Tea on the Quarter-deck
I
On those days, when, instead of merely going for a ‘walk’, we made the expedition to Folkestone (either to Pay the Books or on some other domestic errand), we would mount the cliff, more often than not, by a steep track known as the ‘Cow Path’, through those thickets of elder and tamarisk where, if I was lucky, I would be able to identify the ‘nests’ of wild soldiers, and where, too, in early spring, would be delighted by the dark-green, maculate spears of the cuckoo-pint.
Sometimes, however, if the weather was bad, we would take one of the funicular lifts which plied between the Lower Road and the Folkestone Leas. The lift was an alarming affair: a cross between a train and an aeroplane. Having a bad head for heights, I could never quite accustom myself to the sight of the Lower Road falling dizzily away into the sea as we ascended; but the attendant was a fatherly, reassuring man, and I learnt, in time, to trust to his steersmanship. Arrived at the top, and once more on terra firma, I would look down at the lift ‘station’ (built of red-brick in the Edwardian villa style) with a sense of triumph at having achieved, once again, the perilous passage.
Walking along the Leas, I would observe, narrowly, the promenading crowd for familiar faces. In those days, Folkestone possessed an unrivalled collection of eccentrics; it wasn’t surprising, for the town catered, principally, for elderly rentiers, retired Colonels and invalids. On almost any morning one could observe some of these oddities; they tended, indeed – at least in the winter months – to be in a majority . . . Hobbling, dancing, lolloping along the asphalt paths, they formed a fascinating spectacle: some twittered or grimaced at us as we passed, some muttered or sang to themselves, some peered myopically from the hooded darkness of bath-chairs . . . There was, among others, a tall, rather distinguished-looking old man with a long beard who, in other respects apparently quite normal, would at every third step give a little hop-skip-and-a-jump, as though remembering the gay-polkas of his youth. Often, too, we would encounter the lady who ‘painted’ – an almost unmentionable aberration in those days; probably she was perfectly virtuous, but she was surrounded, for me, by the glamour of ‘immorality’ – a word which, though I hadn’t the faintest idea what it meant, seemed to me thrillingly evocative . . . Most memorable, however, of all these odd, aberrant figures was the elderly dame who flaunted the proud title of ‘Archduchess’. I suppose she was harmlessly mad – certainly she was no more an Archduchess than I was; but she seemed to have succeeded, to some extent, in imposing her private myth on her fellow-townsfolk, and was never referred to by any other title. Her morning promenade along the Leas had almost the quality of a Royal progress: people would stop to stare at her with a frank curiosity which, no doubt, the ‘Archduchess’ thoroughly enjoyed. Bowling along in her bath-chair, she would glare malevolently to right and left from beneath a fantastic ‘Merry Widow’ hat; her neck was encircled, on most days, by a kind of Elizabethan ruff of pink chiffon, and, tied to her ankle was, invariably, a dishevelled fragment of coloured silk which, trailing negligently along the ground, became constantly entangled with the wheels of her chair.
I was fascinated by those curious, derelict offshoots of humanity; but perhaps I didn’t find them quite so odd as they would seem to me today. For I was, after all, accustomed to them: they were, for me, merely the indigenous fauna of the Leas, and as such I took them for granted. Once in the town itself, the people we passed became less extraordinary; though even here the crowd would always include a few of those strange anthropoids, strayed from their grassy Mappin Terrace on the cliff-top.
Mostly our transactions were confined to the Sandgate Road, that broad bourgeois thoroughfare which traverses the modern ‘west-end’ of the town. Here I was familiar with the odour and atmosphere of almost every shop: there was, for instance, Gironimo’s, the pastrycooks’, where sometimes I was allowed to buy a sponge cake. From the door, as we entered, came a hot waft of air, laden with a breath-taking, paradisiac mingling of odours: newly baked bread, hot chocolate, cakes fresh from the oven. Or there was Cave’s Café, in whose window was displayed a fascinating machine rather like a steam-engine, which belched and rattled and hissed, and (as we entered the doorway) assailed our nostrils with the delicious scent of roasting coffee. Clements’ the shoe-shop, Heron’s the grocer, Maestrani’s restaurant – each of those estab-lishments had for me its particular emotive flavour; some of them we visited, others not – Maestrani’s, for instance, was for some reason forbidden territory, and I could only judge its character by the spicy, vinous odours which escaped from the constantly swinging glass doors.
