Three Houses (4 page)

Every treat we had seemed to include enormous quantities of dirt. When we went into Kensington Square we ran our hands along the railings till they were black and grimed our faces and smocks by pushing in among the sooty shrubs. An afternoon in the garden meant being washed in several waters. The occasional visit to the leads over the night nursery was an orgy of smuts. How thankful Nanny must have been when the day came for the trunks to be brought down from the boxroom at the head of the stairs and we all went off in a station omnibus to Victoria for our summer visit to our grandparents at Rottingdean.

RICHARDSON’S HOUSE, THE GRANGE, NORTH END

Many years before we children were born my grandparents had been looking for a house at the sea-side where my grandfather could have the Brighton air which to him was magically restoring. My grandmother, walking across the downs, had come to Rottingdean and seen a white house on the village green. This was their home for many years, and my grandmother lived there till her death.

The original house was a three-storey cottage, only one room thick, but there was a neighbouring house standing at right angles to it a little back from the green, and the two houses were later made into one by an architect friend. The whole was a most
ingenious and rather confusing dwelling. The little court or garden between the second house and the road was built over, and formed the link between the two houses. The result of this was that to get from one part of the house to the other you had either to go through a room in the connecting part or, if you did not wish to trespass upon dining-room or studio, go right up the blue staircase, through the nursery, and down the brown staircase. As the second house stood on a slightly higher level than the first there was the additional complication of little flights of three or four steps between the two houses on every floor. It all made a kind of rabbit warren most enchanting to a child.

It was called North End House, partly after North End Road where my grandparents lived in London, and partly because it was within measurable distance of the north end of the village street which ran up from the beach past our house and the village green, and finally turned to the right up the hill before it straightened itself out and went on up the valley to Woodendene and Lewes. The house, shiningly white all over, was divided
from the road by a low white paling in front of a euonymus hedge. I can’t think what the south coast would do without euonymus and tamarisk, those dismal eternal shrubs. The dull, feathery tamarisk, always coated with dust from the white roads that are cut through the chalky downs, and the sparkling euonymus, every leaf varnished to dark, or to hard yellowy green, absorbing all the softer rays of light and giving back nothing but fierce glitter. Both are impervious to salt winds and winter frosts, and when the foam is blown up from the sea by south-west gales they never shrivel a leaf or lose a young shoot.

We went in through a little white gate upon which we were forbidden to play, so we always climbed it or swung upon it when Nanny’s eye was off us. On the right was a little path between hedge and house, covered deeply with the shingle that is used so much for paths in that country. Another of our forbidden pleasures was to walk up and down this path from the front gate to the fence which divided North End House from Gothic House, the boarding-house next door, kicking and shuffling the shingle with
our feet. Some of it went into our sandshoes and was very uncomfortable; the rest was left in untidy heaps till Ernest, the garden boy, came and raked it smooth again. On the left were brick steps going down to a little area outside the scullery window where the tradesmen delivered their goods, and this also was forbidden to us. In fact Nanny’s whole existence seemed to be spent in forbidding things for no particular reason. It may have been that she was not on good terms with the kitchen inhabitants and didn’t want us to mix with them, but visits downstairs, by the outside steps or by the more legitimate medium of the kitchen stairs, were sternly discouraged, though this didn’t in the least prevent one’s getting down to the kitchen and cleaning out the bowl in which a chocolate pudding had been mixed, or indulging in that peculiar passion of the young, uncooked pastry.

Between shingly path and scullery steps was a brick path which took one in two strides to the porch. Shingle and brick represented the two common forms of path in those days – asphalt had not yet reduced everything to a common ugliness
– and there was a third and most uncomfortable form of paving which was round stones about the size of a duck’s egg laid close together in tightly packed earth, or sometimes mortared: a penitential form of pavement to all pilgrims, but more especially to those with bare feet. When you go barefoot all the summer your feet become hard enough to turn the edge of a piece of broken glass, but the hardest sole cannot happily walk on cobblestones, neither is shingle really comfortable. The paths that we preferred were of brick, cool and refreshing to the feet on rainy days and with a delicious basking warmth in sunshine, though sometimes, on an August afternoon, too hot even for our leathery soles, so that one was glad to walk in the gutter where water might be running, or pad along the middle the road. Damp walking is very much more agreeable than dry when you are barefoot. ‘Dirty and dry’ was the description of the most uncomfortable feelings one’s feet could have, smothered with chalky dust from the roads, or caked with the clay or mud one had acquired at the edge of a pond and then dried hard by sun
and wind. The most delicious of barefoot feelings is to walk on meadow grass under flood, when the water is shallow enough to be warmed through by the sun; and another exquisite sensation is good rich mud squelching up between the toes and spreading oozily over the foot. Our cousins at The Elms who went barefoot half the year could go everywhere with impunity, but we who only took our shoes and stockings off for the six weeks of school holidays were not so hardy. Their most enviable point of superiority was that they could run over the tops of the downs without feeling the little thistles which lie spread out quite flat and close to the ground in that short herbage. While Josephine and her brother and sister could speed over flat thistle and stunted cowslip alike, we could only move with hops and shrieks of agony and were ignominiously reduced to putting on the sand-shoes which we usually carried slung round our necks for emergencies.

