Chapter 14
RENISHAW CHILDREN
ost literary-minded people who hear the name Sitwell think of Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell. Although most of their childhood was passed at Scarborough, where they were born, the family having moved back into Wood End, the three spent several months every summer at Renishaw. Despite grumbles about their parents, all recalled their time there as magical. On a window in the old night nursery, the first room they knew, had been cut with a diamond the words, ‘Charmes des yeux, Renishaw 1825’, which was justified by the view.
Renishaw meant most to Osbert, who, born in 1892, was aware from an early age that the house and the estate were going to be his. He said that as a very little child he was frightened at night by ‘this large, rambling old house, haunted and haunting’, lit only by candlelight. Yet ‘my home always meant Renishaw’, he recalled, while admitting that most of his childhood had been spent in Scarborough or London on visits to his grandparents or away at school.
He lyrically described summers at Renishaw as a small boy. When he arrived, he would run through the hall to the low half-door on the other side, over which came through the open window ‘the overwhelming and, as it seemed, living scent of stock and clove, carnation and tobacco-plant on a foundation of sun-warmed box hedges’. He never forgot the joy with which he arrived, nor his sorrow at leaving.
Although scarcely a countryman – he neither farmed, hunted nor shot – he developed a deep sympathy with the surrounding country, responding to its sombre charm. He liked to think that his forebears who built up the estate had bequeathed ‘something still very real and active in my nature; this love seemed to me so much older than myself and so much part of me’.1 One day, he would find an artist who shared his vision and painted both house and countryside for him,
In particular, Osbert loved what he termed the ‘impalpable essence’ of the house, ‘laden with the dying memories of three centuries, pervading the mind like a scent faintly detected, the smell of woodsmoke for example’.2 Despite being an agnostic, he believed in ghosts, joining the Ghost Club – dedicated to investigating the paranormal. In an early poem called ‘Night’ (one of the best he ever wrote), he conveys the eeriness that he sometimes felt at Renishaw:
A door that opens slightly, not enough;
The rustling sigh of silk along a floor;
The knowledge of being watched by one long dead;
By something that is outside Nature’s pale;
The unheard sounds that haunt an ancient house;
The feel of one who listens in the dark,
Listens to that which happened long ago . . .3
Five years older, Edith responded in much the same way to the atmosphere, and seems to have had Renishaw in mind in one of her own early poems, ‘The Sleeping Beauty’.
In Taken Care Of, written just before she died, she tells of her childish fondness for a beautiful peacock in the gardens there, ‘Peaky’, who seemed to return her affection, every morning running to be fed by her, until the day came when he was given a peahen for a mate and abandoned poor Edith. She consoled herself with a puffin who had a wooden leg, and a baby owl who snored to lure mice within range.4
Renishaw left no less impression on Sacheverell, even though he would acquire a fine old house of his own. In All Summer in a Day, he writes of an idyllic childhood there, and only the happiest memories can have inspired such nostalgic poems as ‘The Renishaw Woods’ or ‘The Lime Avenue’ (in The Cyder Feast of 1927).
Yet ‘Sachie’ had sinister memories too. He recalled the ballroom and the Great Drawing Room when he was a child as ‘terrifying to be alone in, or even to walk through by oneself’, and that being asked to fetch something left in the red dining room was ‘an excursion fraught with horror’ – the portraits on its walls turned their heads, following him with their eyes.5
When young, by his own admission, Osbert loved his father; he was grateful for advice on overcoming a terror of Hell (which did not exist for Sir George), or getting on with other boys at Eton. But during his late teens they fell out. Part of the reason was Sir George’s nagging fear that his son might grow up to be a spendthrift, warning him of the dangers of extravagance which had proved disastrous for the family in the past.
Yet Sir George had more influence on his eldest son’s development than Osbert liked to admit. Few fathers can have presented a ten-year-old boy with a tiny edition of Pope’s Rape of the Lock, illustrated by Beardsley, as he did; when Osbert grew older he advised him to read Ruskin, and Darwin’s Origin of Species. Above all, he taught him to love Italy, taking him to Venice – which for the rest of his life remained his favourite city – and to Rome, Florence and Naples, as well as instilling an enthusiasm for the Mezzogiorno.