Sometimes, too, on rather exceptional occasions, we would pay a visit to ‘The Office’. This was, in fact, the name by which we invariably referred to my father’s wine-business; and not only ‘we’ – the family – but every member of the firm, from the directors down to the lowest cellar-boy. To have called it the ‘shop’ would have been a solecism not easily forgiven. And indeed, when one entered it, one would have supposed it to be a bank or an estate-agent’s office, rather than a wine-merchant’s. Severe counters, with grilles; a bevy of neatly dressed clerks; etchings on the walls – it seemed highly unlikely that one could enter these grandiose premises and buy a bottle of ginger-beer; not only buy it, for that matter, but take it away under one’s arm! Yet such, indeed, was the case. In point of fact, nobody ever did anything of the kind – except for a few misguided ‘trippers’ in August (and these were not encouraged); the correct procedure was, of course, to ‘order’ one’s wine (or, possibly, even one’s ginger-beer) which was, in due course, ‘delivered’.
The smell of the ‘office’ was characteristic – a faint odour of leather, of fine cigars and (but this was the merest soupçon) of port or sherry. Usually we would go into the ‘Inner Office’ to see my father, who as often as not would be tasting wine – his thin, kindly face poised over a claret glass, his aquiline nose delicately wrinkled. He would sniff; take a sip; and then, disappearing behind a screen, spit discreetly into the sink provided. Sometimes; for a treat, I would be given a biscuit – a very thin, very dry biscuit, intended as an accompaniment to sherry. I was not, however, given any sherry, and the biscuit rather reminded me of the one which the Red Queen gave to Alice, in Through the Looking-glass.
‘Going to the Office’ was rather a solemn business altogether: I was unpleasantly reminded of going to church. Far more interesting and more memorable were our periodic visits to the Miss Hodsells. These were two sisters, a twin-archetype of that mysterious section of the community known, generically, as ‘my-little-woman-round-the-corner’.
They were, in fact, seamstresses and dressmakers on a small scale. My mother patronized them regularly; partly because they were useful and partly because they were poor. They inhabited a very dark, very small and very overcrowded little room over a shop in George Lane, the alley-way leading off Rendezvous Street. The entrance was next door to Scott-the-Dyer (where we also sometimes called: the name, for me, had a mythical quality – I associated it with such hero-figures as Herne-the-Hunter or Here-ward-the-Wake). The door led into a kind of area or lobby, roofed with glass; just inside was a sort of wire basket, standing upright on four legs, in which grew a few wilting, depressed-looking ferns. The place had a pungent and characteristic odour compounded of stale urine and escaping gas; the gas predominated; there must have been a permanent (and considerable) leakage. A flight of stone steps led up to the Hodsells’ room; perhaps there was more than one room – they must have slept on the premises – but if so, I never discovered it. Their work-room exhaled, but more faintly, the same odour as the lobby below; here, however, it was mingled with a slight taint of onions, and with that complex, indescribable smell of rooms in which the windows are never opened.
The place was crowded, not only with the Hodsells’ private possessions, which were numerous, but with the implements of their trade: three or possibly four (I cannot be certain) enormous sewing-machines, of that type which is worked, like a harmonium, by means of a treadle. As one entered, one was greeted by the busy whirr of these august and rather terrifying engines; and one detected, as one’s eyes became accustomed to the gloom, two intent, black, seated figures, like Fates employed at some interminable and mindless juggling with destiny.
The machines at last would stop; and the two Miss Hodsells would rise to greet us. One was a great deal older than the other: emaciated, grey-faced, with false teeth which rattled in her bony jaws, and a high pile of frizzy white hair. The younger sister was plumper and pinker and wore pince-nez: she was known as Miss Jenny Hodsell, to distinguish her from her sister, whose Christian name I never knew.
The elder of the two was, I imagine, the leading partner in the firm: she chattered away endlessly, her teeth clicking and rattling an accompaniment like castanets, and her gnarled, delicate fingers always busy with something – threading needles, rolling a tape-measure, gathering together little piles of odd ‘snippets’ which mustn’t be wasted.
