Alice Mary Bacon died, aged 93 years, 11½ months.
Entry in the Agapemone diary for
Friday, 30 December 1949
I missed Alice. Sailing the paper boats she had taught me to make just wouldn’t be the same. And I wished I had known when she was alive that Alice had taught herself French so well she could ‘speak it like a native’, despite never having been to France.
‘We were always being complimented on our French,’ said Mummy after the old lady had been laid to rest in the churchyard of St Margaret’s, Spaxton’s village church, two days into the new year. Mummy and I had gone for a short walk along the narrow lanes, with their high, bare hedges, which surrounded the community. ‘And it was Alice who taught us.’
My New Year’s resolution had been to emulate Alice and surprise everyone at school with my sudden skill. I imagined the look of surprise on my French teacher’s face as I prattled away during the first lesson of the post-Christmas term.
‘Didn’t you learn French at school?’ I asked my mother.
‘None of us went to school.’
I stopped mid-stride. I frowned and turned to my mother. ‘You didn’t go to school? Ever?’
Imagine never having to experience those scratchy new clothes that made me feel abandoned at the start of each new erm. And at the end of each holiday never again being obsessed with ‘This time next month (or week or tomorrow) I will be back at school.’
‘We were educated at home.’ My mother reached to pull me from the middle of the road. ‘How I longed to go to boarding school, Kit. Have school friends, get away, see life. I was determined you three would have what I had longed for as a child.’ A sad little smile twitched at her lips. ‘You know, I read every Angela Brazil book I could get hold of.’
I had read these tales of ‘jolly-hockey-stick’ girls at boarding schools after coming across a whole bookshelf of them in one of the attic rooms. Many of them had been inscribed with: ‘Lavita, with love from Toto.’ They were good stories, although none of the ones I had read seemed to deal with the overwhelming need to cry that I experienced at the start of each new term.
‘But why didn’t you go to school?’
‘We weren’t allowed to.’ She pursed her lips against indiscretion.
‘But why?’
‘You’ll understand when you’re older.’
The same old answer. But just when would I be old enough?
I asked Toto. She explained that Alice had learnt French in order to teach Belovèd’s children and that other members of the community had volunteered their services to teach his children English, mathematics, including algebra and geometry, Latin and astronomy (perhaps because Halley’s Comet had swung by within hours of my mother’s birth). Then there were the obligatory singing and dancing.
‘But why weren’t Mummy and the two uncles allowed to go to school?’ I persevered.
Toto stared at me from behind her bottle-end glasses. ‘Dear me, that wouldn’t have done at all.’
‘Why not?’
‘They weren’t like other children, Kitty, dear. After all, they were the—’ She hesitated and then finished. ‘Belovèd’s children.’
‘Like the princesses, being the King’s children?’
Relief flooded her face. ‘Yes, my child, rather like the princesses.’ I went to bed that night proud of our exclusivity.
Alice’s earthly possessions still lay untouched in her third-floor bedroom when my sisters and I returned home for Easter. Margaret and I could resist the temptation no longer. Waiting until the house was silent and the old ladies resting in their rooms, we crept into Alice’s bedroom, silently closing the door behind us.
For the next two hours, we rifled through the room: drawers still stuffed with underwear and nightdresses edged with broderie anglaise; the small wardrobe with its meagre collection of shapeless dresses. In her bedside table we found a Bible, a thick caramelcoloured book with no title on the spine, and a whole pile of the squares of brightly coloured paper that Alice had used to fashion the boats.
‘Put them down,’ Margaret whispered when she saw me fingering the pieces of paper. I was wishing I had paid more attention to Alice’s instructions. My sister sighed and tucked the papers into her pocket. ‘I’ll show you how to make them – but later.’
For the next hour, we forced our feet into the shabby, buttoned shoes lined up tidily under the bed, fastening them with a buttonhook we found in the cheap china tray on the chest of drawers. We used the glove stretcher, also in the tray, to prise open the fingers of a pair of tiny elbow-length gloves we came across in the tallboy. We each dangled long strands of black beads around our necks and fought over Alice’s only hat, a wide-brimmed black straw affair. We strutted and giggled and collapsed in muffled hoops of helpless laughter before settling down on the floor to play a hand or two of cribbage on the board we had found tucked away in a bottom drawer.
Suddenly, Margaret held up a warning finger. ‘Shh!’
She stood up and walked to the bedroom door, opening it slightly.
Through the crack in the door came the unmistakable sound of kettles being filled in the housemaid’s cupboard, far away at the top of the back stairs leading down to the kitchens. Rest time was over. Stealthily, we changed back into our own clothes, returning everything to its approximate place, except for the glove stretchers, beads and the pile of squared paper, which we secreted in our pockets. Margaret stuffed the china tray up her jumper.
