Too Close to the Sun (4 page)

NINETEENTH-CENTURY EXPLORERS
had brought Africa into the drawing room. When Henry and his siblings were playing cricket at Haverholme, explorers were the celebrities of the age, and their books, illustrated with naked bodies and comical headdresses, were bestsellers. Catalogs offered buffalo-hoof “door porters” with brass handles, buck-horn toasting forks, and corkscrews fashioned from tusks. Eager decades of “discovery” then culminated in an undignified sprint to carve up the continent. Salisbury noted that when he left the Foreign Office in 1880 nobody thought about Africa, but when he returned to government as prime minister five years later the principal nations of Europe were quarreling obsessively over the division of the continent. It was the sudden acquisitive interest of other countries that transformed an indifferent poking around into an urgent search for colonies. (The Germans had a word for it:
Torschlusspanik,
panic over the door-closing. Lord Derby called it the Scramble for Africa.) The Belgian king, Leopold II, a catalyst of sorts, was prepared to spend his money—“
Il faut à la Belgique une colonie
”—and he searched for tropical territory for two decades before he found the Congo basin. Colonial pressure groups sprouted in France and Germany, expeditions were dispatched, and the
tricolore
was soon flapping on the banks of the Niger. At the West Africa Conference inaugurated in Berlin at the end of 1884, there was lofty talk about civilizing the dark continent, but in reality it was simply imperative to stop other countries from gaining a trading monopoly. Colonial sovereignty was a kind of commercial protectionism. Politicians indicated that there was money to be made from the new territories, but for many settlers, Karen Blixen among them, life in Africa was to be one long struggle with the bank manager. As for Africans, they were perceived as a dark, inert mass: people who, if they were well behaved, would benefit from the civilizing effects of mechanization, commerce, and trousers.

IN 1893, THE FINCH HATTONS
rented a villa in Sydenham, a prosperous residential district in the burgeoning London suburbs. Henry played golf at Mitcham while the children and Nan went to the pantomimes and flower displays at the Crystal Palace, Sir Joseph Paxton’s iron-and-glass masterpiece that had been moved pane by pane from its original home in Hyde Park. Nan filled the house with books. The children read Mrs. Ewing’s soldier story
Jackanapes,
the historical romances of Charlotte Yonge, and Kingsley’s classic
The Water Babies.
While Topsy lingered over
Little Women,
the boys moved on to the manly novels of G. A. Henty (these appeared at the rate of three or four a year until the industrious author expired in 1902). Henty fostered the heroic ideal of the Briton dining in black tie in the Punjab or raising his hat to a compatriot in the murderous heat of the Nullarbor Plain, and the boys ate it up. Their appetite for the outdoor life was stimulated by a diet of
Treasure Island, The Swiss Family Robinson,
and
Around the World in Eighty Days,
as well as the sensational new
Jungle Book
and its sequel. After tea, the children sang songs in the parlor with their mother. Nan, a talented musician, was often at the piano with one of a succession of pet jerboas—furry rodents with large ears and long hind legs—listening on her shoulder. (“Oh,” Nellie Terry wrote to her passionate admirer George Bernard Shaw in 1896 during a difficult period, “all the time I was just dying to go away to some quiet place—to you, or to hear some music from Nan Finch Hatton….”) All three children had inherited her musical ability, and there were frequent family concerts with guest appearances from Terry and Nan’s other theatrical friends. Denys was surrounded by strong, artistic women in his childhood, and their influence persisted in his adult relations. The family revolved around Nan. Remembering the tensions of her own childhood, she was determined that her children should always know how much they were loved. “She was so unselfish,” her desolate husband wrote after her death, “that everyone who knew her loved her dearly.”

London had its attractions, but the hearts of the Finch Hattons remained in Lincolnshire. Between Priory tenancies everyone boarded the train and rattled up to Sleaford, where they were met by the Haverholme brougham and conveyed to the one home to which Denys felt a lifelong emotional attachment. A crenellated extravaganza with thirty bedrooms, the Priory was Victorian mock Gothic of the purest order, and hideous. Despite a row of delicate arches that lent the ground level an ecclesiastical aspect, the overall effect was warlike; there were slits through which teams of imaginary archers could aim their bows, and the pargeted chimneys jostled cowled shoulders against the watery fen sky. The house was surrounded by a low, balustraded stone wall that formed a rectangle, and the whole lot had been plonked in the middle of the flatlands like an overdesigned toy castle resting on a tea tray. But its poetry absorbed its absurdity. It was said locally that the Priory was the model for Chesney Wold in Dickens’s
Bleak House.
It looked bleak, though it warmed up when you got within the low wall and considered it from close range. Then the texture of the stone and the scope of the architectural detail softened the façade. Inside, a touch of the monastery lingered. Even on the brightest days the rooms were dark, and the long corridors lined with marble busts of Roman emperors were positively stygian. The cold, high-ceilinged drawing room was silent save for the sound of great clocks all ticking together, and the interminable journey to the nursery, dimly lit by flickering oil lamps that brought suits of armor to life, was peopled in the children’s imagination by a phantasmagoric cast of monks, knights, and fairies. Once in bed they listened for the resident ghost, a Gilbertine canoness whose footsteps could be heard on the path under the tower window.