They must have been extremely poor; yet they always seemed to have more commissions than they could deal with. Sometimes they would come down to Sandgate for a day’s work – machining, fitting, or any odd jobs in their ‘line’ which might need doing. And once, on an extraordinary and unprecedented occasion, they came over, in the summer, to our country cottage. This, I think, was purely a holiday for them; we took our tea out into the woods: and I was immensely impressed by the sight of the Miss Hodsells, dressed in their habitual, funerary black, sitting on a path among dense thickets of bracken, and drinking tea out of the tops of Thermos flasks. I hope they enjoyed that day; but I cannot help feeling that it seemed to them – as it seemed to me – an incongruous and rather embarrassing occasion. Sitting there, in their black clothes, among the bracken, they appeared disconsolate and dépaysées; they seemed to me, in such surroundings, to be birds of ill-omen. I liked them well enough – in their own special ambience; but I wasn’t prepared to cope with them here, on a hot summer afternoon, among the silent, fly-haunted thickets of Gorsley Wood.
II
A visit to the Hodsells, to the ‘Office’ or (on very rare and special occasions) to Upton Bros., the toyshop – our mornings in Folkestone seldom lacked some element of interest or excitement . . . We would return, punctually in time for lunch, along the Lower Road; alert with hunger and a slight, rather pleasant fatigue, I would be, on those occasions, abnormally receptive to familiar sights and sounds. The undercliff, apart from its real and mythological inhabitants, abounded also, for me, with a number of inanimate fetishes. At one time, for example, I was much attached to a felled tree which resembled, so I imagined, the funnel of a railway-engine; and I never failed to pause in front of a certain house whose gate-posts were surmounted by two large balls, bristling with iron spikes . . . Objects such as these had for me a profound mystical significance, and I couldn’t pass them without an act of homage. More potent still – because it seemed to me entirely inexplicable – was a large iron bolt, in the shape of the letter S, let into the garden-wall of the house next to our own. I wondered for a long time what it was for; but I was an incurious child in some respects, and usually preferred to invent myths about the things which puzzled me, rather than inquire too closely about their true nature. If well-meaning grown-ups insisted on ‘explaining’, I would pretend, as often as not, that I knew all about it already.
This intellectual snobbery became, at a somewhat later date, rather inconvenient: as, for instance, when the headmaster of my first boarding-school gave me a little talk about the Facts of Life. Such, at least, was his intention; but his embarrassment was even more acute than my own. ‘I take it,’ he began, ‘that you know about the – er – process of reproduction?’ I blushed; I realized that he meant something to do with babies. I had evolved a vague idea that these were excreted, like faeces, from the anus; but beyond that, I was abysmally ignorant. However, I wasn’t going to admit it, and, in answer to the headmaster’s question, I said yes, I did know. He proceeded to inform me that Certain Parts of my body were Sacred – though he did not, apparently, think it necessary to explain which parts, or why. We parted with a mutual embarrassment: I was a good deal more puzzled than I had been before, and for the first time in my life developed an active curiosity about sexual matters. Thenceforward, I was not satisfied until I had plumbed the mystery to its depth.
The undercliff possessed also, in addition to these visual landmarks, its habitual and familiar sounds: the wailing of gulls, the muffled thud of the waves and (in misty weather) the far booming of fog-horns . . . There were other noises too, more homely and localized: the shrill ‘ping-ping’ of the Sandgate school-bell, or the incessant yapping (as we passed her home) of Lady Bancroft’s prize Pomeranians; and if we were returning earlier than usual, we would be sure to hear the voice of the fishmonger, Mr Jarvis, intoning his monotonous litany outside’ the ‘Tradesmen’s Entrances’; ‘Nice fresh codling, lovely mackerel, all alive! All alive!’ Every day he came with his barrow-load of fresh fish from the fish-market, crying his wares along the Lower Road, and finishing up at Sandgate, where, later in the day, one would recognize his empty barrow, parked outside the doors of the Military Tavern. For Mr Jarvis Drank: it was disgraceful, and the residents of Radnor Cliffe would have liked to discourage him; but then his fish was so much fresher than any one could get elsewhere . . . Once he didn’t appear for nearly three weeks; on the morning of his return, he explained that he had been suffering from ‘that nasty influenza’; but we all knew that he had, in reality, spent the period in gaol for being drunk and disorderly and (it was said) for beating his wife.
