Grace Ker left here for Liverpool en route to New York after fortnight’s stay.
Entry in the Agapemone diary for
Friday, 22 July 1949
When Toto’s niece Grace left for her Long Island home, her American energy went with her. My sisters and I would miss the retired headmistress’s praise; she was always admiring our intelligence and the standard of our learning. What I didn’t realise at the time was that those fulsome compliments were also subtle criticism of our mother’s and uncles’ lack of education.
Toto had tears in her eyes as she waved goodbye to the Rolls-Royce as it swept out of the gates just after eight o’clock in the morning, with Uncle David at the wheel and Grace seated beside him. I ran after the old lady as she returned inside and sadly made her way up to what she called her eyrie in the attic.
‘Shall I make you tea and toast on your stove, Toto?’ I called up after her disappearing feet.
The black-buttoned shoes paused in their climb. ‘I’ll manage, thank you, Kitty,’ she called down. ‘But it would be very nice to see you after you’ve finished your own breakfast.’ The shoes continued to plod upwards, like those of a tired mountaineer.
I loved visiting Toto’s room, two floors above the dining room. It looked out over the overgrown gardens to the long, stone balustrade that topped the bank, hiding the fruit cages, vegetable gardens and greenhouses. On a clear day, it was possible to see the outline of the Quantock Hills in the distance. We often played a hand or two of rummy or bezique, a complicated card game popular when Toto had been a girl 80 years earlier.
After lunch, I spent ‘quiet time’ in the orchard helping Edward corral the bullocks Uncle Pat had bought at the Bridgwater market two days before. Then I played a round of solitary croquet with the set that was kept in a room in the stables, along with the bucketful of old, featherless shuttlecocks and the mouse-nibbled badminton net, which had fallen apart when I had tried to unroll it. But it wasn’t much fun playing on my own and, besides, I was still worried about Toto, so I returned to her room, lugging a heavy St Nicholas Magazine album. This bound copy of six months’ worth of the once-popular American illustrated magazine ‘for young folks’ was one of more than a dozen volumes sent to my mother and her brothers by Toto’s brother when they were children in the early 1900s.
‘Shall we save the book for tonight?’ Toto really was sad. Normally nothing would prevent her reading to me, even though it meant she had to hold the book just inches from her nose in order to see the print clearly.
‘Tell me about when you were young,’ I asked encouragingly.
I loved her reminiscences about life as a young woman in early Victorian times. Wealthy yet plain, but with a highly developed social conscience, the young Phoebe Ker had worked among the very poorest in the London slums, taking succour to barefoot children, beggars and tramps, and all those ‘poor people’, she said, who were ‘so close to complete destitution’.
‘Just like in that clever Mr Dickens’ stories,’ she added, and then sighed. ‘Oh, dear. Those poor children. But, thankfully, things are so much better now.’
Working in the slums was how she had heard about my grandfather. One day she had accompanied her father to one of Dear Belovèd’s services in a rented room in Clapton. She had soon become a regular. ‘I was at the formal opening of your grandfather’s splendid Ark of the Covenant,’ she told me.
‘Ark of the Covenant?’ I had learned about the Ark of the Covenant at school. ‘Wasn’t that where the Ten Commandments were kept?’
‘It was,’ replied Toto. ‘But it was also what Belovèd – and all of us – called his church in London. That was our holy of holies.’ She sighed and stared into the distance, as if gazing upon it once again. ‘We all gave money toward its building. It was so special.’
‘What kind of special?’
‘It was where . . . it is very beautiful.’ Toto’s face became suffused with joy – and regret. ‘Oh, they were such happy times,’ she said with a sigh.
I had a sudden thought. ‘Is that a picture of it in my grandfather’s study?’
‘I expect so, dear,’ Toto went on. ‘But it’s not used any more. Like so much since Dear Belovèd . . .’ She sighed and shook her head, as if in disbelief. ‘What a terrible time it was. We just never dreamed . . .’
‘What?’
She turned toward me, her eyes huge and melancholy behind the bottle lenses of her glasses. ‘That he would . . .’ her voice sank to a whisper, ‘. . . pass over.’
How else would they get to heaven? Besides, not a school holiday passed without the death of one of the elderly women I lived with.
‘I had to get Lavita away.’
I was confused. ‘Why?’
‘She and her dear father had been so close.’
I had often been told the story of my mother’s stay on Long Island, where she and Toto had stayed with Toto’s brother and his family. It was where my mother had learned to swim and canoe. But I never realised the trip had taken place because her father had just died.
‘Didn’t Granny mind her going away?’ I asked.
‘It was a very, very difficult time for everyone, but most of all for your grandmother.’
‘Mummy wishes she could have stayed in America for ever.’
‘And my brother’s family would have had dear Lavita to live with them. But it would never have done, Kitty. Lavita belonged here.’
* * *
The next afternoon, when the house was silent but for a few distant, muffled snores, I decided to take a closer look at this church and sneaked into the room that had been my grandfather’s study but was now where my grandmother, mother and uncles took their meals. For once, Uncle Pat wasn’t in the armchair by the fire, listening to the afternoon’s horseracing on the radio and leaping up between races to dash out to the telephone room, where he would shout his bets down the phone to his bookie. He was busy rounding up his bullocks, which had escaped into the vegetable garden. I had gone to help, but he had shouted at me, so I’d decided to leave him and Edward to chase them back to the orchard by themselves. Sometimes Mummy would make a sudden appearance in search of another library book. Once, Uncle David had appeared through the French windows that looked out onto the little garden outside the chapel. I had ducked down behind the sofa and hidden there until I heard him snoring, then had made my escape. And one day Margaret and I both got trapped between the tall Chinese screen and the upright piano. For once, she had made no effort to make me giggle because she would have got into more trouble than me, as she was so much older.
But today I would be safe. Waa was making and mending our school uniforms for the coming year. With three of us to sew for, that would be sure to take all afternoon. On his return from dropping Grace at the railway station, Uncle David had driven Mummy and my sisters to their riding lessons – mine was the next morning. It would be supper before they were back because Mummy and Uncle David would be sure to call into a pub on the way home.
I tiptoed to where the small, framed black-and-white photograph of the ornate stone church hung by the mantelpiece. How exotic it looked – dark stone with every corner, edge and flying buttress outlined in a different white stone. Even the tall spire and the baby spires each side of the tower were white. I leaned closer, realising something strange. No gravestones, just manicured lawn. Maybe the picture had been taken before anyone was buried there.
And this was ours! I didn’t know anyone else who owned a church! Gosh, we must be important – and rich – I thought.