Hampstead Village, London NW3, is now such a desirable residential area that you can’t find anywhere to buy a reel of cotton or a stick of licorice. When I was a small girl in Hampstead in the Twenties, there were sheep grazing on Hampstead Heath, chair menders, knife grinders, and muffin men in the streets (the muffin men, like the sheep, were seasonal), lamplighters who walked at dusk from gas lamp to gas lamp, and small shops that sold pennyworths of licorice and Phillips soles, with which you repaired your own shoes. Milk came round in a pony cart. There were still plenty of horse-drawn vans.
At 11 a.m. on Armistice Day, no matter what day of the week it was, the traffic stopped dead for two minutes. That was hard on the horses if they were on one of Hampstead’s steep hills, and the drivers sometimes threw out a drag, like a kind of anchor, to keep from slipping. But during those two minutes, you really listened to the silence. Not that Hampstead, in those days, was in any way a noisy place. Today, it is very different, full of cars and bustling shoppers.
Our home was No. 34 Well Walk. The Well is still there, on the north side of the street, although it no longer connects with the Hampstead spa water, which was the right thing to drink in the eighteenth century and apparently contained enough iron to make it the colour of dark sherry. The spa itself lost favour, but the rows of small houses like ours, built for the visitors, remained. No. 34 was a Queen Anne house with two rooms on each floor, which my father rented for £40 a year.
He was a journalist, and at that time had to write a weekly humorous article for Punch. A messenger boy cycled up from the printer’s in Mount Pleasant to collect the copy. Being funny is a very hard way to earn a living, and as my brother and I listened to my father pacing to and fro in the study overhead, our hearts ached for him. Usually, the boy sat whistling cheerfully in the hall until past the last possible moment. Nothing had to be typed, however—printers, in those days, still worked, if necessary, straight from handwriting.
Meanwhile, like so many other children, we produced our own weekly, humorous article and all, on an almost unmanageable device, a John Bull toy printing set. Why our mag was called IF, or Howl Ye Bloodhounds, I can’t remember now.
Well Walk has always been a place for writers and painters. No. 40 was No. 6 when the great English landscape painter Constable lived there with his two motherless daughters (who, at times, got out of hand and put a broomstick through one of his canvases). D. H. Lawrence lived at No. 32, and eloped from No. 40. I don’t pretend that as a small girl I had heard of him, but because poetry was read to us at the earliest possible age, I did hear of John Keats. He and his brother Tom lodged, in 1817—18, at No. 46, just past the pub on the corner—once the Green Man, now, rather more grandly, the Wells Hotel. Their landlord was a Mr Bentley, at that time the only postman in Hampstead. He was kindness itself when poor Tom died of TB, and helped John to move his books out, carrying them in a clothesbasket.
In my Well Walk days, No. 46 had long since been knocked down. The trouble was Keats’s ghost. Two doors from us lived a quiet, well-established actor, Leslie Banks. His life was made intolerable by taps (gas and water) being turned on and off by unseen hands and a rich, mysterious smell of cigar smoke in the garden. Why Keats, who didn’t smoke and could never have seen a house with gas and water laid on, should have been blamed for the haunting, I don’t know. A priest was called in to exorcise the unwelcome presence, but the cigar smoke continued to drift.
Before I went away to school I had lessons in the afternoons with Miss Lucas, a retired infant teacher who lived in a discreet room within walking distance. Miss Lucas was devoted to her ginger tomcat, Bubbles, a rapist and pillager who ranged the neighbourhood, springing through unwisely opened kitchen windows and helping himself to large pieces of fish from the slate shelves of other people’s larders. Bubbles was almost as broad as he was long.
One day Miss Lucas confided something in a low tone to my mother. ‘You will think me very foolish, but I have engaged myself to be married.’ Before long a coughing, grumbling, sodden-looking man—‘this is Mr Green, my husband’—was seen occupying Bubbles’s favourite armchair by the front window. ‘Work of any kind makes him feel dizzy,’ Miss Lucas explained. My mother worried. Surely he was after her savings? But, in fact, Miss Lucas had a strange need for arrant, repulsive selfishness in her companions. Bubbles (now sulky) had done pretty well at this, but he couldn’t compare with Mr Green.
By autumn, Mr Green had moved away from the window and must certainly have been close to the fire, which was the only place in any room in those days, except possibly the kitchen, where you could get properly warm. There was no heating at No. 34, and it needed real resolution to face the chilly climb upstairs to bed.