Some years later, when the war was over, my mother attended an Armistice-day service at Sandgate; it was held in the open air, by the war-memorial, which stood at the corner of the road just opposite the Military Tavern. Eleven o’clock struck, the traffic stopped, and everyone stood awkwardly and self-consciously to attention for the two-minutes’ silence. It was a quiet, windless November morning: no sound broke the stillness but the faint, far murmur of the sea, and the distant crying of gulls. The crowd stood solemn and immobile, remembering the dead of Ypres and Passchendaele . . . Suddenly the silence was rudely shattered; round the corner, from the direction of the sea, came a clattering of wheels, and a voice – loud, ringing, stentorian – bawled out the only too familiar but, in the circumstances, blasphemous and appalling words: ‘All alive! All alive!’
From the Lower Road, our house looked undistinguished enough: semi-detached, and faced, rather depressingly, with grey cement. The front door was painted green, with a brass knocker; the bell was at the side – one of those old-fashioned bells with a large knob which had to be jerked (with considerable muscular effort) from its slot, and smartly released again. An extraordinary noise of clanging and rumbling ensued somewhere in the bowels of the house; to me, returning famished from my morning ‘walk’, the sound seemed a kind of extension of the rumbles in my own empty stomach. At last the door would open and we would be sucked forward, as though into a vacuum, by the rush of air thus generated – for, as often as not, the door of the dining-room and the french windows beyond would be open as well. The hall seemed filled, perpetually, with the sound and smell of the sea: entering the house, it was as though one were passing, merely, through a kind of tunnel from one ‘out-of-doors’ world to another; the sun blazed in one’s face, the wind rushing in from the windows lifted the hall carpet and flapped the tiger-skin hanging on the wall. The whole house seemed, in its ‘coign of the cliff’, to be perilously suspended between two worlds – the tame, ‘country’ world of the undercliff, and that other, uncharted universe – inimical and frightening – of the sea.
If there was time before lunch, I would run into the drawing-room, through the small greenhouse, and down the wooden steps to the garden where, if it was morning in spring or early summer, I would find my family assembled under the ‘verandah’, waiting for the luncheon-bell.
The house was built, as it were, on two levels, so that the ‘ground-floor’, which one entered from the Lower Road, became the ‘first-floor’ when viewed from the garden. An iron balcony, partly roofed with glass, projected from it, forming a kind of enclosed terrace below, on the basement level. Even in winter, on a sunny day, it was possible to ‘sit out’ here in comfort; the sun’s warmth seemed to be concentrated into a thicker, an almost palpable element, seasoned with an odour which I could never quite identify, but which was perhaps compounded of crushed privet leaves and the piles of last year’s bulbs, which were laid out to dry on the window-ledges. The balcony was supported by pillars, wreathed with jasmine and honeysuckle; and in the corner, by the boundary hedge of thick-set privet, grew an enormous barberry-tree which, at the end of April, showered its multitudinous fading blossoms upon the pinkish stone of the terrace, and upon the edge of the lawn.
Unimpressive from the Lower Road, the house, on the seaward side, offered a complete contrast: virginally white, with its green persiennes and projecting balcony, it resembled some Mediterranean villa. For me, it seemed then (as indeed it seems still) the very archetype of all houses, and I cannot, to this day, hear the word ‘house’ without visualizing, instantly, our old home on Radnor Cliffe; nor, for that matter, can I encounter, in Southern Europe, some green-shuttered villa perched on its terrace above the sea, without feeling a curious sense of homecoming, as though this ‘foreign’ and outlandish building, inhabited by strangers, were a kind of distant cousin of the house in which I spent my childhood.
The terrace below the balcony gave on to a small lawn – half the size of a tennis-court and, so far as games were concerned, only suitable for clock-golf. At the end of it, beyond a narrow flowerbed, rose a wooden frame over which clambered a carmine-pillar rose. Flowering in May – or even, in a mild spring, at the end of April – the frail, vividly-crimson blossoms had for me a special poetry of their own: they should by rights, I felt, have flowered in June or July, like other roses; instead, they chose to appear with the pheasant-eye narcissus and the first tulips. Charming interlopers, dressed unsuitably for the season, they were like girls who, in earliest spring, if the weather is fine, will daringly assume their thinnest summer finery. Spring flowers – English ones at least – have a marked tendency to be white or yellow: reds and purples are comparatively rare ‘before the roses and the longest day’. Perhaps it was this fact which made me fall in love, at an early age, with the Purple Orchis – and which, for that matter, many years later, would invest with the same poetic nostalgia the common vetch of the May-time hedgerows.