Always a strong character – she aimed a blow from her pram at the actress Mrs Patrick Campbell for calling her a ‘baby’ – Edith later claimed to have detested her parents from an early age. However, her letters give the impression that she was fond of both into her teens. Yet she certainly had reason to dislike them, having been rejected from the start as an ugly little female oddity instead of the darling boy for whom they hoped, and made more miserable still by Osbert’s arrival.
Embarrassed by having produced such a ‘fright’, Lady Ida was often harsh with Edith, who in old age claimed bitterly that her mother had bullied her throughout her childhood because she embodied an unhappy marriage. ‘You’d better run, Miss Edith,’ she recalled Moat warning. ‘Her ladyship is in one of her states and looking for you.’
Her abnormally long, attenuated limbs seemed dangerously weak, which worried her father. (She may have suffered from Marfan Syndrome, a malady that affects the connective tissues.) She hated George for sending her to a quack specialist who made her wear steel braces to strengthen spine and ankles, and a brace to straighten her crooked nose. She called the apparatus her ‘Bastille’, never forgetting the pain and humiliation. Yet this was the best, most expensive treatment available – she could scarcely complain of neglect.
In all her writings she says nothing of Sir George shaping her mind, save for his disapproval of her fondness for Swinburne. But her finest biographer, Victoria Glendinning, believes that little as Edith cared to admit it, she derived from George ‘much of his liking for strange information and the habit of books’.6 It is probable that he taught her to enjoy Alexander Pope’s verse, since she recalls learning by heart The Rape of the Lock before she was thirteen – in her bedroom, by candlelight – and The Rape was one of his favourite poems.
Only from Osbert and Edith do we have accounts of Sir George’s shortcomings. Despite Sachie’s closeness to his siblings, he had nothing but good to say about their father, although fully aware of his eccentricity. He was especially grateful for being taken to Italy in the Easter holidays – by the time he was nine he had seen not only Rome, Florence and Venice, but Lucca and Bologna. ‘Even when I was really young’, he recalls, ‘my father was always talking to me about the paintings and the buildings he had seen, particularly in southern Italy.’7
As for his mother, Sachie loved her unreservedly. In Splendours and Miseries (1943), the chapter ‘Songs my mother taught me’ is a paean of gratitude. ‘Her character, when I first remember her, was a compound of natural high spirits and a sort of palace-bred or aristocratic helplessness.’ He adds, ‘There was always something tragic in her appearance, which I felt deeply as a child, in spite of her gaiety and powers of mimicry.’8
Even so, Lady Ida all too frequently lost her temper, and while Sir George was the main target, she savaged the children as well. (As late as the 1930s, watching two Guatemalan volcanoes, Osbert joked that it reminded him of life with his parents.) But Sachie, the youngest, suffered least.
Nevertheless, Ida fascinated and charmed all her children with her beauty and sense of fun. When very small, she took them to make butter in the dairy at the home farm, to fish for pike in Foxton Dam or to hear an old farmer’s ancient wife sing part of the Hallelujah Chorus in a cracked voice – their naive pleasure causing her much secret amusement. When they were older, discovering that her Swiss maid Frieda knew how to yodel, she persuaded the girl to give a performance for them in her bedroom, although the bashful Frieda would only do so from behind a Japanese screen.
In July 1907 she arranged for someone else to present her daughter at court – a bit overdue, since Edith was already twenty and girls typically came out at eighteen. Besides inheriting Sir Sitwell Sitwell’s great beak of a nose, Edith had grown to be six feet tall, which accentuated her ‘freakish’ looks. It looks as if Ida did not wish to be seen with such an unsightly child, whom in her superstitious way she regarded as a changeling. In a long white gown and elbow-length kid gloves, ostrich feathers in her hair, and looking more of a ‘fright’ than ever, poor Edith nervously made her curtsy at Buckingham Palace to Edward VII and Queen Alexandra.
