I AM STRUCK BY THE fact that the more slowly trees grow at first, the sounder they are at the core, and I think that the same is true of human beings. We do not wish to see children precocious, making great strides in their early years like sprouts, producing a soft and perishable timber, but better if they expand slowly at first, as if contending with difficulties, and so are solidified and perfected. Such trees continue to expand with nearly equal rapidity to an extreme old age.
—Henry David Thoreau, journal, November 5, 1860
That the strength of his understanding, the accuracy of his discernment, and ardour of his curiosity, might have been remarked from his infancy, by a diligent observer, there is no reason to doubt. For, there is no instance of any man, whose history has been minutely related, that did not in every part of life discover the same proportion of intellectual vigour.
—Samuel Johnson, “The Life of Sydenham,” 1742
When Britain entered the Great War in August 1914, Emily Russ’s two youngest sons, Frederick and William, both decided to serve their country. Frederick, who was still living at home, volunteered for the army. He would fight in the trenches in Belgium. After his second bout of pneumonia, however, the army refused to send him back to the front, so he became a balloonist in the Royal Flying Corps. William, the baby of the family, joined an artillery unit and was stationed outside London, not far from the home of his brother Charles, a medical doctor who commuted into London, and Charles’s wife, Jessie, and their seven children. Whenever Willy rode over for a visit, his nephews, eleven-year-old Godfrey, Victor, nine, and Michael, five, raced out to greet him and to lead his horse to the backyard, where it grazed on the Russes’ ample lawn.
The house the Russes called Walden lay in a wooded area in rural Buckinghamshire County, halfway between the towns of Chalfont St. Peter and Gerrards Cross. As the house’s name would indicate, it was an idyllic place to raise a family. Charles’s brother Sidney, also a London medical doctor and scientist, and two servants lived in the big house as well.
Though a quiet man, Uncle Sidney, whom the children called “Beany,” was much loved, especially when he arrived home in the evening with pockets full of candy. He usually placed the candy on a tray and held it over the children’s heads so that they had to jump up and knock it off, resulting in a mad scramble to see who could retrieve the most. Any sweet the youngest obtained in the melee was a gift from a protector or held in reserve by Beany, who, being a seventh child, understood the plight of the underdog.
By no means did the tranquillity of Thoreau’s Walden apply. In the long, bellicose winter of 1914, the house was close with children, and Jessie was again about to give birth. On December 12, in the big bedroom at the back of the house, she clutched her youngest’s hand as a roaring bird flew overhead. Through the window, the boy, Bernard, or “Bun,” as everyone called him, gawked with fascination. It was the first time he had seen an airplane. Shortly thereafter, Bun was tugged away from his mother and ushered from the room. Though not yet three years old, he sensed a momentous change.
Later that day, Jessie gave birth to a boy, her fifth. At last, Bun was allowed back into the room. He was shown his mother’s mysterious new parcel. The miracle being not nearly so wondrous as an airplane, he soon lost interest and was relegated to the floor. Deposed as the baby of the family, he crawled about forlornly on the large sheets of brown paper spread there, perplexed at just why such a small thing had required so much wrapping.
At least that’s how Bernard Russ recounted the story of Patrick’s birth some three-quarters of a century later in Lady Day Prodigal, his autobiography privately published for the family. Whether he could have experienced such consciousness at the age of two is debatable, as are a number of his other colorful recollections. What is certain is that Bun, later known as Barney, could spin a good yarn. Perhaps it was in his blood.
Actually, Patrick was not yet named, and the Russes were in no hurry to do so. In February 1915, when his birth was registered, he remained nameless. Finally, in a special certificate of naming, he was dubbed Richard Patrick. “Pat,” as they would call him, was not a healthy youth. He suffered from what was sometimes identified as bronchitis and sometimes as asthma or, as his brother Barney put it, “a weak chest.” According to a letter written much later by his brother, Pat would at some point in his younger years, like his mother, suffer from tuberculosis. But Pat proved to be a remarkably resilient fellow, and Walden was an appropriate birthplace for this extraordinary little boy, whose love of nature, literature, and writing arrived early, whose love of solitude would endure, and whose obsession for privacy would infuse his eventual literary tour de force, the Aubrey-Maturin novels.
As with Thoreau’s slow-growing tree, life’s difficulties would only make Pat sounder at the core, though they certainly would leave their share of knots in the trunk and odd bends to the branches.