From the ‘lawn’ the garden descended, in terraces, to the beach: steep flights of steps led from stage to stage, and the journey to the beach and back was an arduous one, not lightly to be undertaken by old ladies, or by the numerous tribe of aunts, who seldom went further than the second terrace, which we called the ‘Quarter-deck’. This was a kind of look-out post, furnished with a rustic seat and a summer-house; below it lay the ‘rose-garden’ – though I remember it less for its roses than for the purple irises which, with a perversity equalling that of the carmine-pillar, unfurled in late April their aestival and unseasonable splendours. To see the first blackish-violet bud bursting through its tight green sheath was an event to which, each spring, I passionately looked forward: violet became for a time my favourite colour, and any object even faintly tinged with it acquired in my eyes a disproportionate value. Flowers, particularly: Purple Orchis, Purple Loosestrife, Purple Gromwell occupied, for me, a special and distinguished rank in the botanical hierarchy.
On afternoons of spring and summer, if we had not gone to the cottage, and if the weather was reasonably fine, we would have tea on the ‘Quarter-deck’. From here the ‘view’ was uninterrupted: one looked out directly across the bay towards Dungeness. For most children it would have been exciting, I suppose, to live thus with the sea at one’s back door; yet I was indifferent to it – at times, indeed (if it was a question of trying to make me bathe), I positively hated it. All my desires, all my romantic imaginings, were turned towards the country; and the winter months at Sandgate were spent, by me, almost wholly in looking forward to the time when we should go to our cottage in the Elham Valley.
The Quarter-deck, however, had for me attractions quite other than that of the ‘view’ – which, though it might appeal to the grown-ups, left me comparatively cold. There was, for one thing, the summer-house: a small, ‘rustic’ building impregnated with a pungent odour of creosote and paraffin. In it was kept a miscellaneous collection of objects – garden tools, balls of string, a ‘Beatrice’ stove, cups and saucers (for a special tea-set was reserved for tea on the Quarter-deck: thick, white cups and tea-pot, embellished with the pale-blue ‘rose-and-thistle’ pattern). One of my favourite sensations was to bury my nose in a ball of ‘tarred’ garden string, whose aromatic, rather acrid odour seemed to hold the very essence, the irreducible spiritual reality, of the scene about me. Just as a seashell, held to the ear, seems to contain the sea itself, so, in this ball of creosoted string, were implicit for me the green arbour of tamarisks, the irises, tea-on-the-quarter-deck, the whole sunlit, miraculous April afternoon; and on more than one occasion, years later, when I was enduring the hell of my first boarding-school, I would sniff, by accident, this magical scent again, and would be overcome by a sudden and inexplicable happiness, a conviction that life was worth living after all.
Often, if we were at Sandgate in the summer, people came to bathe from the Quarter-deck: friends, mostly, of my brother and sister. I would watch them romping and laughing in the sea below, at once thrilled and appalled at the thought of their valour and their nakedness. At tea-time we would signal to them; and with mackintoshes over their bathing-suits, they would come running up the steps to the Quarter-deck, where, sitting on deck-chairs beneath the tamarisks, they devoured crumpets and sandwiches, with heroic appetites. Their ‘heartiness’ repelled and fascinated me: so did their bare legs and chests, and the shameless pleasure which they seemed to take in their bodies . . . The thing I dreaded most (apart from Ninnie leaving us, or my going to boarding-school) was being made to bathe. It didn’t often happen; but the threat was always there, and when there were bathing-parties, I kept, as much as possible, out of the way.
I might, now and again, be threatened with ‘bathing’; but there seemed little immediate prospect, at this time, either of Ninnie leaving us or of my going to boarding-school. (Both those events would, I suppose, occur sooner or later: but, like Death, they remained for me mere intellectual abstractions; I didn’t ‘feel’ them, as D. H. Lawrence would have said, in my solar-plexus.) I was, however, shortly to leave my Kindergarten, and go to a new school – a Real Boys’ School: Greylands House, at Folkestone. Only as a day-boy; but the prospect filled me with alarm. Would it, I wondered, be like the school-stories in Little Folks? I hoped not; at the same time, my alarm was tempered by a vague, heroic excitement: I began to imagine myself as a ‘schoolboy’, just as I had imagined myself (rather half-heartedly) in the role of a soldier. My life was to include both experiences, as it happened: but one couldn’t, as I realized, be a soldier at the age of seven (a fact for which, in my more unheroic moments, I was profoundly thankful); one could, on the other hand, most decidedly become a Schoolboy. I viewed the prospect with mixed feelings:
Through my reins, like ice and fire,
Fear contended with desire . . .