I was still excited about our adventure at bedtime. Margaret promised to sneak into my room after Waa had turned out my light. We never shared bedrooms. When you live in a mansion with so many empty rooms, after all, there is no point; we simply changed bedrooms at will each holiday, just for the fun of it. Or rather my sisters did. At eight, I was still thought too young for such freedom of choice – anyway, I was scared of the dark and secretly didn’t want to sleep in the attic rooms they chose.
‘. . . And they lived happily ever after.’ Toto smiled at me over the spine of the book of fairy tales. Her hand reached over to stroke my hair. I faked a noisy yawn. ‘You’re tired, child,’ she whispered. The mattress and her knees creaked as she rose. Her hand went to her mouth, covering an answering yawn. ‘And so am I.’
‘Goodnight, Toto.’ I said.
‘Goodnight, my child.’ The room went dark. I listened as her footsteps trailed away.
Wide awake, I sat up again and waited. Soon, the door opened and Margaret’s dark head peered round. ‘Kitty?’
‘Yes!’
The door closed behind her, plunging us once again into near-total darkness. She was loaded down with her night-time carafe of water, a candle in a holder plus a box of matches, and the china tray we had removed from Alice’s bedroom that afternoon. She set everything down on my bedside table, drew up a chair and then struck a match. The room blazed with flickering light. I hugged my knees. I knew what was coming.
‘Bonfires!’ I exclaimed. I loved this game.
Tipping out the contents of the matchbox, we began building a tower with the matches – four one way, four the other, with the tips facing alternate directions.
Fifteen minutes later, we had a tower several inches high. We would have finished sooner, but we had to stop and blow out the candle twice when footsteps came and went as the old ladies readied themselves for bed.
‘There!’ Margaret pronounced at last.
It was an amazing sight. A tower built of matches. I hardly dared breathe, in case I blew it over.
Handing me my carafe of water – ‘Just in case!’ – she struck one of the few remaining matches and held the flame to those on the bottom layer of the tower. There was a series of little explosions as the first four match tips caught fire. The flames licked the next layer. They caught. Soon, the tower was ablaze.
‘Eiee!’ I shouted as the tower began to tip toward me. I aimed the water at the now dying fire. Margaret hurled most of the contents of her carafe at the smouldering pile of blackened matchsticks. Then she turned on me. Soon we were hurling water at each other.
‘Girls!’ Waa was standing in the doorway.
We froze. Margaret edged toward the bedside table in an effort to hide the remnants of our bonfire. I climbed back into bed, hiding my soaking nightie.
‘Sorry, Waa!’ offered Margaret.
‘We were only playing,’ I added.
Our nanny sniffed the air. ‘I can smell matches!’
With one hand, Margaret proffered the candle and the nearempty box of matches. The other she thrust behind her back, gesturing to me to get rid of the evidence. Hidden behind her, I began to sweep the burnt matches into a sock I’d providentially discovered in my bed.
‘Really, you girls!’ Taking possession of the candle and matches, Waa sighed heavily as she peered at Margaret’s soaking front. ‘You’re all wet.’
‘We were having a water fight,’ Margaret confessed.
Our long-suffering nanny shook her head. ‘I’ll be back in five minutes with dry nighties.’ She turned to leave. ‘You girls will be the death of me!’
But she was smiling. I could hear it in her voice.
A couple of weeks later, both of my sisters went fox-hunting and I decided to try rooting on my own. For once, I decided, there would be no one to boss me around – or acquire the best finds. I waited until everyone was resting and the only sounds were the ticking of the numerous clocks throughout the mansion and the muffled snores from the bedrooms. My goal was the large, comfortable room above the centre bay window of the dining room, known as ‘Katie’s Room’. ‘You would have loved her; everyone did,’ said Waa, when I had asked who this mysterious Katie had been. I knew that she had died long before I was born and that I had been named Catherine in her honour.
When I stealthily entered the room one afternoon, it seemed less crowded by furniture than most of the old ladies’ rooms I had been in – invited and not. I was fascinated by the black-lacquered chest of drawers set against one wall, covered with Chinese scenes painted in what looked like gold, and the plain mahogany tallboy by the door. And the room had a raised dais in front of the window. Anyone seated in either of the two armchairs there had an unobstructed view of the garden.
I started with the tallboy. The top drawer was filled with reels of thread, thimbles and scissors. The next one contained papers, some covered with sketches in pencil, pen and ink, and even watercolours, most of which weren’t even as good as Margaret’s. I delved further. Spotting a small photograph album, I pulled it free and squatted on the Indian rug to leaf through it.
