Three Houses (7 page)

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, Al
i
xander’. 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.

If I had been over from North End House to spend the afternoon with Josephine Kipling at The Elms, it was quite likely that I would find a little knot of sightseers gathered outside the high white gate which screened the house from the road. All through the summer months charabancs, drawn by four skinny miserable horses (how mysterious the word
sharrabangs
was to us), would disgorge loads of trippers at the Royal Oak, and as there was little for them to see in the village besides my grandfather’s house and the church, they spent a good deal of time round Cousin Ruddy’s gate. The Kiplings had been obliged to have the gate boarded over in self-defence, leaving a little hole with
a sliding shutter through which you put your hand to open it. Through this hole tourists would stare with a perseverance worthy of those individuals who looked through the grating in Mr Nupkins’ gate at Ipswich. Not once nor twice did Aunt Carrie (she had been a Balestier from Vermont and Cousin Ruddy wrote
The Naulahka
in collaboration with her brother Wolcott Balestier) have to ask a kneeling crowd of sightseers to move aside and let her go into her own house. The tourists were marvellously misinformed as a rule and I am afraid we took a perverse pleasure in lingering near the gate and deliberately misleading any one who asked us questions, though in the case of the gentleman who wanted to know ‘where Rupert Gilpin lived’, but little misleading was necessary. Nor did we find it needful to undeceive the enquirer in the churchyard who asked in a hushed and reverent voice ‘where Rudyard Kipling lay’.

If Nanny was not on the look-out for me with an eagle eye for escapades, there were many ways of diversifying the journey home. It is true that the journey only consisted of a few yards across the village green, but why go in that direction when there were so
many friendly houses to choose from at our end of the village? Even if Nanny was on the look-out one might, instead of turning to the right and so straight home, go sharply round to the left and be lost to sight behind the Kiplings’ garden wall. Then one would swing for a little on the chains which hung between posts along the edge of the road. Behind them the ground sloped upwards to a long euonymus hedge behind which Farmer Brown lived. We were personally not on visiting terms with Farmer Brown, but we stood in respectful awe of a man who had such an enchanting farmyard and such fine barns and such heaps of rich manure and could play on haystacks whenever he liked without being turned off by an irate farm hand. His older labourers remembered then time when the ploughing was still done by oxen which were turned into the yard at night.

Some of the labourers had the good looks which you find in the Saxon counties; regular features, skin of a beautiful golden brown, blue eyes, and corn-coloured hair. Curiously their wives and daughters rarely had the same good looks, but the women may have had some of the intelligence which
was hard to find in most of the slow-witted slouching men. One handsome young giant to whom we talked over a farmyard gate was asked some question by my grandmother about his work and who was his master. ‘Muster Brown I be his employer,’ he slowly replied and then as slowly amended it to, ‘leastways he be my employer.’ The difference seemed hardly worth mentioning. Others among them belonged to some older and more mysterious race, dark, thin, and hawk-faced, though with the same piercing blue eyes. The oldest shepherd was a man of this type. He would spend weeks away upon the downs with the sheep and was weather-wise beyond what is human. When one met him on the downs on a winter evening in his long cloak, his moleskin cap well tied down over his ears and his steel-tipped crook, symbol of his office, in his hand, he might have been one of the shepherds following a star. His language, to us at any rate, was simple and exalted, like one of Hardy’s peasants who sound so unbelievable in print and are yet so true. One day we found him at leisure near a lambing fold, an enclosure surrounded by wattled hurdles to give the ewes some shelter from the spring winds. With
a young lamb sheltered in the folds of his cloak he looked incredibly picturesque (it is just possible that he knew it), and he began to tell my mother a story about a former master, the best and kindest master a shepherd ever had, and how one day he had gone up to the house with a message and it rained and he had stood patiently wrapped in his cloak outside. Then his master had called to him to come into the porch to take shelter. ‘And he called me,’ the old shepherd went on, ‘and he said to me “Shepherd, come under the porch, out of the rain.” It isn’t many would have said that to me and me in my humble garb.’ Dudeney is a Sussex name, but there must have been some alien strain in the old shepherd, so different was he with his courtly foreign grace from the heavier Mockfords, Snuddens, Moppetts, and Stennings. In his later years the old shepherd developed an embarrassing habit. Whenever we met him on the downs he would let fall that he had just had, or was just about to have, a birthday, or that curiously enough it was his birthday today. The conventions then demanded that silver should pass between us. Also he was apt to lead up to the subject of his crook, for which he had always
recently refused five and twenty shillings, but as we showed no disposition to improve on this figure the conversation languished.

