Gothic House next door was a boarding-house and North End House had all the garden of both houses. A high flint wall ran right across the back of Gothic House and its little paved brick courtyard, dividing it from our garden, and against this wall was a high penthouse roof of red tiles, known as the Cloisters, supported on plain wooden pillars set in a low brick wall. The space below the roof had a wooden floor, making a pleasantly echoing place for our wet-weather playground in summer. It contained a couple of large beehive chairs made of creaking basket-work like the ‘sulkies’ in the garden at Earlham. Grown-ups could sit facing each other in them and talk, or could turn them back to back and read or meditate, undisturbed by the sight of each other. Children could turn them over on to their backs and use them as cradles, or pirate ships, or Spanish galleons, or an Argo, or the Ark. Or they could pull one over on to its face and crouch beneath it in hiding from the world in general and Nanny in particular. Here also were deck chairs and a few rush-bottomed chairs, stained with paint, discarded from the studio, and in one corner a heap of outdoor toys; spades and buckets for the beach, a spotted wooden horse on wheels and the little wooden go-cart which our parents brought from Germany, christened by Jeanne, the French maid, ‘le petit chariot’. It was the kind of low four-wheeled cart that dogs draw in some parts of the Continent, or children drag about in Ludwig Richter’s pictures, and we used it to drag our baby sister and each other about the garden. There were moments when the axles bent or a wheel came off and then we had the pleasure of dragging it round by the village pond to the blacksmith and having real repairs done while we waited. The forge was at the far end of the pond, opposite the Plough Inn, just where the road called Whiteway went up to East Hill. Rottingdean was rich in public-houses; five to a village of about a thousand inhabitants. The White Horse and Royal Oak were houses of some size and pretension, the Plough Inn was more frequented by farmers’ men and labourers who brought horses in to be shod, or wagons to have new metal tyres to their wheels, and there were still the Black Horse and the Queen Victoria – hardly more than ale houses – to supply the needs of the public.

At the end of the cloisters nearest the house there grew a bay-tree affording easy access to the tiled roof on which we walked like cats with bare feet. This spot was technically forbidden for various reasons. Nanny forbade it on general grounds of disapproval of anything we wanted to do. My mother had visions of our mangled forms falling six feet on to the ground on our side, or ten feet into the boarding-house yard on the other. My grandmother very properly objected to a habit of using the gutter which ran along the lower edge of the cloister roof as a final foothold, for this gutter was of a peculiarly sacred nature, supplying as it did the rain water for the huge butt that stood beside the bay-tree. But in the summer holidays these restrictions were partially removed because a barefoot child could run along the roof to where the big fig-tree hung over at the farther end and put the ripening figs into green muslin bags to protect them from birds and wasps. How the faint smell of the fig-tree comes back to me and the rough sticky feeling of the leaves as I thrust among the crooked branches, exploring for half-ripe figs to be jacketed, or picking those that were burstingly ripe and ready for the dining-room.

There were little figs that never reached normal size though they were perfectly ripe, and they were the property of the first child who found them. How superior are our long Sussex figs to the short round foreign variety. My grandparents had three trees, two purple and one white, and while their season lasted we fed on honey-dew every day. When we were given figs in the dining-room we had to eat them in a special, and I think elegant, way. The fig was held by the stalk in the left hand and cut lengthwise with a silver knife and then lengthwise again, so that it opened like a flower with four perfect petals spreading outwards. It was then an easy matter to scoop out the ambrosial inside with a spoon or the human tooth.

As one descended from the cloister roof one was apt, if in too much of a hurry, to land with one foot in the snail-pot, a large tin bowl with a wooden handle which lived permanently under the rain-water butt with a handful of salt in it for the disposal of snails. Never have I known a garden so infested with snails. Enormous grandfathers congregated together in twos and threes under the roof of the cloisters and in every angle of the wooden pergola on the other side of the lawn. Middle-sized parents lived under every leaf and on the stalks of every flower, while there was a perfect congested district of tiny, brittle-shelled descendants in every iris clump round the pear-tree outside the Bower window. It was one of our jobs, and seldom was a useful duty undertaken with so little reluctance, to collect these pests of society whenever we saw them and drop them into the snail-pot to die. Some children were paid a penny a hundred, but I don’t think the idea of payment ever entered our heads and we hunted them down with the hunter’s stern joy in the chase. What happened to the nauseous mixture I don’t know. Probably Ernest, the garden boy, dealt with the corpses and buried them in the rubbish heap, but every day a fresh brew of salt and water was waiting by the rain butt for us to fill.