And now we are standing in the porch with its red tiled floor, a seat along one side and its black serpent knocker on the white door. There is no need
to knock, or to pull the twisted iron bell-handle, for the door is never locked except at night, but as we have only just arrived from London there is a formality to be gone through. Already as we drove up to the house we have seen our grandmother looking for us out of the drawing-room window and now we must ring the bell to give her time to greet us. While the maid is answering it my grandmother will have left the drawing-room and taken up her position at the top of two steps, just inside the front door, and when the door is opened we shall see her, a little, very upright figure, in sweeping skirts, arms stretched wide and saying ‘Welcome.’ Such a difficult word to say without giving it some suspicion of affectation or a rehearsed effect, but from my grandmother the deep expression of an embracing love. She was so small that her grandchildren began to tower over her while they were very young indeed, but her carriage gave one the impression of six feet of dignity and she stood as straight as an arrow all her life. Her large eyes were clear blue and calculated to make a child stand abashed who had pricks of conscience about
chocolates abstracted from the drawing-room cupboard, or peaches which had been handled till they were what William Morris used to call ‘pinch-ripe’. She was a widow during the greater part of my recollection of her, and always wore much the same dress, very long full black gowns of velvet or satin with a little lace. A large watch all set with chrysolites which my grandfather had given her was always pinned at her waist. He had bought it for its beauty in their early married days with almost the last eight pounds in his possession. On her head she wore swathes of soft lace, pinned here and there with an old paste brooch, and on one hand an old diamond mourning ring. It had belonged to an aunt of my grandfather’s and had a beautiful open setting in claws of gold, with black enamel and gold chasing on each side. ‘Aunt Catherwood’ died in 1872, and the name of the friend or relation for whom she had worn the ring was obliterated by time. Otherwise my grandmother wore hardly any jewellery.

Meanwhile our luggage was being unloaded from the omnibus that had brought us from
Brighton station. It must have been a relic of early omnibus days in London, with seats beside the driver and a knifeboard on the top where one sat back to back just like Leech drawings in old copies of
Punch
. There were other buses running between Rottingdean and Brighton, but they were vastly inferior. Those from the Royal Oak were indeed drawn by four horses, but they were such thin and jaded wisps that to drive behind them was misery, and one found oneself wondering whether their bones would come right through their wretched starved-looking bodies before the journey’s end, or if they wouldn’t choose this journey to lie down at the bottom of the long hill and die. But though the other bus was only drawn by two horses, they were so white and so stout and competent that it was always, if possible, arranged for us to come by the train that was met by the bus from the White Horse. It came right up the steep hill into the station yard and was waiting for us at the end of our journey. We would willingly have clambered up to the seats beside the driver, but they were usually reserved for lucky grown-ups and the most
we could expect was occasionally to be jammed in, between a grown-up passenger and the driver, and allowed to hold the reins when he had gathered them up. Our Nanny had strong objections to our going outside, which were partly in the general scheme of repression and partly, I must now admit, a not unnatural avoidance of the responsibility of a child with quicksilver in its legs and sea-air in its brain being loose on the roof. So as a rule we had to ride inside with Nanny and the baby, though even here were compensations, for the bus actually had a door that was shut in cold weather and straw on the floor in winter, so that it was not difficult to find romance.