I should, presumably (amongst other things), have to play football; this was all very well in the school-stories, but lately, walking along the western end of the Leas, I had seen a real game in progress, and had formed a rather different impression of it. A war, when one takes part in it, has seldom much in common with the thrilling accounts of wars in history-books; and the same was true, I suspected, of football. The crowd of scuffling, barging men, muddy and sweating, with their bare knees and open shirts, filled me with terror; yet I felt at the same time, a curious, rather guilty excitement creep over me. I wanted to play football; but I cherished the desire like some secret vice which I would have died rather than publicly admit.
III
Tea on the Quarter-deck had something of the quality of a picnic; true, the tea-things were kept ready in the summer-house, but the eatables had to be carried across the lawn and down a steep flight of steps to the terrace; Quarter-deck teas were not popular with the parlour-maid, who, at four o’clock, would mince disapprovingly down the garden carrying a silver dish of crumpets and one of those curious wicker-work contraptions, like portable pagodas, perilously laden with plates of cakes and sandwiches.
These outdoor teas, moreover, were apt to be unpopular not only with the maids but with the family too: little green spit-insects dropped out of the tamarisks into one’s cup, and the tea itself tended to have a slight flavour of paraffin or creosote; moreover, the terrace was usually either too hot or too cold; one’s deckchair was apt to collapse; why have tea uncomfortably out-of-doors when you could have it comfortably in the drawing-room? But my mother would listen to none of these objections: dispensing tea from the summer-house, she enjoyed, like Marie Antoinette in her dairy, the sensation of doing something faintly adventurous and a bit messy. ‘And besides,’ she would insist (while the rest of us shivered in the chilly June breezes) ‘it’s such wonderful air.
So far as I was concerned, tea on the Quarter-deck had one major advantage: when it occurred, my mother would usually be ‘not at home’, so that one felt safe from callers. Tea in the drawing-room, on the other hand, was fraught for me always with a slight apprehension; and nothing could exceed my horror when (as often happened) the door opened and the maid announced Mrs So-and-so from along the cliff, who had come to ‘call’. My shyness was almost pathological: I was on awkward enough terms with our own relations – even, indeed, with my immediate family circle; with strangers I became no better than a cretin.
However, once the ‘how-d’you-do’s’ were over, I would, more often than not, be left in peace; and sitting, unnoticed, on the tuffet by the corner of the fireplace, I would listen to the obscure, prolix and fascinating stream of talk which flowed above my head. Grown-up conversation struck me as being a kind of game played for its own sake: people didn’t, it seemed, talk about the things which really interested them; they talked, rather, as if it were a question of filling up the time, or as though someone were perpetually listening to whom they didn’t want to give anything away. When I was first taken to a ‘grown-up’ play, I recognized the technique: the actors talked in just the same way, and even with the same accents. They went on talking until something ‘happened’ – usually somebody was kissed, or perhaps there was a quarrel, or (if the play happened to be a musical one) the characters suddenly burst, without warning, into song. But in the drawing-room at home none of these things happened: people just went on talking.
None the less it fascinated me, this endless and apparently aimless talk; and sometimes it would rouse in me desires which obsessed me for weeks afterwards: for example, the height of my ambition, at one time, was to be taken to a ‘show’ at the Pleasure Gardens Theatre, which I had heard much discussed; or I would develop a craving to go to an enchanted land called the ‘South-of-France’, where my Uncle Hewlett lived (he was reputed to be rather wicked), and whence, at intervals, he would dispatch enormous crates of mimosa or carnations to my mother.
Sometimes, after tea, my mother or my sister would play the piano; I preferred the things my mother played, on the whole – chiefly the ballads and ‘pieces’ which she had learnt in her girlhood. I knew these ‘pieces’ by the pictures on the covers, and associated the music, in each case, inseparably with the picture. My sister, a proficient pianist, was more ambitious: the things she played seemed to me mostly rather dull, and, moreover, they usually didn’t have any pictures on the cover – unless, indeed, they were ‘selections’ from recent ‘shows’, which she would rattle out in her more low-brow moments. These I found extremely exciting: there was a musical play called ‘Betty’, for instance, the piano-score of which had a cover-photograph of a man in evening-dress leaning over a beautiful lady on a sofa. I fell hopelessly in love with the lady; but alas! when ‘Betty’ came to the Pleasure Gardens Theatre, I was not allowed to go, for it was considered, apparently, to be slightly ‘improper’.