The whole garden cannot have been much larger than a tennis-court with plenty of room round it, but it had been so ingeniously cut up and laid out that to us it seemed infinite space. Beyond the snail-haunted pergola was a little plot of ground with trellis round it where we were each supposed to have a garden, but beyond bringing up stones from the beach to mark the confines of our separate plots, and sowing one penny packet of mustard and cress and one of nasturtiums, I cannot remember that we ever paid any attention to horticulture. We were far more interested in the brick incinerator where my grandmother superintended the garden boy burning the rubbish. She was something of a gardener herself on a small scale and had a touching faith in human nature which made her take boy after boy from the village to be ‘trained’. As the training consisted of working for a couple of hours after school under her very mild supervision, with intervals for talk about books and life in general, it was hardly surprising that the garden suffered. We were used to hearing, year after year, accounts of the laziness and incompetence of this or that boy who was to have been a paragon, but it never seemed to occur to her that they imposed upon her at all, or took advantage of her readiness to read bits of Ruskin aloud to them when they ought to be working. The only time when her faith was a little shaken was the year when the very laziest and most incompetent boy of all, under whose unloving care the garden had become a wilderness, won the first prize at the local flower show for his own garden; though even then she was able to persuade herself that without her training the prize would not have been won.

My grandmother had a great deal of natural self-possession and dignity and a power of accepting every one – no matter what their social position – entirely for what they were in themselves. She could talk to working people in their cottages with as much ease as she received royal princesses who came to look at pictures. I must say that I think the first of these tasks by far the most difficult and I was always paralysed with shyness if my grandmother took me with her on one of her cottage visits. There was no condescension in her visits and no familiarity, though the child who accompanied her was ready to cry with confusion as she sat with her large blue eyes fixed on some gnarled unlettered old woman, telling her tidings of comfort from Fors Clavigera. Only her entire absence of self-consciousness made these visits possible and there were other and – to us – even more shameful occasions when she would have a worthy carpenter or wheelwright to the house once a week to discuss the socialism in which she so thoroughly and theoretically believed. All the snobbishness latent in children came to the fore in us as we watched the honoured but unhappy workman sitting stiffly on the edge of his chair in his horrible best clothes while my grandmother’s lovely earnest voice preached William Morris to him. Then there were times when she believed that a hideous but favoured maid was worth educating. In the evening there would be an embarrassing ritual and the maid would sit in the drawing-room, though at a respectful distance, and read aloud to my grandmother from such books as she thought suitable to the domestic intellect on The Distribution of Wealth and the Early Italian  Painters. How we hated it all and how uncomfortable it was for every one concerned except the kind giver of these mental feasts. There can rarely have been a woman who was so absolutely unconscious of self, though it was carried to such a pitch that even her sense of humour fell into abeyance. Now and then her humour did get the better of her, as when she described a visit she had paid to some poor family who had an invalid child ‘surrounded with medals for abstaining from vices of which he was incapable’.

In spite of her wide affections and deep understanding she was curiously removed from real life and I think she honestly believed that The Seven Lamps of Architecture on every working-man’s table would go far to ameliorate the world. She was absolutely fearless, morally and physically. During the South African War her sympathies were with the Boers, and though she was at that time a widow, living alone, she never hesitated to bear witness, without a single sympathiser. When peace was declared she hung out of her window a large blue cloth on which she had been stitching the words: ‘We have killed and also taken possession’. For some time there was considerable personal danger to her from a populace in Mafeking mood, till her nephew, Rudyard Kipling, coming over from The Elms, pacified the people and sent them away. Single-minded people can be a little alarming to live with and we children had a nervous feeling that we never knew where our grandmother might break out next.