It said ‘Views’ on the front, written in Gothic script. But the first photograph wasn’t of a view. A group of sixteen women were seated in two rows before a greenhouse. I felt a jolt of recognition as I looked at the picture. I jumped up and looked out of the window, towards the row of cottages flanking the lower lawn. Even from this distance I could see the change in the colour of the bricks, marking where the greenhouse in the picture had once stood. The women wore clothes not too different from those I saw every day in my home – long sleeves and ankle-length skirts – with hair caught up in a bun. Below the photo a row of names had been painstakingly written in copperplate script.
The name Aggie matched the woman on the far left of the back row. I looked closer at the smiling figure in the photo. It was a much younger version of the elderly cook who shooed me from her kitchens when she was busy. The next seven names meant little to me, except the last: May! There was no mistaking my paternal grandmother’s determined chin, which people tell me I have inherited, or the glittering dark eyes I now see in my youngest son. I peered closer, fascinated at coming across such incontrovertible proof of our complicated family relationships. Eventually, I turned my attention to the front row. Esther, who had died earlier that year, was on the left and next to her sat a smiling young woman in a black dress with a cameo brooch at her neck. It was Waa. And seated three seats away was Ellen, whom I knew as a fussy, over-burdened elderly woman – nothing like the svelte, attractive woman in the picture.
I began to turn the album’s pages. The first few photos were pictures of my home. How different it looked to its ramshackle present. Those manicured, sweeping lawns and shaded walks. I kept turning and came to more photos of people. The woman wore long dresses with leg-o’-mutton sleeves and wide-brimmed hats, the men striped blazers, breeches and straw hats.
In one photo, a young and apparently naked young man sat on a stony beach with his back to the camera, his dark hair glinting in the sun. ‘J.V. Read, Esq.’ I looked closer. Surely this must be my grandfather! The rest of the snapshots were of groups of young people– J.V. Read among them, according to many of the captions – picnicking, cycling, playing tennis on the upper lawn, even painting windows. They looked happy and relaxed. And who wouldn’t, with such a lot of company. At the very end there was a picture of three young women, one of whom – Phoebe Ker, without spectacles – was chatting by a tennis net. The other two were Nellie Bush and a smiling Emily Hine.
I laid the album aside and delved deeper in the drawer, pulling at the corner of a sheet of paper. ‘My dearest sister,’ it read at the top. The address was High Street, Orpington, Kent, and the date – it was hard to make out in the old-fashioned handwriting, but it was perhaps 1910, the year my mother was born. The rest of the letter looked like some kind of strange puzzle. It had been written normally, from left to right, but then, to perhaps use all available space, the paper had been turned sideways and the writing continued across the already filled page.
‘Katie, I worry so much about you,’ I read aloud slowly. ‘I cannot bear to think . . .’ The next few lines were an impossible jumble, and then, ‘. . . no understanding . . . I can safely say . . . to your pure nature. . .’ Frustrated, I turned the page. ‘You know we would welcome you . . . With all my love, your devoted sister, Helen.’
People really were strange back then, I decided. Fancy signing yourself like that! Wouldn’t this Katie know who her sister was? I returned the letter to the drawer and pulled out a dark-red bound sketchbook with endpapers decorated to look like marble. In the centre of the first blank page was an ink drawing of an ivy leaf, and within the leaf were written the words: ‘Un petit souvenir d’amitié offert au génie et à l’amité par H. Allen à sa bien aimée amie Elizabeth Maber.’ The rest of the pages were filled with sketches of children, young men and women in elegant regency attire, but only the faces were finished, in delicate watercolours: a young man wearing a regency frilly cravat and knee breeches sits holding paintbrushes and an artist’s palette; two little girls in bonnets and long dresses dangle titbits for a begging dog. But especially I loved the sketch of three young children – two curly-haired girls, and a boy wearing a cutaway jacket and long pants – caught at the top of a staircase by a tall young man standing framed in a doorway. They looked guilty. The adult wore an expression of mock sternness, the kind I imagined on my father, had he been around to catch us doing something we shouldn’t have been.
I stopped, aware of a snuffling sound behind me. Gay must have heard me. Quickly, I shoved everything but the sketchbook back in the drawer, pushed it shut and tiptoed to the door.
‘Go away!’ I whispered.
A paw scratched in reply.
I opened the door. ‘Bad dog,’ I whispered. Hiding the sketchbook under my jumper, I crept out. It took me days of struggle with an old French dictionary to get even the faintest idea of the meaning of the words written in the front of the sketchbook.