Among the Bohemians (17 page)

I could only guess at what his reaction might be.
I was right.
‘
What
?’ he shouted.
‘You want to subject yourself willingly and wittingly to the harshest discipline in the world?
You must be mad, boy!’

Caspar persisted; Dorelia helped to persuade Augustus to finance him, motivated by a willingness to get the older members of the family off her hands; and in due course he was dumped unceremoniously at the gates of Portsmouth docks.
It was the beginning of an impressive trajectory from Bohemia to the establishment, culminating in Caspar’s knighthood and his appointment as Admiral of the Fleet.
Would Augustus have turned in his coffin to hear such a turncoat of a son read the lesson at his memorial service?

The Woman Who Did
, Grant Allen’s progressive novel of the late nineteenth century, demonstrates the monstrous disappointment felt by parents whose high hopes for their children are dashed against the rocks of conformism.
Herminia Grey had set out possessed by the ideal of giving her children…‘the unique and glorious birthright of being the only human beings ever born into this world as the deliberate result of a free union, contracted on philosophical and ethical principles…’ The daughter born to this free love union, Dolores, is fated to suffer the ostracism of society because she is the child of a single mother.
She is bitterly resentful, for all ‘Dolly’ wants is to be ordinary, to have married parents, material blessings, clothes and money like everybody else.
She hates being condemned to Bohemian status, and when she grows up she makes it her mission to infiltrate polite society.
An upper-class weekend house party represents everything Dolly has ever dreamed of:

For the first time in her life, she saw something of men – real men, with hones and dogs and guns – men who went out partridge shooting in the season and rode to hounds across country, not the pale abstractions of cultured humanity who attended the Fabian Society meetings or wrote things called articles in the London papers.
Her mother’s friends wore soft felt hats and limp woollen collars; these real men were richly clad in tweed suits and fine linen.
Dolly was charmed with them all…

Her daughter’s rejection of her most cherished hopes is unutterably galling to Herminia, whose life now seems to her to have been spent on wasted endeavours; and at the end of the novel she dies, heartbroken.

Although it neatly illustrates the point about how children can react against their parents’ values, the black and white world of
The Woman Who Did
does not do justice to the agonies and complexities of real people’s relationships.
Kitty Garman was the daughter of the sculptor Jacob Epstein by his mistress Kathleen Garman.
After she grew up, Kitty came to feel that she had been the victim of a selfish and narrow-minded disregard of other people’s points of view.
She and her brother and sister (also Epstein’s children) were practically brought up by their Garman grandmother, whom they adored, while their mother, Kathleen, was a remote, occasional visitor.
She would appear at Granny Garman’s at weekends, dressed in smart, exotic London clothes, and embarrass her children.
Kitty believed her mother was really a witch; she was frightened of being touched by her, and shrank from Kathleen’s cold-hearted dismissal of her childish fears.
Epstein himself was equally remote, though benign, and Kitty, who yearned for someone to call ‘Daddy’, developed a substitute in the form of a fantasy father.
Though Kitty made her peace with her mother before she died, she spent much of her adult life resentful of her Bohemian parents, whom she felt never looked after her properly.
She remembered how when she was only seven, Kathleen went out with Epstein and left her, terrified, with her brother Theo, alone in the house at night.
Though the children were often dirty and ragged, Kitty always felt that their mother took no responsibility for this: ‘She had a way of making us feel it was our fault, not hers.’ She once upbraided her mother for having children for whom she didn’t care, and was fobbed offwith: ‘I had no choice…’ Jacob Epstein and Kathleen Garman may have been pioneers in their way of life, but, according to Kitty, they didn’t have to pay the price for their fearlessness: ‘It was their luckless children who suffered!’

Kitty’s two cousins, Tess and Anna Campbell, the daughters of Roy Campbell and his wife Mary, were taken by them while still very young to live in the south of France.
On the face of it this was an idyllic upbringing, the little girls free to wander the wild prairies of the Camargue and swim in its inland salt lakes, brown and barefooted.
As well as picking up French from their friends at the nearby chateau, they learnt everything there was to know about the facts of life from these local children.
But Anna later questioned her upbringing:

I did notice [my mother] was an unusually unworried sort of parent.
She never seemed to notice what we were eating: sometimes we would be given bread and
milk, or sour milk, every night for our suppers, for weeks on end.
Luckily, we always had neighbours who filled us up with brandied cherries, dried fish (which we liked eating raw), plenty of strong coffee with milk, and other delicacies of this sort.