To us it was far more amusing to leave our own little gardens untended and go on through the tiny orchard which contained at least ten apple-trees (one rumoured to be a real Ribstone pippin), to the summer house, a two-storey building in the angle formed by two high flint walls, facing south and east. The lower floor was concreted and used for tools, and the top floor was reached by an outside staircase, or, more accurately, a broad ladder. The little room above was a triumph of pre-Raphaelite discomfort. Bitterly cold in winter and stiflingly hot in summer, none of its windows would open or shut properly, being, like the windows in Uncle Phil’s room, arranged to slide, or more commonly stick, in grooves. It contained a small wooden table and two or three wooden chairs which were suited to no known human body. They had been designed by my grandfather for the seats of knights at the Round Table in the tapestry which William Morris made from his cartoons and the chairs had actually been translated into wood by a skilful carpentering friend so that my grandfather could draw them from life. Some had round backs and some were square and there was little to choose between them for sheer discomfort. The seats were very high off the ground with no depth from back to front, so that any knight who used them would have sat like a child with his feet dangling in the air, if indeed he managed to keep himself balanced on the exiguous seat at all. The arms of the chairs were too close together to allow any one to use a knife and fork with any freedom and too high to get one’s arms clear of them, and altogether a more unsuitable set of dining-room chairs for a royal dining-room can hardly be imagined. If that is how Arthur’s court was furnished it is quite enough to explain the eagerness of the knights to leave their seats and follow the quest of the Holy Grail and one can only conclude that the Siege Perilous was even more uncomfortable and ill-adapted to the human frame than the seats of the other knights.

The apples in the tiny orchard were warm in the afternoon sun when we came down from the summer house. We were only allowed to eat windfalls, but much can be done to help Nature at her work, and to bump violently into a tree was not considered unfair. One had to be careful of the windfall though, for sometimes a wasp had eaten his way in at a bruised place and as one lifted the apple from the grass there was a loud angry noise from the feaster disturbed, and a black and yellow fury came out of the apple, swift to visit his vengeance on bare arm or leg or undefended neck. The nectarines and peaches that ripened on the high wall which faced due south were also a haunt of wasps and more than once a child, cautiously lifting a peach to see if it would conveniently snap from its stalk, was overtaken by sudden and deserved retribution as the winged terror came out of its temporary dining-room. The cooking apples were grown on espaliers on one side of the path which bounded a half circle of grass enclosed by a sweetbriar hedge. The smell of sweetbriar on a hot afternoon filled the air and permeated everything. The russet apples tasted of sweetbriar and surely no apples were ever so sweet, or broke between the teeth so crisply, or held such ambrosial perfumed juice. Sweet they were to the core and there was no need to pare them, for the skin was thin and delicate. It seems to me that apples now have thick tough skins that spoil the pleasure of biting deep into the fruit. It would have been a sin to touch these apples, even with a golden knife, for every part of them was honey-sweet and perfumed with the scented briar.

Inside the sweetbriar close a tent was sometimes pitched for us in summer. I do not know why it had been bought and it was the most wretchedly uncomfortable and stuffy form of shelter that could be devised, but naturally we felt its romance deeply. It was a round tent with a rickety wooden table on two legs encircling the centre pole and it was our supreme joy to have tea in it and equally Nanny’s supreme detestation. To her it must have meant stuffiness, table manners running riot, the carrying out of heavy trays, mess of milk and crumbs, overpowering breathless heat and deep discomfort, and now I think I would agree with Nanny. But to us then it was glorious adventure. One might easily be a Knight of the Round Table in his pavilion, or Saladin receiving Richard, or the Greeks before Troy, and the highly uncomfortable meal eaten reclining on a rug in the atmosphere of the Black Hole of Calcutta among swarms of flies became Alexander’s feast. Or if we happened to be Cavaliers at the moment and the Roundheads were known to be approaching in force, what was easier than to slip out on one’s stomach under the flaps of the tent and, re-forming rapidly in upright position, to take them in the rear. We threw ourselves into the fray with all the more ardour when the Roundhead of the day happened to be our cousin, Rudyard Kipling, who lived at The Elms across the village green.