Patrick’s father, Charles Russ, was a giant of a man, nearly six feet, five inches tall, but thin, boyish-looking, with wavy blond hair. He was exceedingly handsome, and he had a powerful mind to match his looks. He approached an intellectual or mechanical challenge with enthusiasm and a high degree of creativity. When he was not preoccupied with work, he was often tinkering with whatever automobile was in the driveway. These were his passions.
Carl Russ had intended for his sons to be furriers. But his absence and the fortune he left behind, an estate worth more than £40,000 (£2 million in today’s numbers), allowed them to choose their own paths. Charles and Sidney both decided on medical school. Whereas Sidney was steady, dependable, intensely private, and deliberate in his personality and career, Charles was prone to enthusiasms (his twenty-three cameras gave way to the cars), assertive, and something of a malcontent. Children, residences, and creative energy would flow willy-nilly.
In 1902, when he had married his sweetheart, Jessie Naylor Goddard, at St. Luke’s Church in Hampstead, he was studying medicine at London’s St. Mary’s Hospital, where Augustus Waller had discovered the electrical reaction of the human heart and Almroth Wright introduced immunization against typhoid fever. It was in this spirit of experimentation and discovery that Russ collected his medical diplomas in 1903 and prepared to make his mark on the world.
Nine months and a week after they had married, Jessie, a fetching brunette with full lips and thick chestnut eyebrows, the daughter of a town legal clerk, gave birth to a son, Charles Godfrey, at the couple’s home in West Hampstead. A towhead, young Godfrey barely had time to break in his lace knickers before Victor arrived on the scene in 1905. Olive followed in 1906, Michael in 1909, and, in 1910, twins Connie and Nora. During this time the Russes lived at almost as many addresses as they had children.
Charles, a bacteriologist, worked as one of two qualified assistants in Dr. G. L. Eastes’s laboratory of pathology and public health on Queen Anne Street. But after hours, he explored his own ideas, conducting groundbreaking research in electrolysis. In 1910, he demonstrated to members of the Royal Society of Medicine and later to the British Medical Association that an electrical current could kill bacteria suspended in a liquid. The following year he spoke at the International Hygiene Exhibition in Dresden.
The Royal Society encouraged Charles’s promising work with a £100 grant, and interested doctors provided him with cases. Charles eagerly applied his techniques to varicose ulcers, cholecystitis, and gonorrhea. As he worked, he improved means and methods. He was inspired. In March 1912, the same month that Jessie gave birth to Bernard, their seventh child, Charles presented a paper on an improved method of estimating the blood’s ability to consume bacteria. While conducting his tests, he invented a felt-lined portable radiator for blood cultivations. In August, he published his observations of syphilitic sera.
Perhaps all of this activity left the independent-minded scientist too little time for his assistant duties, for Dr. Eastes eventually fired him. Charles then set up his own lab less than a mile away, on Beaumont Street, igniting a bitter dispute. Claiming Russ had violated a noncompete clause in his contract, Eastes sued his former assistant. The Chancery court sided with Charles, deeming the contract, which he had never actually signed, flawed. Eastes appealed. At the close of 1913, he was rebuffed again. Charles was vindicated, but the case had attracted some unwanted attention in the medical world, and the unpleasant business had cost him a mentor. Now he had to create a practice of his own, and he would prove none too good at it.
While Charles was living the life of a maverick, his quiet younger brother Sidney had taken a more conventional route to unexpected prominence. At the University of Manchester, where he taught physics, he assisted 1908 Nobel laureate Ernest Rutherford, who identified the alpha particle of a helium nucleus that year. In 1910, Sidney moved back to London to become a fellow of the Cancer Research Laboratories of Middlesex College, and in 1913, he became physicist to Middlesex Hospital, evidently the first physicist ever appointed to a hospital staff.
Charles, meanwhile, affiliated himself with St. Peter’s Hospital in Covent Garden. His cholecystitis and gonorrhea treatments, despite their apparent potential in curing the diseases, had a serious drawback. They were frightful in their application. In the first, the patient wore a belt of metallic gauze surrounded by layers of lint, and in the second, a lint-covered metal pad was applied to his scrotum. A rubber catheter was inserted up his urethra to his bladder. One end of a platinum wire ran up the catheter, and the other attached to a battery. Another wire connected the battery to the belt or pad, making a complete circuit. The electrical current ran for up to ninety minutes (see illustration, page 4 of insert). After the setup, the procedure was painless, Charles assured his colleagues: “The patients are unaware of the current’s flow and recline at their ease, being occupied in reading, and often also enjoy a smoke.”