Lady Ida was always trying to outwit the husband she saw as a penny-pinching tyrant. She took advantage of his absence in Italy to order enormous quantities of champagne and give lavish parties, or to go on manic shopping sprees in London, as well as acquiring a taste for gambling. Understandably, she resented being put on a tight rein when he came home and, naively cunning, tried to turn her children against him. Edith recalls her confiding, ‘with a far-away, idealist look in her eyes, “What I would really like, would be to get your father put away in a lunatic asylum.”’9 She also told them that a baronet was ‘the lowest thing on God’s earth’.
Edwin Lutyens’ account of staying at Renishaw for the first time, in September 1908, portrays the family as perfectly normal – despite his being put in the Duke’s Room, which he felt sure was haunted. ‘Sir George Sitwell is very courteous, very civil . . . Lady Ida is a darling.’ He noticed the house was full of pictures, ‘some quite, some very good’.10 He sent off a telegram for colours and materials to redecorate the ballroom, which proved a big success.
The only thing Lutyens thought odd about his stay was being taken by cab to see Hardwick and Haddon Hall. ‘They have no horses or motors here, but hire taxis from Sheffield.’ Learning that the great architect was in the neighbourhood, the new Duchess of Devonshire, who happened to be at Hardwick, sent a message to say how delighted she would be to meet him. Having made the vast old house habitable by putting in hot pipes, she wanted free advice on decoration. Afterwards, ‘Sir George said he had never seen anybody pick a man’s brains so completely.’
During further visits to Renishaw, Lutyens modified his opinion. He found Sir George an unusually demanding employer, who actually dared to improve on his plans or even to reject them and was ‘rather sticky about the garden’. He also realised that while the beautiful Lady Ida might be ‘a darling’, her behaviour could be horribly embarrassing when she’d had too much to drink.
Impudently, young Osbert asked him if any of his twelve brothers and sisters shared his talent. He never forgot Lutyens’ reply, which was that none of them did, and that he attributed his gifts to a childhood illness that had stopped him playing games and made him use his eyes instead of his feet.
Osbert was miserable at his preparatory school, Ludgrove, where at first he tried to find relief by malingering. He called it ‘Bloodsworth’, claiming he had been sent there because the headmaster was ‘the most famous dribbler in England’. (Osbert did not care for football.) His salvation was an Italian holiday each spring. In 1908 his father was delighted to find how much he enjoyed Rome. ‘No amount of travelling or sight-seeing tires him and he always sleeps and eats well,’ his father wrote proudly to Ida on 30 April after showing him the city. ‘He is such a dear boy, altogether.’11
‘I liked Eton,’ Osbert wrote sardonically in his memoirs, ‘except in the following respects: for work and games, for boys and masters . . . It was extraordinary how delightful, easy, cheerful, the school looked [in the summer holidays], without masters, matrons or pupils.’12 A heavy, moon-faced boy, lumpish yet nervous, who mumbled and had atrocious handwriting (which he never tried to improve), his work was invariably third-rate and he avoided all sporting activities like the plague. His favourite relaxation was arranging flowers at the local florist’s shop.
All he learned was to read voraciously – novels, verse and plays – a habit he retained for the rest of his life. This was why he claimed to have been ‘educated in the holidays from Eton’. He also developed a malicious sense of humour, and the knack of becoming the life and soul of a party. What he would never admit was that during the holidays his father’s influence gave him an intellectual curiosity and, in consequence, a remarkable openness to new ideas.
Osbert conjures up how Renishaw felt in those days, especially when he was alone there with his father in October or November:
Then, with so few people in the house, we lived for the most part in the Carolean core of it, and everything as a result looked as strange to us as if we inhabited a different mansion in a different world. But even though we used only the Little Parlour and the Great Parlour, abandoning the large eighteenth-century apartments, nevertheless you could feel the vastness of the stretch of rooms that lay there beyond, on each side, empty . . .