Farmer Brown’s house being out of bounds (I believe that my grandmother exchanged a ceremonious call with Mrs Brown once a year, but we were not included), the next thing was to cross the road and have a good stare at the skins of vermin nailed on Squire Beard’s stable door. These gave us a hideous and fearful joy and were inseparably connected in our minds with the meet of harriers that sometimes dazzled our young eyes. Squire Beard was to us a distant and rather frightening figure. Dulcia, his little daughter, was an intimate of the nursery, but. there were dozens (as it seemed to us) of young squires, all leg and whip and spur, who lived in an unknown exciting world of horses and hunting. So on the whole one did not linger near Down House, but padded on down the hill, skirting the island enclosure of which The Elms formed a part, till one came round again to the top of the village street – the real North End. Here on the right was the path that led through the field called Hog Platt to the
village allotments and so up to the windmill. Even in those days the windmill had ceased to turn, but the miller’s house was still there, a ruinous heap, against the windmill’s stone base. The windmill was so well known that it served as a landmark for ships in the Channel and for that reason was preserved long after its usefulness in its own work was a thing of the past. Gradually the house fell away, or was moved piecemeal by people who wanted stones, and its site was hardly to be recognised. The sails rotted off the mill, tramps slept in it, birds built in it, and once or twice it was set on fire, whether accidentally or not one did not know. But ships in the Channel could not do without it and it still stands, a black hulk, looking out over the newest crop of dragon’s teeth, the hideous red-brick houses that devastate the hill between Rottingdean and Ovingdean.

Just below Hog Platt was hospitable Hillside, where Colonel Phillips and Mrs Phillips were always glad to see us and always had a peach or an apricot handy. Here the atmosphere – quite different from Squire Beard’s – was all of young ladies who must have been very young indeed then but seemed very
old and dashing to us. The eldest sister had married Squire Beard and was the mother of our friend Dulcia and stepmother of all the long-legged horsemen, but Mary and Lilla were at home and were endlessly kind to us and took us into their long garden which ran uphill towards the windmill. They had a far better summer house than ours. It was much higher up and had a long brick staircase to its top storey and when you got there it was a kind of gazebo, perched against a high red brick wall overlooking Hog Piatt. What fun it was to sit there and watch one’s village friends going along the footpath below. There were brothers that came and went, but they were too grown-up and far off to enter into our scheme and it was the girls who let us be friends with them and took us into the kitchen garden and let us pick apricots off the long wall.

But perhaps today with Nanny waiting for me it was safer not to loiter, so I left Hillside unvisited and went on past the tiny, picturesque, and doubtless hopelessly condemned cottages that stood on the other side of the road. They were flush with the brick pavement and one dropped down a couple
of steps to go into the little front room and could almost see into the upper room as one stood in the street. Probably they were not very fit to live in, but we had old friends who had lived and managed to bring up families there and it was a sad day when the cottages were deserted. At first bills were posted on the doors and boys threw stones at the windows, then they became ruinous and were pulled down. Now their stones are forgotten and their site is part of the big garden which has grown from the old garden of The Elms and takes up the whole island. Then as I had done my duty to myself and kept Nanny waiting, I ran past the boarding-house and went in at our own front door, just in time for tea in the dining-room.

The dining-room at North End House was incredibly small for the number of people that it held, and my grandmother’s greeting of ‘welcome’ was daily repeated in its open-armed hospitality. It must have been the parlour of the old brown-staircase house and where its window used to look over the green an open arch gave on to the brick steps leading to the hall. Over this arch hung a heavy velvet curtain embroidered by
Mrs Morris with a figure of St Catherine designed by Mr Morris.