Our beloved coal fires, of course, polluted London and clouded its skies, but they made incomparable toast, and on late-winter afternoons (when the fifth post of the day arrived through the letterbox) they created a glowing illusion of security and peace that can never be recovered. And if you were thought to be poorly, you might have the fire lit in your bedroom. Then, as you dropped off to sleep, it would throw a changing shadow play across the reflection of its broad golden light on the ceiling. By morning, it had died down, but there was still a breath of warmth left in the room. I used to get dressed under the bedclothes and make (like a seal under ice) a small clear patch to look through on the frosty window. Our neighbours, a husband and wife who were retired missionaries, might be venturing out onto the glassy pavement with their knitted socks over their boots. This was the way they had managed, I was told, in Tibet.
The Queen Anne houses on Well Walk have fared very well, through time. They are all still there just as I remember them. In later years, I passed No. 34 quite often. The knocker looked wrong because it seemed much lower than it once had, but the front door was painted the same green. Then, a few years ago, I had a telephone call from the owner of the house. She was someone I had known as a little girl and hadn’t seen since she married. Now she was moving, with her small daughter, to a new home in Dorset. Everything was packed up, they were going that very afternoon, would I like to see the house once again before she locked up? She meant, would I like to see my childhood once again? Yes, all things considered, I would.
Because so much had been crated up, I could easily imagine our furniture back in the empty spaces. The little boiler (though surely it can’t have been the same one) was in the same place in the dark basement kitchen. The built-in solid shelves were still there, and with no effort at all I could conjure up the old standbys—arrowroot, suet, sago, blacklead, starch, Reckitt’s Blue, Monkey Brand soap, Borwick’s Baking Powder. I’m not sure I’d know what to do with sago or blacklead now.
A passage led from the kitchen, past the small dining room and out into the garden. In my time, the back of the house had been covered with a vine. The sooty grapes had ripened, I think, only in one year—the heat wave of 1926. The vines were gone, but the indestructible fig tree, usually figless, still offered its shade.
On the ground floor of the house, I looked into the room where my brother had laid out endless war games on the worn-out Turkey rug. I was allowed to run the field hospital, wearing my nurse’s outfit. My brother disposed of the toy troops, which included Serbian light infantry, the King’s African Rifles and Generals, with their staff, on horseback. When all the forces were drawn up, we opened the door and let the dog in. He rushed towards us with a furiously wagging tail, and everything he knocked over counted as a casualty. Then he was banished once again, protesting, to the garden.
At the top of two more flights of steep, narrow stairs was, and is, the bathroom, dear to me, as it is to most children. The window had a tremendous view to the southwest. On a clear day you could see the Houses of Parliament, and the flag on top of the building that showed that they were sitting. Miss Lucas had told me that they were all hard at work there to keep us safe and at peace, since the last war (in which my father had been wounded) had been the war to end wars. Although the bathroom window is still there, just as it was in my youth, the view has definitely changed. Today, hundreds of new buildings fill the skyline, and you can no longer see Westminster from Well Walk.
Nowadays, the chair menders, knife grinders and muffin men have vanished from Hampstead. Up and down the High Street, it seems that the only way for shopkeepers to pay the rent is to regularly open and close restaurants and boutiques. During my childhood, there were none of these in Hampstead. People did go out to dinner in restaurants, of course, but that meant dressing up and making an expedition into London. As for boutiques, Gazes the drapers sold all that you were likely to want in the button, woollens, stocking, and knicker line. But you had to know what you wanted: the stock was not on display, but was kept in deep wooden drawers behind the counter. There was a bead shop where beads were sold separately; in those days, Hampstead women wore long necklaces ending in a tassel. I used to be allowed to help to sort out the beads: amber, ivory, jet, cornelian, jade, and the cheaper ones made of sealing wax, china, and glass. In the windows of Knowles Brown, the clock-maker, there was a wonderful sight—a silver clock in the shape of a panting spaniel whose tongue moved up and down with every tick.
A few years ago, Knowles Brown closed down. He was last of the old Hampstead tradesmen, I think, and now there is hardly anyone who remembers the way it used to be.
Daily Mail, 1994
When my father was demobilized from the army in 1919 he had no job to go to and nowhere to live. He was supporting his wife and two small children by writing a poem every week for Punch. Before the war he had taken the lease (or so he thought) of a small house looking on to Hampstead Heath, in London. But now it turned out that the writer Katherine Mansfield was living in it, and although she disliked the place it seems to have been impossible to ask her to leave. So, when I was two years old, we went to live in Balcombe, in West Sussex.
That meant I had my own room, looking out over a lawn with a cherry tree, splendid with white blossom in spring and splendid, too, in the cherry season—but then the birds more or less lived in it, and I can’t think there was ever much fruit left for us. With the walnut tree we did better. Mrs Ticehurst, who came in once a week to help out, knew the best (she said the only) recipe for walnut ketchup. Unfortunately, it was unaffordable: a hundred very young green walnuts, half a pint of best port wine, anchovies, brandy, horseradish, nutmeg, wine vinegar. Mrs Ticehurst herself admitted she had never made it. She pickled the walnuts, and so did we.