Off to London early in the morning and home late in the day, the doctors Russ played a secondary role in the life of Walden. The household was essentially run by Jessie and a nanny named Nellie Blencowe, whose Hertfordshire dialect sometimes made her difficult for the Russ children to understand, or so they claimed when it suited their designs.
The heavy decor of Walden recalled the splendor of Clifton Villa, Charles’s childhood home, but the focus here, as the name suggests, was on the out-of-doors. In front of the brick house, a horseshoe-shaped driveway with large gates opened onto Packhorse Road, where motorcars were occasionally seen and heard. A half acre of land, mostly in back of the house, provided space for Patrick to toddle and the other children to roam. There was much of interest: an orchard of fruit trees, a large vegetable garden, and, the Russes having a fondness for nicknames, a garage called “Toodles,” a teahouse called “Beadle,” and a garden shed called “Boodle.”
On a summer day, with the perimeter Lombardy poplars rustling softly in the breeze, Jessie could be found tending to her garden or sitting behind an easel painting watercolors of her flowers. Here she found a degree of serenity, something that had not come easily in her life. After her parents, Ernest and Mary Goddard, died when she was thirteen, she was sent to a Roman Catholic orphanage and became separated from her remaining sister, Mabel, and two brothers, Cecil and Morse.
But the quiet moments at Walden were rare. The eight children presented their challenges in as many different ways. Some of them, such as little Pat, who suffered from respiratory difficulties, required extra care. One of the twins, Connie, was afflicted with a rare form of muscular distrophy called Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, which caused her feet to turn in. Sometimes she had to be pushed about in Pat’s pram.
Jessie doted on her children. She sometimes dressed her little boys in velvet jackets and lace collars, which made Bun, with his extravagant, golden curls, look like Little Lord Fauntleroy. He endured much teasing by his older brothers before Charles finally demanded that the curls be cut off. Jessie cried as the barber did his work in the nursery, but it was probably a relief for Bun. Likewise, little sympathy was reserved for the sickly young Pat, who, although not of Bun’s galling beauty, was the sort to attract a mother’s sympathy. A meek little fellow with straight brown hair, he resembled his Uncle Sidney. He had a round, impish face, a thin mouth, and protruding ears. He wore a thoughtful, open expression, which betrayed no signs of mischief, in marked contrast to his older other brothers.
In the evenings, Nellie served the children bread and meat drippings or bread and butter and jam for high tea. “Eat it up and be good, or I’ll smack you else,” she would say, in her thick dialect.
To which Olive, the eldest daughter, would mischievously reply, “I’m not Else, I’m Olive!”
The children were permitted special treats, like doughnuts or sticky buns, at weekend high teas. On one occasion, Olive was asked to set the tea table. Left on her own to perform the task, she secretly nibbled each of the buns and arranged them to conceal her transgression. Her hungry siblings gobbled down their treats without noticing. However, the trick did not fool Jessie, who notified Olive that since she had already eaten her bun, she needn’t have another.
The boys had their own way to needle Olive, whose middle name was Isobel. “Hello, Is-a-bell on a bicycle?” they greeted her, never failing to get her goat.
At last Nellie moved on, though she would keep in touch with some of the children for many decades. Another nanny, Mrs. Mason, signed on and became a close friend to Jessie. The children regarded her as yet another aunt and called her Aunty Mason. But Godfrey soon pegged her as “Hanty Mason,” and the name stuck.
Despite Charles’s strict Presbyterian upbringing and Methodist schooling, Jessie’s stay with the nuns, and their marriage in the Church of England (or perhaps because of this hodgepodge), there appears to have been no time or energy for religion at the Russ household. None of the children seem to have been baptized. The Russes liked to entertain, however, and holidays, especially Christmas, produced more aunts and uncles and cousins, of which there was no shortage, however dispersed they might be. Of Charles’s siblings, Edith had married a bank clerk in 1897 and Bertha a Quaker stationer in 1905. Albert worked as a draper and Frederick, following the war, as a civil servant in Her Majesty’s Office of Works. Two would become favorite uncles of Charles and Jessie’s children: rugged, raw-boned William, who became a geologist and explored Nigeria, and the gregarious Emil, who was said to have had a talent for writing when younger. In 1905, he had moved to India and, as William recorded, became “court tailor … and friend of Maharajah X.”
