All We Know: Three Lives (23 page)

To Andrew and Hettie McHarg, Madge was an awkward, willful, sickly girl who would not do as they asked, could not be appeased by their generosity, and was not frightened by their threats—the architect of her own unhappiness and of too much family conflict. They were often away for weeks and months on end, however, in Europe and Australia, and in her early childhood Madge was cared for by her nursemaid, May, who had come out with the family from Australia. May was a steady source of comfort and affection, and Madge, like many whose first bond was with their parents’ employees, attributed the loss of her self-confidence to May’s departure. In old age, she still longed for May, or for the feeling of having been loved so completely.

Her mother’s usual response to a question was to say, “You wait till you grow up, then you’ll find out,” so being sent to school, the local kindergarten, was “a delight,” because there the adults encouraged her curiosity. Describing her earliest schooldays, Madge wrote with surprising candor that she had first fallen in love there. The girl’s name was Nina Brown; she was a year older, and Madge was so persistent in her demands to be close to this “idol” that her teachers finally broke the rules and allowed her to be accompanied by Nina at all ritual moments of the day: when they drank hot milk, or took their midday walk. Out one day with her new baby brother, Keith, and his nanny, Madge passed her friend’s home and was startled to see “a small terraced house and not the palace” in which she “had expected so exquisite a person to exist.” She transmuted her longing and disappointment by fixing on the purple clematis that grew over the porch: It was “like a beautiful star,” she said, and it became one of her favorite flowers.

Throughout her childhood she suffered from her ailments—allergies, curvature of the spine, susceptibility to illness in the days before antibiotics—and their cures. She understood herself to be a problem in every way and felt as trapped in her body as she did in her family. A solitary, fastidious child in a home that held virtually no books, she escaped however she could and absorbed whatever was at hand. At twelve, she culled hundreds of images of beautiful women from her parents’ magazines and illustrated papers. She lingered over these pictures and mounted them in a huge scrapbook. The only gesture toward learning in the McHarg house was the 1911 
Encyclopædia Britannica
, which came with its own special bookcase. She read every volume.

The 1911 
Britannica
, advertised as “The Sum of Human Knowledge,” was published at the last moment when it was possible to imagine that such a sum could be contained in twenty-eight volumes. It is a repository of English thought at the height of empire. Many prominent scholars contributed articles. So did, for the first time, a significant number of women. From the entry “Women”:

The essay reads like the work of someone trying to will his or her hopes into fact. For Madge, it described a change that was by no means complete, presented as self-evident views that were accepted by no one around her. But its emphasis on education seemed to chart her way out.

And yet, when her parents decided to send her away to school, to Cheltenham Ladies’ College, she refused. Hettie McHarg had become pregnant with a fourth child (“a very much unwanted menopause baby,” Madge recalled), and “the problem” of “what to do with a teenaged daughter” in front of whom one could not “discuss or even admit such a condition” was acute. (Hettie was also forced to cancel a long-hoped-for move to Mayfair; she had even chosen a house in Hanover Square.) Madge had been given some “silly books” about schoolgirls (“illustrated by nauseating pictures of the horrible girls”) and was convinced that she would be miserable at such a school. She objected to the communal living arrangements. She objected to the hearty athletic life. She objected, at least in retrospect, for sartorial reasons: “I discovered that you wore a navy blue, woolen, box pleated tunic over a white woolen flannel tucked blouse,” she said. She told her parents, “I am not going.”