Its long south window looked into the grass plot where the ilex grew on a little hillock, its two stems growing apart so that we could squeeze between them. In autumn passion flowers blossomed round the window and just outside a bell hung under a little wooden shelter against the weatherboard wall of the blue-staircase house, to call us in from the garden for meals, though really it was hardly necessary when there was such a very deeply booming gong in the hall. The dining-room wall was hung on the three other sides with hangings embroidered by Mrs Morris, from her husband’s designs; a coarse woollen material, very dark blue, with clumps of flowers at regular intervals. The hangings on each side of the fire-place, facing the window, masked recesses where china and silver were kept. Here one could hide; and whenever one was sent to get anything from the shelves one murmured to oneself, ‘She drew the arras aside.’ My grandmother had a very high-backed chair, covered with some blue Morris material, which stood with its back to the window and so enveloped
her little form that she was almost invisible to any one entering the room. I never heard her discuss domestic matters or housekeeping, but Rottingdean meals were very delicious. One remembers the lobsters that came fresh from the Fish Woman’s cart an hour after the lobster pots had been taken up, creamy and delicate as no town lobster is, for your lobster is something of a vintage breed and does not travel well. The nursery was always allowed to have the lobster’s whiskers – antennae – feelers – I don’t know their right name, and they made a fine show stuck in the ribbons of one’s summer hat. Later on, when we were allowed to join the grown-up lunch, we were promoted to a claw and were blissfully happy with the silver lobster-pick, rummaging down to the very tip for edible morsels. Prawns of gigantic size we also had, in whose head Nanny could find two little things remotely resembling figures of people, called Adam and Eve. And shrimps of course which we had caught ourselves, and winkles – but these were considered low and Nanny did not encourage them.

It was a tradition which has been handed on in the family that the wife should carve, and my little
grandmother was almost hidden by the Sunday joint. Her carving knife with green ivory handle was worn by age almost as fine as the rapier with which the chef in charge of the cold table cuts the ham, and the sirloin of beef or the ‘sainted mutton’ fell to pieces at once under her skilful hand. She had ways at table inherited from her youth in the north of England, belonging really to an earlier generation, and always ate cheese on the point of a silver knife with extreme delicacy. One of her favourite dishes for supper when the family were alone was a marrow bone. It would come to table standing up on a large piece of toast, swathed in a white table-napkin. At the sight of it my grandmother would carefully unfold her own napkin to its fullest extent and pin it to the neck of her gown with a handsome paste brooch. Thus equipped, she would dip into the marrow with a long silver implement – it cannot have been the lobster pick, so I think it must have been the chutnee spoon, that attenuated caricature of an ordinary spoon – and help us all liberally to that delicious, but almost too satisfying, dish. Another habit of her youth was to lay her slice of cake between two pieces of bread-and-butter
and eat them together like a sandwich which was known in North country parlance as ‘matrimony’.

Then there were special foods for cold Sunday supper which always included hard boiled eggs with their inside removed, mashed up with butter and seasoning, and replaced, and cheese straws tied up in little bundles like faggots. At Christmas there was a turkey with gilded claws sent from Cheshire by Lady Leighton Warren. This lady was a devoted friend of my grandparents and found for my grandfather many of the country flower names which he turned to pictures in his Rower Book. Once she sent to North End House a little sea-horse, white enamelled body, gold mane, green enamelled tail, and a saddle girth of rubies, because she said it must be like the White Horse at Rottingdean, though to any one who had seen this unassuming public-house the likeness was not obvious.

In the summer holidays heaped plates of figs and peaches and nectarines were always on the sideboard, bursting and oozing with their own richness, and a child could easily appropriate one, or two, or three
without the theft being noticed. A little later the sweetbriar-tasting Ribstone Pippins took their place; and later, almonds and raisins.

When we left the dining-room for the drawing-room we had to pass through the hall. It was always worth lingering here to see if any rose-water would drip from the big glass barrel which stood in a niche by the steps and then to look at the big clock which rather erratically told the days of the month and had a painted sun and moon that tottered across a starry hemisphere. Plaster casts of Delia Robbia singing boys, skilfully coloured by Nora Hallé, were hanging on the wall opposite the window and there was the horrifying joy of lifting up the trap through which coal was shot down for the furnace below. It was another of the minor curiosities of the house that though there was an excellent hot-water service to heat the pipes in the studio, it had never occurred to any one to use the hot water for any other purpose, and there was only one cold water-tap (to which we shall come later) in the whole of the blue-staircase house. Near the clock the Watts portrait of my grandfather as a young man looked down on
us from the wall. He was about thirty-seven then, with straight nose, blue eyes, a high forehead, and a rather long forked beard and hair of a light-brown colour touched with golden tints. The modelling of the upper part of the face which is free from beard and moustache is singularly delicate and beautiful. When we knew my grandfather his beard and hair were grizzled and he wore his beard clipped to a point, but the sensitive modelling of the face was, if anything, accentuated.