Emily and Otto Müller, who had gone bankrupt in Germany, were raising their twelve children in Canada. Other siblings not in attendance at Walden were Percy, a photographer who lived in Hawkes Bay, New Zealand, and Ernest, a soldier who had joined the military at age sixteen and during the Boer War had changed his surname from Russ to Russell to hide the German link. As his nephew Barney later put it, perhaps overstating the case a bit, for this betrayal he was “summarily dismissed with disgust from the family annals.”
No matter who came to the Christmas celebration, the Russes threw a lavish feast in their dark-paneled dining room, which glistened with polished silver. Each year, Jessie saved her silver threepenny pieces, and before Christmas she emptied her jar and bought presents to put under the tree. At one Walden Christmas, possibly Pat’s first, the younger children came down with chicken pox and then measles. Dressed in their nightgowns, they watched jealously from the second-floor balustrade. Godfrey and Victor, who had escaped both afflictions, taunted them from below.
In warm weather, driving became one of the family’s favorite activities. Charles traded in his motorcycle and sidecar, in which he and Jessie had often escaped into the countryside with a picnic basket, for a Globe. The car, which sported large carriage lamps on either side of the windshield, was always in a state of high polish, though its engine performance was not. Frequent breakdowns sent Charles—often in a formal suit and starched wing collar—under the car, while Jessie watched the children play.
One trip took them to Dashwood Hill, where they stopped to watch other cars attempt the steep climb. The failures were pronounced “crocks” by the children in a hail of laughter. “The fact that our car was itself a crock,” Barney later recalled, “did not seem to bother our parents at all, and everyone thoroughly enjoyed the fun.”
The worst car that Charles bought was a three-wheeler Morgan, a bad idea for a large man with a small wife: while rounding curves, it tipped over to his side. The best was a Wolseley, which, remarkably, could accommodate the whole family.
Patrick would have only the vaguest of memories of this early period of his life. Perhaps what is more important than what he remembered is what he later knew he had missed. For soon this would all be gone, and in the family memory it became almost a mythical time when everything was right with the world. A time when no matter what the trouble was, there was a loving mother there to fix it.
In 1916, Charles Russ, now in charge of the electro-therapeutic department of the Male Lock Hospital (“lock” signifying a hospital for venereal disease) and affiliated with a similar department of Middlesex Hospital, published A New Treatment of Gonorrhoea, which argued for his method of treating the disease. Although the Lancet, an influential medical journal, remained skeptical based on the lack of general trials, it ran a lengthy article by the doctor detailing four successful cases from the book. He also addressed an unpleasant side effect: “a spasmodic contraction upon the inserted catheter during the flow of the current.” Sometimes, he confessed, the urethra clamped onto the catheter and would not let go. He recommended reversing the current for several minutes—but by no means using force.
Charles’s treatment might have cured some patients, but his methods were neither proven nor practical. As venereal disease spread among troops stationed abroad—by 1918, as many as 300,000 were being treated (in a day when everyone did their utmost to ignore the problem)—concern for the potential mass infection of Britain’s women approached hysteria. Doctors and health officials rang the alarm louder and louder. In 1917, politicians passed legislation to provide treatment at free clinics, using equally dubious but more popular methods. Charles’s supply of patients dried up. Professionally and financially, his ruination had begun.
Before the end of the war, lovely Walden had been left behind. The Russes had moved to 10 College Road, Harrow, an address nearer to Mater’s house and closer to Charles’s work. Sidney no longer lived with them. He married a nurse named Mary Priestley and soon had three children of his own, but Mary disliked her husband’s ties to Germany and did her best to sever connections with his family. Some unsatisfactory financial dealings with Charles might also have clouded the brothers’ relationship, an early indication that Charles was already feeling the financial strain that would dog him the rest of his life. Sadly, Charles’s and Sidney’s children would never know each other.
On July 10, 1917, Charles and Jessie had yet another child—their ninth in fourteen years—a girl they named Sylvia Joan. But this birth was accompanied by complications. In August, Jessie underwent surgery for abdominal problems. She had a tumorlike growth caused by tuberculosis of her intestines. She could have contracted tuberculosis as a child when her father died of the disease, which under some circumstances can remain dormant in the body in the form of a granuloma. She never fully recovered.
