the end, Mr. Salteena has the honor of meeting the Prince of Wales, “nervously wishing he had got correct knickerbockers,” but triumphant nonetheless.
And there is, of course, a wedding, where Ethel wears a dress of “rich satin with a humped pattern of gold on the pure white,” and a veil “of pure lace with a crown of orange blossom.” The banquet includes many delicacies, from “jam tarts with plenty of jam on each” to “a pig’s head done up in a wondrous manner.” When the wedding supper is done, “everybody got a bag of rice and sprinkled on the pair and Mr. Salteena sadly threw a white tennis shoe at them wiping his eyes the while.”
Daisy’s final work, The Hangman’s Daughter, was finished at the age of fourteen. “I put so much more effort into it than any of the others,” a grown-up Daisy said about this last book, which took her a year to write. “By this time I had really determined to become an authoress (an ambition which entirely left me after my school days) … I shall never forget my feeling of shock when I read it aloud to my brothers and they laughed at the trial scene!”
The children’s manuscripts and drawings, all carefully saved by their mother, were not seen or thought of again until Emma died, thirty years later, at which point the literary treasure trove was discovered in one of her drawers.
By then, Daisy was an adult. She had married James Devlin and started a family. Knowing that her friend Margaret would see great humor in the rediscovery of her childhood opus, Daisy sent her The Young Visiters as an amusement while she was recovering from the flu. But Margaret was excited and passed it along until it reached the book publishing house of Chatto and Windus. Recognizing the charm of a precocious child’s masterpiece, they chose to publish the book with all the errors intact.
They also invited J. M. Barrie to write the introduction. He was the famous man who had created Peter Pan, and he became an avid fan of Daisy Ashford. A rumor circulated that The Young Visiters had actually been written by him. But no, it was truly a small scribbler who had created the work that would become a play, a movie, and a continued success in the book stores, more than one hundred years later.
Daisy gave her heroine and hero a happy ending:
Bernard Clark was the happiest of our friends as he loved Ethel to the bitter end and so did she him and they had a nice house too … So now my readers we will say farewell to the characters in this book.
Daisy Ashford’s book came about because she was surrounded by loving family members, each of whom prized the written word.
Ada Blackjack wrote because she was surrounded by men making observations in scientific journals, each of them showing her that the smallest details can add up to big stories.