Mary, like her sister Kathleen, opted out of taking responsibility for her children.
Perhaps it was a Garman family trait.
She would leave their hair to get dirty for weeks on end and then get unreasonably annoyed when the necessity of washing it became manifest.
Mary didn’t even interfere when Tess and Anna contracted measles and allowed them to go on bathing in the lake.
Once they were absent for a whole week staying with their chateau friends before Mary noticed and suddenly became consumed with anxiety.
There were furious reproaches when she got them home, ‘which seemed, under the circumstances, terribly unfair, and a bit late in the day’.
When, in due course, the children were sent back to stay with their Garman grandmother in her English country house, it was a blissful contrast:

The lavender-scented baths, after the salty bathes in the lake.
The delicious cooking of Mrs Beeton after bouillabaisse with rouille sauce.
The soft green fields after the blazing forest fires… Even the contented paddling of ducks after the soaring of a thousand flamingos – crimson in the setting sun.
Of course Grandmama… spoilt us and cosseted us.
At Tour we suffered from an excess of freedom.

Nicolette Devas (nèe Macnamara) picked up the same theme: too much freedom.
She was enriched by her time spent with the Johns at Alderney.
There were times of ecstasy, and yet a large part of her felt desperately insecure.
The disappearance of her philandering father made a profound impact.
Yvonne, her mother, was handicapped without him.
With her four young children she drifted from harbour to harbour, indecisive and lost ‘in a desert of freedom’.

After Alderney the Macnamara family moved on to Blashford, not far from the Johns; there the children grew up with little guidance, and a lot of fresh air.
The only form of discipline was their hardening morning wash: the girls were made to stand naked in a row in the bath, while their mother drenched each of them with a jugful of cold water.
It was agony, but the children grew up exceptionally healthy.
In winter they took pride in wearing as few clothes as possible; anyone who caved in and donned a sweater while the others were all in short cotton sleeves was subjected to cries of derision: ‘Woolly, woolly, woolly!’ Apart from these internal codes of conduct, the family conformed to no accepted precepts.
Nobody expected the children
to write thank you letters for presents.
Their clothes were ‘odd’.
They spat in public.
They defied local disapproval by bathing naked in the Avon.
The gamekeeper regarded the children as hooligans who disturbed the ducks and upset the salmon.
Letters of complaint were sent to their mother, but she calmly tore them up – ‘What rot’.
Once they were nearly caught, and only escaped by whipping off their knickers and skirts and wading through the stream beyond the angry keeper’s grasp.

There were advantages to this lack of formality.
Looking back Nicolette was able to see that her upbringing had made her a survivor, someone able to bypass the tramlines of convention and cut to her objective; above all she felt it brought her into closer contact with fundamental realities – birth, copulation and death.
And yet she also felt deprived, bored, intolerant.
More than anything, Nicolette reproached both her parents for not giving her an education.

*

Sooner or later this question had to be addressed, and Bohemia’s liberalism made education a complex and vexed issue.
Not for the Bell and John boys the traditional middle– and upper-class conveyor belt from prep school to public school to university.
Not for their sisters the predictable route from schoolroom, through the care of a governess, to launch them at the age of seventeen, endowed with appropriate accomplishments (French, music, drawing), into their first season and onwards to marriage.
The generation of artists growing up in the early decades of the twentieth century felt scarred for life by their strict and repressive education, and were determined not to inflict it on the next.

Richard Aldington portrayed the pre-war English public school in his bitter novel
Death of a Hero
(1929), in which sensitive, artistic George Winterbourne is sent off to have the finer feelings hammered out of him:

‘The type of boy we aim at turning out,’ the Head used to say to impressed parents, ‘is a thoroughly manly fellow.
We prepare for the universities of course, but our pride is in our excellent Sports Record.
There is an O.T.C., organised by Sergeant-Major Brown…

On such occasions he invariably quoted those stirring and indeed immortal lines of Rudyard Kipling which end up, ‘You’ll be a man, my son.’ It is so important to know how to kill.
Indeed, unless you know how to kill you cannot possibly be a Man, still less a Gentleman.