One day in late March 1918, Hanty Mason gathered the children, and one by one they were taken in to see their mother. Behind the bed stood Charles, Sidney, and the physician attending Jessie, who was propped up in bed. Putting on a brave face and summoning her last ounces of strength, Jessie said good-bye to her children. Three-year-old Pat was lifted up to her, and she hugged and kissed him one last time. On the evening of March 30, with her husband by her side, Jessie, just forty years old, died of tuberculosis.
That night, Hanty Mason came to the bedside of each of the children. Weeping, she hugged them and told them that their other mother had left the world for a better place.
The, three youngest children, Bun, Pat, and Joan, did not attend the funeral. They were left to play in the nursery. Bun, who was now six, wandered through the halls and into his mother’s empty bedroom. Pale blue candles flickered at each corner of the wire bed frame, now stripped of its bedding. The terrifying sight of emptiness where his mother had lain so recently would haunt the boy for the rest of his life. None of the children escaped without a deep, permanent sorrow from the death of their mother. Jessie had been the soul of the family.
The impact on young Pat was clearly immense, and the loss of his mother would be an animus for his fiction. His first book, which he wrote when he was just fourteen, was about an orphaned wild beast. Subsequent stories and novels were peopled by orphans and abandoned children. His great characters Aubrey and Maturin would be virtually parentless, Aubrey having lost his mother at a young age and then suffering the offenses of a troublemaking father and Maturin being an Irish-Catalan bastard, whose childhood remains obscure.
Patrick’s first wife would be an orphan, too.
Charles Russ was devastated by the death of his wife. What he badly needed was a reserve of strength and grace. He had nine suffering children crying out for warmth and tenderness and time, but he was not up to providing these essentials. The Russ household was in shambles. Aunts and nannies tried to tame it but found the effort overwhelming. The infant, Joan, was sent to live with Aunt Bertha and Uncle Frank Welch, a Quaker, at their home in Pinner, a section in the far northwest of London. The three older boys—Godfrey, now fifteen, Victor, thirteen, and Mike, nine—attended day school at the John Lyon School for Boys. They had bicycles on which they came and went as they pleased. The rest were left largely on their own.
Charles could not bear to live in the house where Jessie had died, so he uprooted the family once again, moving to a rowhouse at 276 Willesden Lane, in Willesden Green, also a section of northwest London. Although he was desperately trying to evade the painful memories of his wife, he could not bring himself to abandon her beloved plants and flowers. So he instructed Victor to dig up as much of the garden as he could. On his bike, Victor pedaled the plants to their new home and planted them in the small garden in back.
One day, while he was working outside, a remarkable thing happened. He met a man dressed in naval uniform, who was walking about in the next yard. When Victor told the man his name, the man told him that he had a sister named Jessie, who had married a Dr. Russ. It turned out that the sailor next door was their uncle Morse Goddard, Jessie’s younger brother, who had gone to sea as a boy after their parents had died. He was now a worldly first mate in the Canadian Pacific Fleet, awaiting the completion of the fleet’s new flagship, Empress of Canada, which was being built in Glasgow. He had friends and acquaintances around the globe, but he had not seen his siblings for many years.
This fateful convergence had a calming effect on the Russ gang. Though the procession of nannies and temporary arrangements with aunts and uncles continued, now there was family—Uncle Morse, Aunt Grace, and cousin Molly—next door.
If ever there was a perfect inspiration for a young boy’s love of tales and the mystery of the sea, Uncle Morse was it. He fascinated the boys. He called the study his cabin, and there, in front of the fire, he told stories about his adventures. Starting out as a cabin boy at the age of twelve and earning a shilling a month, he had come home second in command. He sailed around Cape Horn in a steel-hulled windjammer, learning to insulate his feet from the frigid winds before a trick at the wheel by filling his boots with seawater. Stories of pirates in the China Sea, of storms, and of life on board Canadian steamers, such as the Empress of Russia, on which he had served as second mate, carried the boys away from their present sorrow, if only briefly, and gave them dreams for the future. Patrick was about five years old, an age when reality and fantasy engage in a delightful dance and when one’s own mythology is seared into the mind.
Uncle Morse would be the source of another bizarre coincidence in Patrick’s life. Although none of the Russ children knew it, Uncle Morse was not actually married to Grace. When he finally did marry, in Canada in 1925, it was to Emma Frances Anson-Cartwright, the sole heir of the Anson estates, including that of Admiral George Anson, whose voyage to the Pacific and capture of a treasure-laden Spanish galleon in 1743 became legendary. Ironically, Patrick would later write about Anson’s voyage, unaware, apparently, of the family tie.