The family luggage had been piled on to the roof: large black shiny dress trunks with round tops, heavy leather trunks, massive Gladstone bags, Nanny’s tin box locked and corded, and, neady sewn up in hessian and mackintosh, the baby’s bath containing all her belongings. Fashions in luggage have changed as completely as everything else since those days, and I suppose Nannies and housemaids all have suit cases now and what has happened to
the tin trunks I cannot say. I was walking not long ago in a quiet street in Mayfair when a very old four-wheeler came round the corner and drew up at a large house. Like John Gilpin’s chaise it did not drive up to the front door, but stopped at the area gate. There got out of it a very respectable man in overcoat and bowler and to him the driver handed down a small tin trunk neatly corded which he took on his shoulders and conveyed down the area steps. I felt that I was seeing a ghost of other times, the gentleman’s gentleman with his tin trunk going down the area steps and in at the servants’ entrance. As the cab turned round and made for a very discreet public-house with green blinds in the windows a few doors off, the shade of Thackeray seemed to be hanging over it.

By now perhaps I had been lucky enough to be perched up in front between the driver and some friendly grownup, with a broad leather strap across us both, much needed when the driver turned the horses’ heads, and we drove down the long steep hill from the station, the bus almost pressing the horses’ hindquarters. The driver held them well up, bracing
his feet against the board in front, and we held on to the seat and were thankful for the strap which kept us from slithering down, especially when our legs were too short to reach the floor. Our bus had special privileges and was allowed to go along the sea front while other and inferior buses had to come and go by back streets. So we swung round to the right in Castle Square, leaving the Pavilion behind us, and there in front was the sea which we hadn’t seen since Christmas, the pier, and the bathing machines hauled up from the tide. Past terraces and squares of Regency houses we clattered, delightful houses with great bulging windows overlooking the sea, some curved, some angular. Past the mysterious terrace of houses which were all black and built, so Nanny used to tell us, of very hard coal, because the man who built them had made a fortune in it. Past Sussex Square, sloping uphill, prosperous and spacious, each house thrusting out bow windows to get a glimpse of the sea, with gardens surrounded by the eternal euonymus. There were rumours, also supplied by Nanny, of an underground passage leading from Sussex Square to the lower esplanade,
Madeira Road, so called I imagine as an attraction to invalids, and we deeply envied the inhabitants.

As we drove along with the sea on our right and houses on our left, the prospect of the downs opened in front of us and far away we saw the black sails of the Rottingdean windmill which meant our journey’s end. One of the many romantic parts of this journey was to see the remains of the roads that had been swallowed up by the sea, for the chalk cliffs crumble very quickly here and people still spoke of the road we were just coming to as the New Road, though it had been in use for many years. The Old Road had continued the line of the sea front, going all along the coast to Dover, but much of it had fallen away and become unsafe for wheeled traffic. In those days one could still walk upon it, a grass-grown road between grassy banks, and the horses would have been glad enough to take it and be spared the heavy pull up the hill which the new road could not avoid. Sometimes a daring passenger would get out at Kemp Town and walk along the old road, picking up the bus further on, but there was always the chance that the bus might
get first to the meeting of the ways and not wait for you. In any case Nanny would never have allowed us to leave her sight, so we stuck to the bus while it swung round past the French Convalescent Home with miserable homesick foreigners looking wanly at us from the chairs where they lay wrapped in rugs. It seemed so desolate to be French and convalescent at that windy corner and almost in sight of your native land.

Now the horses slowed down for the long pull up the first hill. My mother had what seemed to us an excessive tenderness towards horses and all country drives were a succession of dismounting from and remounting whatever vehicle we happened to be in with a view to sparing the horses, always when going up hill and often when going down, unless she had previously satisfied herself that a drag of unusual power had been put on. It was always a sore point with us that we were forced to get off and walk up the long hill and indeed I cannot think that the weight of two children of five and seven would make any appreciable difference to the horses. The only effect it had was to make us vow secretly never to
get out of any carriage, however steep the hill, when we were grown-up. Another of my mother’s amiable weaknesses was to make us do a kind of sitting gymnastics, supposed to be favourably received by horses. If we were going up a hill we would be adjured to sit well forward on the seat to throw the weight as near the front as possible. On the level we would have a brief respite and when we descended the further slope, the command was to lie right back so that our weight might somehow hold back the carriage. I have even known her stop a dog-cart at the bottom of a hill to shift the position of the seat, we meanwhile plodding up the hill, and then, after a brief normal ride along the level, she would have us all out again to move the seat back to a position more suitable for going downhill.