The three Kipling children, Josephine, Elsie, and John were about the same ages as our nursery three. Josephine, very fair-haired and blue-eyed, was my bosom friend, and though we both adored her father, the stronger bond of patriotism drew us yet more firmly together at Cavaliers against Cousin Ruddy’s whole-hearted impersonation of an Arch-Roundhead. For the purposes of Civil War I had assumed the name of Sir Alexander of the Lake and under this title I had sent a cartel of defiance to the Roundhead, but Alexander is a long word for seven years old and the Roundhead’s answer to my challenge ended with the searing words, ‘And further, know that thou has misspelt thine own miserable name, oh, Alixander’. For months I went hot and pink with the memory of this rebuff. The war between Cavaliers and Roundheads raged furiously every year as long as the Kiplings were at Rottingdean, Josephine and I leading forlorn hopes against the Regicide and being perpetually discomfited by his superior guile, or by the odious way in which the Nannies would overlook the fact that we were really six feet high with flowing locks, a hat with feathers, and huge jack-boots, and order us indoors to wash our hands or have an ignominious midday rest. How would they have liked it if they were plotting to deliver King Charles from Carisbrooke and their Nannies had suddenly pounced upon them with a ‘Get up off the grass now Miss Angela and come and lie down before lunch, and there’s Lucy waiting for you Miss Josephine, so put those sticks down like a good girl and run along.’ Fools! Couldn’t they see that these were no pea-sticks, but sword, dagger, and pistol, ready to flash out or be discharged in the service of the King? But Nannies are by nature unromantic, so we had to submit and pretend to be little girls till we could meet again later.

Our Nanny had come to us when my sister was a few weeks old and though she did her duty by my younger brother and myself, she naturally put ‘her’ baby first and our plans and make-believes were only tolerated as they did not interfere with nursery routine. Romance in her was expressed in song. She had an enormous repertory of what had been popular songs ten years earlier and could bring tears to our eyes by ‘Just a song at twilight’ and curdle our blood with ‘The Gipsy’s Warning,’ or cause a wave of revivalism to sweep over the nursery by ‘Beulah Land, Oh, Beulah Land’. She had a real passion for the lower forms of creation. The higher mammals she feared and loathed and never alluded to cows except as ‘them vicious cows’, but to any one with more than four legs her heart was open. It became an embarrassing trait, for insects recognised her as a kindred spirit from afar; daddy-long-legses in particular would come for miles to get between her stiff collar and her neck, where they spent the day in calm repose and were taken out at night with the utmost gentleness when she undressed and put out of the window on to a leaf, usually leaving a leg or two behind in the disconcerting way they have. How very interesting were the dressings and undressings of Nannies when one was small enough to share a room with them. Their undressing of course we rarely saw as we were asleep before they went to bed, but I have fascinating visions of their getting up by candlelight on winter mornings and clicking themselves into black stays which appeared to stretch from neck to knee. It was one of my highest ambitions to be old enough to have black stays that clicked down the front and to imitate Nanny’s masterful handling of the mechanism; the way she fastened them first in the middle and then with two skilful movements brought the upper parts together and then the lower parts.

The Kiplings’ nurse Lucy was also given to song and her (and our) special favourite was a melancholy affair called ‘The Blue Alsatian Mountains’, which seemed to us the most romantic thing we had ever heard. I can only remember a few hauntingly beautiful lines, or so they seemed to me then:

It gives me lumps in my throat even now.

That summer must have been a year of song, for besides Lucy who really looked after the younger children, there was a governess for Josephine and that particular year there were two. I imagine now that one must have stayed on for a fortnight to get the other into the ways of the house, for two governesses at once seems unusual, but the result was deughtful, for they sang Mendelssohn duets together all over the downs, much to Josephine’s delight and mine.

It is many years now since Josephine died one cruel winter in New York while her father too was desperately ill and her mother had to show all a woman’s deepest courage in bearing what must be borne and keeping the death of the adored child from the adoring father till he was well enough to stand the blow. Much of the beloved Cousin Ruddy of our childhood died with Josephine and I feel that I have never seen him as a real person since that year. There has been the same charm, the same gift of fascinating speech, the same way of making every one with whom he talks show their most interesting side, but one was only allowed to see these things from the other side of a barrier and it was sad for the child who used to be free of the inner courts of his affection. I still have a letter from Josephine, written in sprawly childish capitals. ‘I will help you,’ it ran, ‘in the war against the Roundhead. He has a large army but we can beat him. He is a horrible man let us do all the mischief we can to him.’ It must have been a very real game that made her call the father she loved a ‘horrible man’. The world has known Josephine and her father at Taffimai and Tegumai in the Just So Stories and into one short poem he put his heart’s cry for the daughter that was all to him. This letter, a nursery book which had been hers and a silver button from a coat are all I have of Josephine, but her fair-haired, blue-eyed looks and her impish charm and loving ways are not forgotten.