Grace’s marital status notwithstanding, she was a beloved “aunt” and a cool hand at soothing the inevitable domestic squabbles that erupted among the nine motherless children. She kept an eye on the schooling situation, urging Charles to send Bun to kindergarten. He was soon enrolled at the nearby Maria Gray Preparatory and Kindergarten, which Olive and the twins also attended. Still too young, Pat, it seems, was left to his own druthers.
Shortly after moving to Willesden, on October 3, 1918, Charles Russ and family received another blow. At the age of sixty-eight, Mater, the strong-willed and elegant matriarch, who had suffered from diabetes for five years, lapsed into a coma and died.
Mater represented the last vestiges of the rich Victorian Russ family. Although Charles clung to the assumption of wealth and comfort the rest of his life, he did not have it long. Patrick would hear of the family’s former lifestyle and have glimpses of it in heirlooms and the indulgences of his father but did not grow up with the blessings of wealth himself. The remainder of the family fortune was now distributed. To Sidney, Mater left Carl’s gold medal from the Paris Exhibition of 1878 and a diamond earring, which, she instructed, was to be made into a ring or scarf pin. She left her daughter Bertha a “diamond and pearl earring to be made into a brooch, my sapphire and diamond ring, my gold bracelet with diamond and my gold glasses, and also my case containing a toilet set in cut glass bottles with silver tops.” Charles received Carl’s diamond ring. And so on down the line went the jewelry, along with instructions for its use.
But what Charles desperately needed was money. His father had left half of his estate to his children, which meant that it was split twelve ways. The other half had gone to Emily, but now she chose to divide all her money—save the £50 that she left to Florence, her servant—between her two sisters, Alice Callaway and Eliza Cooper.
In the space of six months, Charles had been present at the deaths of both his wife and his mother. He was devastated. In the past, he had taken pleasure in setting up elaborate toy train systems, complete with trestles and several gauges of tracks, with his boys. Godfrey was the master engineer while Victor, a collector of lead soldiers, played commander of the troops, setting up army depots. Mike, Bun, and Pat served as assistants and enthusiastic spectators. But now Charles grew more aloof, more the master and disciplinarian.
To escape his painful reality, he redoubled his work efforts. He had previously turned his attention to research involving the eye, and, in 1918, he patented an eye-ray instrument set in motion by the human eye—“i.e., by vision,” as he described it. “The instrument is the practical embodiment … of experiments which I have made to ascertain whether there is a ray or radiation proceeding from the human eye,” he explained in his patent description, though he did not suggest practical applications for the instrument. Despite his optimism, it would not be a lucrative invention.
Charles continued to treat gonorrhea patients with electrolysis and carefully measure the results. In 1920, he published The Conquest of Venereal Diseases, and in 1922, Gonorrhoea Treated by Electrolysis: Results in 500 Cases, which presented evidence to support his work. But it was an uphill battle, and, with expenses mounting at home and his income unsteady, he was struggling financially.
Domestically, the children were in the care of a widow named Mrs. Newton, who had been a colonel in the precursor to the Women’s Army Corps and sometimes wore her war ribbons and medals on her large bosom. Her military experience proved handy in the present situation, and she was able to keep the troops mostly in line. Though not altogether approving of her methods, Charles, preoccupied with his work, was reluctant to interfere. So the children rebelled in all manner of bad behavior. Michael proved to be the most creative at tormenting Mrs. Newton when he decided to see how long it would take to fill up the umbrella stand with urine. Mrs. Newton soon caught wind of the caper and put an end to it.
Mrs. Newton eventually gave way to another widow, a Mrs. Ashmore, whose husband, the manager of a salt mine in South Africa, had been overly fond of the bottle. Her style was entirely different from Mrs. Newton’s and far more pleasing. She befriended the children, who liked her more than anyone since Hanty Mason. Mrs. Ashmore was appealing in other ways as well. After Uncle William returned from France in 1919, he took a fancy to her. But apparently she had set her sights on marrying her tall, handsome employer.
It was not to be. Mrs. Ashmore was succeeded by Scotch Annie, who was already part of the domestic staff, in charge of doing the shopping. But Scotch Annie did not like to leave the house, let alone go to the market, so she regularly bribed one of the children with a penny to run her errands. Scotch Annie did garden, though, as did the children, each of whom had his or her own plot at Willesden.