But George resists all attempts to turn him into a soldier ‘in spite of infinite manly bullyings’.
The headmaster punishes him for his ‘abominable’ games record, and for the contemptible and unmanly ‘secret practices’ (i.e.
masturbation) in which he has allegedly indulged:

‘We want no wasters and sneaks here…

‘You will receive twelve strokes from the birch.
Bend over.’

George’s face quivered, but he had not shed a tear or made a sound as he turned silently to go.

‘Stop.
Kneel down at that chair, and we will pray together that this lesson may be of service to you, and that you may conquer your evil habits.
Let us together pray
God
that he will have mercy upon you, and make you into a really manly fellow.’

George retreats into his own world of poets and painters, ‘his only real friends’, who give meaning to his life and preserve the inner vitality and soul he is so anxious to express.
The more oppressed he is, the more obstinately he clings to this essential Bohemian core, and the minute he is released he puts manliness and the suffocating uniformity of school life behind him.

Aldington’s portrayal of what traditional schools inflicted on the artistic spirit was no exaggeration.
Accounts by artists and writers of what they had to endure at some of these quasi-lunatic asylums make harrowing reading.
The painter C.
R.
W.
Nevinson could not remember his education without a shudder.
His well-intentioned parents packed their ‘artistic’ son off at an early age to Uppingham, an institution which had the reputation of being more lenient and more tolerant than other ‘great’ public schools of the day:

Since then I have often wondered what the worst was like.
No qualms of mine gave me an inkling of the horrors I was to undergo.

Bad feeding, adolescence – always a dangerous period for the male – and the brutality and bestiality in the dormitories, made life hell on earth.
An apathy settled on me.
I withered.
I learned nothing: I did nothing.
I was kicked, hounded, caned, flogged, hairbrushed, morning, noon and night.
The more I suffered, the less I cared.
The longer I stayed, the harder I grew.

In his memoir
A Little Learning
(1964) Evelyn Waugh left a grim description of how he was forced to endure the black misery of schoolboy life at Lancing College.
The pointless, perverse hierarchies, the chill and the chilblains, the appalling food which ‘would have provoked mutiny in a mid-Victorian poor-house’, the disgusting latrines, the barbarity of the boys
all ate into the very being of the young Waugh: ‘I urgently besought my father to remove me.
He counselled endurance… I believe it was the most dismal period in history for an English schoolboy.’ Waugh never forgot that time, and as an adult made his own children include ‘all desolate little boys’ in their prayers.

Waugh’s friend Harold Acton was another sensitive soul subjected to the repellent regime of school.
His prep school in Berkshire stood in stark contrast to a halcyon upbringing in Tuscany.
He remembered having seldom been more miserable; the food in particular was revolting.
Acton felt out of his element, his finer feelings nipped in the bud, his love of art and culture defiled by contact with such horrors as cricket and football.
His copies of Ernest Dowson’s poems and Shaw’s plays were confiscated, and to console himself he clung tenaciously to his private treasures, reminders that there was another world where aestheticism had meaning.
Other boys might hide naughty pin-ups in their lockers, but the young Acton’s esoteric vice was a reproduction of Boldini’s portrait of the notorious femme fatale Luisa Casati with one of her greyhounds; beside this he kept, very secretly, a lump of amber and a phial of attar of roses.

Not surprisingly, Nevinson, Waugh and Acton all sought, and found, kindred spirits in contemporary Bohemia after their horrible education concluded.
Nevinson revelled in the freedom of the Slade, and was at the heart of the pre-war Cafe Royal set.
Acton set out to live for beauty in Paris.
Waugh went for a while to Heatherley’s Art School.
But at least as boys they managed to scrape an education, leaving school able to parse Latin and with the rudiments of Euclid drummed into them.
Both Waugh and Acton then went to Oxford, arguably learning there more about alcohol and social networking than about their chosen subjects.
But even in this they were better off than their female counterparts.