Yet some of these ‘pieces’ which my sister played, if they seemed at the time too complex or ‘grown-up’, acquired for me none the less, in after years, an extraordinary power of evocation. They became, like the Mendelssohn ‘Song Without Words’, arbitrarily associated with certain moods, and possessed for me a poetry which had little or nothing to do with their purely musical qualities. Thus I cannot (for instance), to this day, hear Debussy’s First Arabesque without visualizing our Sandgate drawing-room on an afternoon in summer: an impression of outdoor heat and of coolness within, the room bathed in a greenish, subaqueous twilight, the sea-breeze stirring the potted plants and flapping the green sun-blinds which shaded the verandah . . .
The drawing-room fascinated me, at that age, probably because my visits to it were comparatively infrequent, and because, when they occurred, I acquired the honorary status of a grown-up, and was expected to behave like one. I developed an almost religious awe for certain of my mother’s treasures – in particular, for a gilt Empire mirror which hung over the long-tailed, rosewood piano. In its depths appeared a rounded, concentrated duplicate of the room, more ‘real’, it seemed to me, than the reality. The chintz-covered sofa and chairs, the gilt-framed watercolours, the pot of weeping smilax on its tall, mahogany pedestal – all these appeared in the glass, but with a heightened vividness: their colours seemed brighter, their shapes more elegant, the refractory planes and angles of their surfaces were softened into baroque curves and swelling rotundities.
But the real room, if less compactly beautiful than its mirrored duplicate, had its own charm: though small, it gave an impression of spaciousness, a sense of being suspended in some windy eyrie between sea and sky. French windows led into the greenhouse, from whose outer door a flight of steps descended to the garden; standing in the doorway, one seemed to be perched above an abyss, an immense void of air and sunlight. Below lay the garden, with its grey-green clouds of tamarisk, and beyond and below the garden, the enormous sweep of the bay – the sea rising like a wall against the sky, the gulls wheeling in the empty air. Here, more than anywhere else, I would be aware of those two worlds – the known and the unknown between which our house seemed always to be maintaining its perilous equilibrium . . . From behind me came the sounds and smells of my own limited and familiar universe – the tinkle of the piano, the faint odours of pot-pourri and tobacco-smoke; before me lay the au-delà, a chasm of blue air from which small, disembodied sounds emerged like distant echoes of themselves, fraught with terror and strangeness: the remote, iterated bark of a dog upon the beach, the chug-chug of a pleasure-boat plying up the Channel and, far below, the soft thud of the summer waves upon the sun-baked shingle.
I turned back to the familiar, the ‘indoor’ world – fearful of such remote limitless prospects . . . The greenhouse was a translucent cage in which scarlet geraniums, fragile and sour-smelling, lolled like jungle-blooms in a green shade; beyond the french windows was the drawing-room, where the grown-ups were sitting, still, in the tranquil aftermath of tea, listening to my sister who, at the piano, was playing one of those interminable and complex ‘pieces’ which I could never recognize, because there was no picture on the cover . . .
Back in the world which I knew, in which I felt at home, I wished passionately that nothing would ever change. I was a true-blue, a positively last-ditch Conservative: I could hardly bear even the necessary, day-to-day alterations in my environment. Only recently my bedroom – or nursery, as it was still called – had been repapered; I found the new pattern intolerable, it seemed to me that, in stripping off the faded green-striped paper which I had known all my life, the paper-hangers had torn away some, surface-layer of my very self, leaving me flayed and smarting from the loss. And now, in September, I was to go to Greylands – a further stage in that process which I so feared and hated, but which I was powerless to check; a process which, cruel and inevitable as the passing of time itself, was removing me every day, every minute even, a little further from that closed, familiar world where the piano tinkled on in the green twilight, and the round glass reflected a vision of the drawing-room as I remembered it and wished it forever to remain: fixed in a moment of time, the long lucid pause before sunset at the end of an afternoon in summer.