She miscalculated. It was a badge of honor among the male writers and artists of her generation and beyond to have loathed their school days. Many were homosexual and most, no matter what their desires, affected a principled aestheticism as a way to rebel against the anti-intellectual quality of English public school life. This distaste was a prerogative of all sorts of privilege, which Madge did not have. Despite the dormitories, uniforms, and a residual emphasis on sports, Cheltenham Ladies’ College was one of the few schools in England that took seriously the education, including the higher education, of young women. Whether her parents knew it—and she always described them as “totally unaware of and disapproving of higher education for girls”—this was an institution at which Madge would have been prepared and encouraged to go on to Oxford or Cambridge. But, presumably not knowing this, she continued to refuse and tried to discourage her father by reminding him that it would be very expensive and insisting that she would run away if sent there. And she was forever proud of her defiance. In the midst of this impasse, a friend of Hettie’s remarked that her own “difficult and unruly daughter” had just returned “much improved” from a school in Paris run by a Mademoiselle Lacarrere. To this more romantic exile Madge agreed. She never acknowledged that her parents might have had her interests at heart, or that she could have ended up with no further education at all.

Like any “well-brought-up” girl in her milieu, Madge never went anywhere alone—she was well over eighteen when she first took a train unchaperoned—and during her year or two in Paris she was supervised carefully. To get to Mademoiselle Lacarrere’s school each term, she traveled with her mother on the boat train to Paris, or her parents brought her to Victoria Station, where one of her teachers met her. At the school, “they always knew where you were, every minute.” The place was nevertheless a revelation, a genuine education in art, architecture, and performance. It was essentially a finishing school, but unlike many, it was not filled with girls speaking English. Madge learned French well; one of her two best friends was Portuguese, the other Romanian Jewish. The students were given a reasonably good general education, and were given their own loge at the Opéra, the Comédie Française, the Opéra Comique, and various concert halls. They toured museums every Thursday and visited cathedrals, Versailles, and the châteaux of the Loire. Madge heard Chaliapin sing
Boris Godunov
and saw the Ballets Russes, including Nijinsky’s “jump through the window” (his celebrated exit in Michel Fokine’s
Le Spectre de la Rose
). Sixty years later she could still find her way to “remote churches all over Paris.” When she was required to exercise, she hid a book in her clothing, pleaded illness, lay in the shade of a hedge by the tennis courts, and read.

She recorded her time at Mademoiselle Lacarrere’s lovingly in photographs of her bedroom, classmates, and teachers, portraits of the couple who took care of the school, and pictures of the places she visited. Later, she sometimes suggested that the school had had the fervid atmosphere of Dorothy Bussy’s novel
Olivia
, whose English protagonist falls in love with the beautiful teacher who is responsible for her intellectual and sexual awakening. Mostly she made it clear that the place had given her the chance to see things she never would have seen—the built and beautified world; artful thinking about texture, light, and movement—and that she had grabbed it all avidly, understanding for the first time what made her happy. Coming from the insularity and prejudices of England, she also found something as elusive and enduring as this aesthetic awakening: an instinct for the possibilities of friendship and an understanding of the world as her home. She called it “freedom of thought.”

The start of the First World War in August 1914 interrupted the McHargs’ plans to send her on to a school in Dresden for further refinement. The family had moved to an enormous house in Hampstead, on Fitzjohns Avenue, but Madge found it “prison-like after the freedom, excitement, and stimulation of Paris.” She was now eighteen years old, expected to pay calls with her mother, in a mood of constant defiance, but unable to express her sense of the inanity of her life in anything other than small rebellions. Even what she could wear “was strictly limited.” (Young unmarried women were not supposed to wear furs, for example, or certain jewels.) “You see my father had a
right
over me,” she recalled; “it really was that you were imprisoned in your home until you were 21.” Looking for ways to experience the pleasure she had known in France, she decided that “the most violent, wicked thing” she could do was visit the Catholic extravagance of Westminster Cathedral, the interior decoration of which was still being completed. She slipped off—“I kept it a deadly secret”—drawn to the vast neo-Byzantine space and the intricate, multihued work of the craftsmen and women.