Naturally, they competed in every way imaginable, as siblings will do, to see who could produce the prettiest flowers or the largest vegetables and win the praise of their seniors. This competition among the impatient children often led, of course, to an excess of gardening enthusiasm, usually to the detriment of the poor plants, carrots being prematurely uprooted for inspection, new sprouts being greeted with overabundant libations, delicate flowers being pawed.
Nevertheless, their hands-on experience taught the budding young horticulturalists a thing or two about gardening. One costly lesson arrived in the form of a cage of bantam hens, which Charles had received in lieu of cash as payment for his medical services. The boys built a henhouse. But the cunning hens managed to escape en masse and wreaked havoc in the garden. They were soon dispatched.
So, too, were the older children. Godfrey had enrolled at Dean Close School, an evangelical Church of England school in Cheltenham, as early as 1915, and Victor the next year. In 1921, Michael and Bun, who, like his Uncle Sidney, was just eight years old when he left home, matriculated at Shebbear College, the alma mater of the previous generation of Russ brothers. The boys quickly assumed their father’s and uncles’ collective nickname, “the spindoos,” for their long spindly legs and were hazed with boyish brutality, including floggings with knotted wet towels and burns from cigarettes.
Olive, Connie, and Nora attended Edgehill College, just fifteen miles from Shebbear, and so boarded the same train for Devon as Mike and Bun. Although the schools were not far by train from Willesden—the British rail system being probably the best in the world at the time—during holidays all five stayed in North Devon with three spinster sisters, Kittie, Ethie, and Trixie Hill, at London Lodge, a gatehouse of the grand eighteenth-century estate Clovely Court. Though it was not home, they were treated kindly by the Hills, who became substitute aunts.
Despite this breakup of the family and the distance from their father, the children adjusted. Yet they would remain bitter about spending holidays on their own, an understandable complaint since Charles seems to have made a conscious decision to keep them at arm’s length. Ultimately they fared better than Pat, who was too young and too sickly for boarding school, and thus remained at home in the now almost empty house, perhaps sometimes staying with aunts or uncles or friends of the family.
Although Joan had been sent away as an infant, she at least had the advantage of living in a stable household with her Aunt Bertha, Uncle Frank, and cousins Margaret and Christine. Even Uncle Morse shipped out in August 1921, on board the Empress of India, since the Empress of Canada was still not yet ready for sea. With Charles buried in his work at Beaumont Street or in his inventions (in November 1921, he applied for a patent for his improvements on airtight tins), this was a low point for the family.
But there was reason for optimism. The slimmed-down family, namely Pat, had a new governess, Zoe Center, the daughter of a Staffordshire vicar. She proved to be the tonic that the family so badly needed, in more ways than one. She was charming, beautiful, and comfortably situated if not wealthy. She apparently doted on Pat, and she certainly smote his father.
Like Charles, Zoe had suffered tremendously. In World War I, her husband, William Center, a surgeon, had served on board the battleship Russell in the heavily mined Dardanelles. So strategic were these waters that First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill had declared to the fleet commander, “The results to be gained [in the Dardanelles] are … great enough to justify the loss of ships and men if success cannot be obtained without it.” It could not be. Before dawn on April 27, 1916, HMS Russell struck two, mines, caught fire, and sank. Center died from burns and gas poisoning from flaming cordite.
Patrick’s eighth birthday was the most exciting of his young life. A week later he would have a new mother. It had been four years since Jessie’s death, four crucial years with a gaping void in his life. But now his father chose well, especially for Pat. Although he would always lament the loss of his mother, this new addition to the family would go far in righting his world, or at least in making it bearable. He would grow very fond of his stepmother, as would all the boys.
On December 20, 1922, at St. Paul’s Church in Knightsbridge, Charles Russ, now forty-five, married Zoe Center, a year younger. The two chose to honeymoon in Malta, where they went to pay their respects to the departed William Center at plot 43 in the Malta Naval Cemetery, across the Grand Harbour from Valletta. This act of sentimentality was something of an aberration for Charles, who was never able to open up emotionally to his children.
The trip says much for Zoe’s determination to preserve the memory of her first husband, something she would accomplish far beyond her imagination. For Patrick became her dear boy. What favorite son does not dream of fulfilling his mother’s most longed-for wish? Patrick’s finest fictional character, of course, would be a naval surgeon.