Although she and I were usually a devoted couple, there were plenty of quarrels. There was the terrible day when I offered to do Josephine’s hair according to the White Knight’s recipe for keeping hair from falling off, by training it upwards on a pea-stick, and the result was an awful tangle of yellow hair, shrieks and tears from the victim, and the descent of a governess on the culprit. Manners at meals were another subject for quarrels. Our nursery had somehow acquired the right to eat cutlet bones in its fingers unchecked, a proceeding which shocked our cousins inexpressibly and led them to call us pigs. They, on the other hand, being half American, had an odious habit of breaking their boiled breakfast eggs into a glass and stirring them up with a spoon. It was a pink glass which somehow made matters worse, and with the complete candour of the nursery we stigmatised the whole proceeding as disgusting.

During those long warm summers Cousin Ruddy used to try out the Just So Stories on a nursery audience. Sometimes Josephine and I would be invited into the study, a pleasant bow-windowed room, where Cousin Ruddy sat at his work-table looking exactly like the profile portrait of him that Uncle Phil painted; pipe always at hand, high forehead, baldish even then, black moustache, and the dark complexion which made gossip-mongers attribute a touch of Indian blood to him. As a matter of fact I believe the dark complexion came from a Highland strain in his mother’s family, for it occurred in other cousins sharing a grandfather whose forebears came from the Isle of Skye, and two at least of them could have passed as natives anywhere in Southern Europe. Or sometimes we all adjourned on a wet day to the Drill Hall where the horse and parallel bars made splendid forts and camping grounds, and when the battle was over and the Roundhead had been unmercifully rolled upon and pommelled by small fists he would be allowed by way of ransom to tell us about the mariner of infinite resource and sagacity and the suspenders – you must not forget the suspenders, Best Beloved. The Just So Stories are a poor thing in print compared with the fun of hearing them told in Cousin Ruddy’s deep unhesitating voice. There was a ritual about them, each phrase having its special intonation which had to be exactly the same each time and without which the stories are dried husks. There was an inimitable cadence, an emphasis of certain words, an exaggeration of certain phrases, a kind of intoning here and there which made his telling unforgettable.

Or, if it was a blazing August afternoon, we might all three lie panting on the shady side of a haystack up on the downs, a field of ripe corn rippled by the warm wind before us, with scarlet poppies and blue cornflowers gleaming among the wheat, and hear his enchaining voice going on and on till it was all mixed up in a child’s mind with the droning of a threshing-machine up at Height Barn and sleep descended on us; sleep from which one was probably roused by having the soles of one’s bare feet tickled with straw by way of vengeance from a slighted story-teller. Our highest heroics were apt to be pricked by Cousin Ruddy and collapse ignominiously. There was a period during which I happened to be Queen Zenobia, a role in which Josephine, who always played second fiddle in our entertainments, loyally supported me as waiting woman or some useful super. Cousin Ruddy was cast for the part of Aurelian, but he became mortifyingly matter-of-fact and wouldn’t respond. The harrowing climax came when he met the nursery procession coming up from the beach one day, myself carrying for some unknown reason a quantity of wet sand in the up-gathered skirts of my blue serge frock. Queens in adversity deserve some consideration, but Cousin Ruddy only said:

upon which the queen dissolved in tears and became a very furious little girl.

One winter I devoted hours of hard work to making a book of poems for Josephine whom I dearly loved. They were all written out by hand, but looking back I cannot say that they had any merit at all, being poor in thought and construction and largely borrowed from other sources. The only poem I can remember will illustrate the graver defects of my immortal works:

Not good, you will say, and indeed you will be perfectly right, but Cousin Ruddy, who as a poet himself should have been kinder, so criticised my unhappy attempts that I sank into a state of dejection which lasted several days and was only really cured by being allowed to come into the study and see him write his name, very, very small, with a very, very large pen – a much coveted treat. It was his kind custom at the end of the holidays to give me a sheet of paper covered with autographs which I was able to swap at school at the current rate of exchange for stamps and other valuables.