The garden was small, I suppose, for the country. I have been back to look at it since, but only once. I prefer to think of it as it was then, when I knew it was enormous. A large garden is one that a tame rabbit can get lost in, and my brother’s rabbit was lost most of the time. I, too, had my hiding place. This was between the bushes of a double rose hedge that ran along one side of the lawn. They must, I think, have been Rosa gallica; they certainly grew too tall for a tidy-looking hedge. Where I used to sit, beneath the level of the crowded leaves and the pink flowers, the ground was never quite dry, and the light fell only in patches. You could sit in a patch of sunlight and move along with it gradually as it shifted.
After a while I would be called back into the house to help. I couldn’t be of help, but someone stood me on a chair at the kitchen table to see what was going on. I remember the business of ‘going through’ the raisins, bought from the grocer’s by the shovelful—you had to sort out the small pieces of gravel. How did they get there in the first place? The rice, too, had to be ‘picked over.’ There were so many long, slow processes, but I knew (because I had heard people say so) that we were lucky to be living in modern, labour-saving times. We had no refrigerator and no telephone, but we had a clotheswasher, worked by turning a handle, and coloured tablecloths (that needed no bleaching) and stainless-steel knives (that needed no cleaning). And however much there was to do there was a time, on hot summer afternoons, when everything seemed to run down almost to a stopping point. The garden was silent, not a murmur even from the hens in their run behind the rose hedge, and inside the house the only sound, apart from the kitchen clock, was the red-currant juice dripping slowly through the strainer into the jelly pan.
We walked long distances, my mother and I, and so did most of Balcombe’s inhabitants. Often we were delivering messages, or returning borrowed objects, or telling the baker and the grocer, who delivered three times a week, that what they had sent was not quite what had been asked for. On the way there and back, across the fields and by the roadside, I had my collecting to do. Feathers, pheasant feathers in particular, were needed for Red Indian headdresses. My brother, when he was at home, was a warrior brave and I was Minnehaha. Then there were horseshoe nails, cast horseshoes, snail shells, beechnuts, pignuts, flints, and wayside flowers. When I got home, everything was laid out on my bedroom windowsill to be counted and recounted, one of the most reassuring activities of all for a small child. Cataloguing easily becomes poetry. My mother read to me from Walter de la Mare’s Peacock Pie about the poor widow who planted her garden with weeds:
And now all summer she sits and sews
Where willow-herb, comfrey, bugloss blows,
Teasel and tansy, meadowsweet,
Campion, toadflax and rough hawksbit;
Brown-bee orchis, and Peals of Bells;
Clover, burnet, and thyme she smells…
The naming of names, as de la Mare very well understood, is halfway to having magical power over things.
From time to time Lady Denman, the most important benefactress in the neighbourhood, took me out for what was then called a joy ride in her chauffeur-driven motorcar. My brother was nearly four years older than I was and had started school, so the treat was for myself and one or two other children of the same age, sitting stiffly and wordlessly beside the chauffeur or next to Lady Denman herself in the leather-and-petrol-reeking (though sumptuous) interior. To me it was bitterly disappointing. You could see so much from a trap, where you sat high up above the fields and hedges, which seemed to be snatched away from each side of the road as the horse pounded forward. Not quite as good as a trap, but better than kind Lady Denman’s Daimler, was a ride home on the last cow when they were brought in for afternoon milking. You had to sit sideways because a cow’s backbone is as sharp as a rail and the view was limited, but the movement was delightful. The cow took not the slightest notice of me, but continued to chew as she walked. Ahead of us the majestic stomachs and udders of her companions swayed gently from side to side, and as they idled down the lane they left a trail of sweet grass-eater’s breath.
We returned to London when I was five and a half. When I look back to my years in Sussex I have to tell myself that not everything was perfect. I was frightened of chained farm dogs, and still more of ganders. I didn’t like Sussex bacon-and-suet pudding, which Mrs Ticehurst praised because it would stick to our ribs. Sometimes I was overwhelmed, standing in a field under an open blue sky, by a kind of terror at the enormity of the turning earth. I never remember feeling anything like that in London. But Balcombe was the place where for three years I had no real anxieties, and looked forward every night, as I fell asleep, to waking up the next day. My father was one of a large family, and he used to tell me that they were so happy in one of their homes (Kibworth Rectory in Leicestershire) that in later years they could always cure themselves of sleeplessness by thinking about it. I, too, if I can’t sleep, think of Balcombe.