But were they empty, for at moments during the evenings as we sat by the fire, so many creakings and rustlings made themselves heard, so many of those inexplicable sounds of an ancient dwelling place, that it appeared as though there were more ghosts than human beings in rooms and corridors? One would say to oneself that it must be the wind: but I still do not believe that it was. Phantoms, when one is young, no more prevent sleep than do the hooting of engines or other modern noise – but those we heard were ancient, issued from some cave in time where they had hidden and to which they returned, or so it seemed to me.13
While Edith gained much from the beauty around her at Renishaw, she found the atmosphere stifling. When not lugged off by her parents to Scarborough, London or abroad, she had to stay in Derbyshire, but not without a hint of rebellion. (Taken to the races to mark her coming of age, she sat with her back to the course.) Looks like hers meant that she did not have any male admirers, and she was unattracted by her own sex. Very lonely, she devoured a vast amount of English verse, especially Swinburne, to whom her governess introduced her.
In 1909, in another act of defiance, Edith ran away from her grandmother’s house at Bournemouth and went with a maid to the Isle of Wight. There, at Bonchurch, she laid a wreath of flowers and libations of milk and honey on the grave of her hero Swinburne, who had just died. But she returned immediately to her grandmother’s, meekly accepting a scolding.
Yet Edith had an audience, of sorts. In her melodious voice she was always reading selections of her favourite verse to her brothers, who believed she was a genius, revelling in her wild humour. She was also encouraged by her former governess, Helen Rootham, who had been engaged in 1903 and had stayed on as a companion. Helen was liked by nearly everyone (although not by little Sacheverell, who loathed her); even Osbert admired the way she played the piano. She has been described, perhaps a little too imaginatively, as ‘a cross between Miss Havisham and one of Bernard Shaw’s “new women”’.
Plain and lonely herself, Helen grew very fond of the clever, sensitive girl whose odd looks deprived her of friends. She did her best to develop Edith’s talents, making her play Chopin and Brahms, teaching her to appreciate Ravel and Debussy and to read Baudelaire, Verlaine and Rimbaud (whose verse Helen had translated). They went to Berlin and Paris together, visiting art galleries, going to concerts.
Besides being an excellent musician, Helen was a gifted linguist who spoke Russian and Serbo-Croat. Although a Catholic, she was fascinated by Madame Blavatsky’s occultism and the writings of the Orthodox seer Vladimir Solovyov (a friend of Dostoyevsky, who used him as a model for Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov). Helen also took an interest in alarming aspects of the spirit world.
‘I saw a ghost when I was young,’ Edith told Elizabeth Salter years later. ‘It was a face in a golden helmet on the Roman road that runs through Renishaw.’14 No doubt, she saw it with Helen’s enthusiastic encouragement.
Deciding that Edith had heard a phantom walking in the ‘ghost passage’, Helen went through the house at night with her, reciting the Catholic prayers for the dead. They heard footsteps overhead, then coming down stairs, with ‘a horrible suggestion of the very soul of evil’, after which a shapeless black mist floated past. That night it visited Helen, but was driven off by her prayers. Edith said the ghost was never seen or heard again. The story sounds as if Helen’s obsession with the occult had a lot to do with the phenomenon.15
Sacheverell profited more from Eton than Osbert, developing highly individual tastes. He was encouraged by an imaginative tutor, Tuppy Headlam, to use the school library and read what he pleased. Among the books he borrowed were Ernest Fenollosa’s Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art, just after its publication in 1912, while he devoured William Beckford and Gustave Flaubert. The son of a man who admired the new as well as the old, Sachie was at the same time fascinated by what was most up to date in art and literature. At sixteen he began a correspondence with Filippo Marinetti, impressed by his Futurist Manifesto. He also took Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticist magazine, Blast.
He responded far more than his siblings to his father’s influence and to what had been created at Renishaw. This was where he learned that the art of past ages is always worth re-examining. When he grew up, he was one of the first to sing the praises of Francesco Solimena and, with Osbert, founded a Magnasco Society. Pictures by these two Baroque masters hanging on the walls at home must have been the earliest examples of their work he ever saw, since even in Italy few galleries would have bothered to display them – they were considered vulgar beyond words.
These years at Renishaw shaped all three children’s development, as it was here that their father kept his most treasured possessions – and he obviously spoke to Osbert and Edith just as he did to Sacheverell. What he said played a crucial role in forming their taste. Sadly, his daughter could never forgive him for seeing her as the ugly duckling that she was, while for a different reason Osbert, too, would grow to hate him. Sachie was very much the exception.