In a house with servants there was, in fact, little for her to do. She was not permitted to enter the kitchen other than for the annual ritual stirring of the Christmas pudding. She wanted to learn to sew, but after she used the machine once and broke it, her mother forbade her to touch it. She was told to occupy herself with the Kentia palms that sat in huge Japanese pots on the staircase landing. “You may polish their leaves with milk,” she was told, “so that they glisten.” Her brother Gerald had enlisted immediately—he was in one of the first groups of soldiers shipped to France that August—and was writing home about the horror of the battlefields. She knew that people were hungry and dying in London, not just in France and Flanders, and she could not stand to waste milk on plants. If she was aware of the young British women, a number of whom later became her close friends, banding together to nurse or drive ambulances at the front (moved to participate at least as much by the oppressiveness of their lives at home, Virginia Woolf later argued, as by patriotic feeling), she was still too tied to her family and without the money of her own she would have needed to make such a break. She was unsuited to nursing in any case and was still focused on education as the best route to independence. “After some months of sulking,” she took herself to Bedford College, a pioneering women’s college (mentioned in the
Encyclopædia Britannica
article) that had moved to new buildings in nearby Regent’s Park. She secured the prospectus, “implored” her parents to let her attend, obtained Andrew McHarg’s grudging permission, and enrolled for the following year in a course on English literature, which was then still a curriculum directed at women and colonial subjects.

The only other distraction in her life was Ewart Garland, the handsome, genial son of Melbourne friends, who arrived in London in 1915 at age eighteen, hoping to enlist in the newly formed Royal Flying Corps. Andrew and Hettie McHarg included him in the family and gave him his own set of rooms in their house. He received his commission in the spring of 1916, after basic training in the infantry, and on his days off from flight school at Oxford, Madge introduced him to London, and he took her to the theater and out dancing at the Savoy hotel. They became good friends, despite her embarrassment about all things Australian and her comment that Garland’s father, who owned the Australian concession of the Dunlop Rubber Company, was “in trade.” This expression of disdain for those who work is the product of culture organized around the idea (if not the actuality) of a distinction between a leisured aristocratic class and everyone else. In Madge it was a ridiculous affectation, given that her father, too, was “in trade,” but if Ewart abhorred her snobbery, he admired her intelligence, appreciated the cultural education she gave him, and sympathized with her struggle against her parents.

Sailing back to England from Australia in March 1916, Andrew McHarg survived the torpedoing of his ship by a German submarine. Although travel was even more dangerous the following winter, he decided to return to Melbourne to supervise his business there. London was subject to zeppelin attacks, but with Gerald now stationed in Italy, Hettie McHarg wanted to stay in England, so she shut the house and moved to Cornwall with Madge’s younger brother, Keith, and baby sister, Yvonne. Madge was told that she would take her mother’s place and keep her father company in Melbourne. Once again, she refused. This time she was overruled. She spent the next two years with her father, in transit and in Australia. She spent these years, and many that followed, furious at this reminder that she belonged to the colonies and rightly convinced that this trip meant leaving behind her chance of a university education.

And she spent the rest of her life concealing these years. She said that she passed her qualifying exams at Bedford College with honors and won a place at Newnham College, Cambridge, but that her father refused to allow her to attend. She said that her father pulled her out of Bedford College before she could even take that exam. She said she had planned to go to St Hilda’s, Oxford, but that he did not allow her to. She said that she lived in the United States for two years during the war. She let it be known that she attended Bedford College from 1916 to 1919, a claim that not only eliminated Australia and the fact of having left the country during the war from her résumé, but also subtracted at least two years from her age. She could not have attended a university without her father’s support: There were no state subsidies for higher education at the time. She replayed this loss, her anger, her ambition, and the fantasy about where a degree might have taken her over and over. She felt so strongly about her lack of academic training, talking about it right up to her death, that some of her friends were convinced she would have been happiest as a university don. In her long life, she lost and destroyed many personal papers, but she never let go of several small notebooks she kept in the 1930s and ’40s in which she recorded the books she had read and planned to read—the documentation of someone who does not take reading for granted.