Country Living, 1999
Twice in your life you know that you are approved of by everyone: when you learn to walk, and when you learn to read. I began to read just after I was four. The letters on the page suddenly gave in and admitted what they stood for. They obliged me completely and all at once, in whole sentences, so that I opened a book in my lair under the dining-room table and read aloud, without hesitation: ‘My hoop can only run by my side, and I often wish it was a dog and could bark.’ I was praised, and since then have never been praised so much.
In 1924, therefore, when we left Sussex and came to live in Hampstead, I went to kindergarten as a reader. The teacher gave me credit for this, but she also recognized that a six-year-old child wants to know not just some things but everything, immediately. When we sat down to draw one morning and she found that none of us could do a cow—didn’t, in fact, know whether it got up with its front legs or its hind legs first—she walked us straight across the Heath to Highgate, where there was a farm in those days, and told us to watch the cows for ourselves. In this way I learned in London what I had never noticed in the country. Afterwards, in the dairy, we had glasses of milk, one between two, and these, I am sure, she paid for herself.
I was perfectly happy at this school. Hampstead is a hill village and I walked to school up flights of steps with my sandals in my shoe bag and my exercise books, which had on the back of them calculations in gallons, pecks, troy weight, furlongs, and farthings. These were for ‘sums,’ which were then thought to have something to do with mathematics. I had a red tam o’shanter and a Liberty smock. The smock was embroidered in chain stitch, as was my shoe bag, which bore the words SHOE BAG. At home, at teatime, the hot-water jug was under a flannel cover marked HOT WATER. My mother seemed always to be at home, and by six o’clock my father was back from his work at the Punch office. I felt secure. The terms passed reassuringly, from springs to the yellow fogs of autumn, when we brought fresh skeleton leaves from the pavements to show to teacher. But at eight years old I was sent, like my brother before me, into exile and imprisonment. No one doubted that it would be best for me to go to a preparatory boarding school at Eastbourne.
They looked after us very well. The South Coast air was good for us. When we were sent out for a walk Matron told us to breathe deeply, because our parents had made great sacrifices to give us the benefit of the air. We paraded up and down the Front, strictly forbidden to put a foot on the white line at the edge, and back to the Meads between clumps of tansy and veronica. All the flowers had the curious quality of looking as though they were pressed dry, even when they first came out. As for the lessons, I came from an Evangelical background and never expected to gain anything of value without hardship. You couldn’t hope for poetry, English, music, and painting every day of the week. Wednesday (ballroom dancing, gym, geometry) was, admittedly, so terrible to me that simply to reach bedtime and know that it was over seemed an achievement in itself. But often I didn’t begin worrying about next Wednesday until quite late on Sunday evening. It was nobody’s fault, therefore, that I felt as wretched as I did. But homesickness, though I suppose it has never been clinically diagnosed, is a real illness. Indeed, many of the little girls were in worse condition than me, because they came from families in the Colonial Service. In our atlases many areas of the world were coloured pink; their parents lived there, and only came on leave at rare intervals. These were the children who cried longest at night in the dormitories. Again, the town itself, a bland resort dedicated to morning coffee and tennis, could in no way be blamed if I associated it with horror. That came about quite by chance.
In my first winter term, when, as a treat, we were taken to the skating rink, a small boy, also from one of Eastbourne’s myriad prep schools, said to me confidentially, ‘Will you help me find it?’ A skate had passed over his finger as he lay on the ice and if we could only find it, some grown-up would put it together again. But so many people flashed by, and so confusingly. A little later, I saw him being led away.
My consolations at school were the three sweets we were given after lunch, the poetry I knew by heart, and the sea. Anyone who sleeps within earshot of the sea must be considered lucky. And Debussy, after all, was sitting in one of Eastbourne’s deck chairs when he first heard the sounds of La Mer. The English Channel whispered in the darkness, above the snuffling of the homesick. In winter we were allowed to watch, at a safe distance, the white and greenish heads of foam crashing over the rails and flinging pebbles broadside across the Front.
My fondness for reading persisted and after four years I won a scholarship to Wycombe Abbey, but for me this was quite overshadowed by my failure to become a Girl Guide. To ‘get your wings’ and fly up from the Brownies to the Guides, you had to pass in General Information, knitting, and rice pudding. Our puddings, each in a small white dish rimmed with blue, were put into the kitchen range and were supposed to be cooked by inspection time. I don’t know why my pudding came out almost raw. It must have been jostled into the coolest place, at the bottom of the oven, I suppose. When I saw it I braced myself for failure but not for being called, as I was, a disgrace to the ideals of Baden-Powell. I still think that was putting things too strongly.
Six years later, safely at Oxford, I thought the whole process was over, but, of course, I was wrong. When my children began their education—although my daughters never went to boarding school—my memory opened its register and through them I lived my experiences again. It isn’t until their last report card that we are truly free. Their schooldays are over then, and so are ours.
Vogue, 1980