For the children, the park was paradise. They played in the monks’ burial ground and near the pigsties and among the watercress beds by the old river Slea. Wherever they went, it was windy. Cricket stumps had to be drilled deep, and blankets and rugs securely weighted by members of a familiar tribe of outdoor servants. Indoors, only the cook, Mrs. Rook, had equal status with the butler. A monumental square-jawed figure with the physique of a wrestler, Mrs. Rook was permanently swathed in acres of black and ruled her territory like a despot, tyrannizing her kitchen maids with booming orders that were underscored by the rumble of the massy brick furnace in the windowless Still Room, and by the orchestrated plumbing of the condenser.

Haverholme was not an obviously lovable estate. The Cistercian monks who had settled there in the twelfth century had not cared for it: too flat, damp, and marshy (“
locus vastae, solitudinis et horroris
”). But Denys responded deeply to the numinous light and the sense of space of the flatlands, and later tried to find those characteristics in other landscapes. His love of Haverholme, rooted early, was nourished by images of egg hunting in the nests of ancient yews; of collecting mosquito larvae from the filmy surface of the water butt behind the grape house; of racing Toby on the towpath along the north bank of the Slea on their Sunbeam bicycles. Haverholme was the setting for all the significant rituals of their early years. In the South Hall, on Christmas Eve, village children gathered with their mothers to receive presents. The untroubled world of pre-ordained classes might have been tottering, but its traditions flourished. There was no sense of patronage on either side when, after the villagers had left, the servants crowded into the hall, each man with a capacious red-and-white-spotted handkerchief that he unrolled on a trestle table so juvenile Finch Hattons could set upon it a hunk of raw beef and a packet of raisins sprigged with holly. Church was an inalienable component of these feudal rituals. Winchilseas and Finch Hattons worshipped at the fourteenth-century St. Andrew’s among relations entombed inside and out. They filed into their own pew, eyed by a congregation of tenants and employees, and during the Reverend Grayson’s incomprehensible sermons the children watched the reticulated tracery of the stained glass cast patterns on the pocked flagstones of ancestral graves.

Like God, guns and animals were always part of their lives. Even before he could walk, Denys was loaded into the dogcart with his brother and sister and taken to watch his father shooting at partridge or rabbits. On one occasion, they went to a tenants’ shoot at Haverholme. Some guns were still muzzle-loaded despite the fact that breechloaders had appeared in 1865, and a ramrod was accidentally left inside one. A tenant, aiming at a hare put up between him and the cart, missed his target and peppered the cart with shot as the forgotten ramrod penetrated one side, whizzed between the children’s legs, and emerged on the other side. “My God, man,” spluttered Henry. “If you must kill my children, then pick one, but don’t brown the lot.” As far back as he could remember, Denys’s spirits rose at the sight of the racks in the gun room and the powder horn that hung on a nail. On shooting mornings, he and Toby ran out to find keepers and beaters stamping their feet in the stable yard while the head keeper, Mr. Garrod, a Pickwickian figure with white sideburns, a bowler hat, and a velveteen coat, stood, legs wide, fastening the leads of three curly-haired retrievers to a strap attached to his waistcoat. The boys carried the cartridge bag and walked behind the line as it rustled through the September foliage, while keepers cracked partridge skulls with their teeth. By the time he was eleven, Denys was allowed to go out alone to shoot rabbits with a twelve-bore, and the satisfaction of watching them tumble head over heels was one that he recaptured on a larger and larger scale as an adult until he saw the whole picture and realized that the killing could not go on forever.

AT THE BEGINNING OF 1896,
Toby and Denys went off to prep school, to warm them up for Eton, the royal establishment twenty miles west of London where generations of family males had been educated. Henry and Nan had settled on a place in Eastbourne, a prosperous resort on the Sussex coast sheltered from the prevailing southwesterlies by the bulk of Beachy Head (the benefits of sea air were heavily touted by the school’s proprietors). Nan was distraught at the prospect of her chicks’ departure. “Last day, last walk,” she noted sadly in her diary the day before they left. “Everything seems hateful.” At the end of her first visit, she concluded, “Horrid cold place. It was dismal leaving them.”

Uncle Harold, meanwhile, remained a favorite with Denys. Despite his bachelor status, he was a dedicated family man, deeply involved in the affairs of his clan. It was he who stood up to Edith when she became unreasonably histrionic, and he who took control of a wedding or a funeral when arrangements careered off the rails. He influenced everyone. Harold put a golf club into Denys’s hand when he was still wearing a sailor suit, Harold taught him to stalk deer, and Harold, more than anyone, instilled in him a passion for field sports. The Avunculus Hector, as Denys called him, was a huntsman and a crack shot, and uncle and nephew often tramped together through Evedon Wood or rode to hounds side by side. But it was not just a sporting bond. Harold was his own man, and Denys admired the independent spirit. As a teenager, he often sat alongside his uncle in the red-walled dining room at White’s Club in St. James’s, breathing in the cigar smoke and languid, lordly grandeur while riffling through the gun section of the latest Army & Navy catalog. Harold embraced the Establishment but refused to submit to convention for its own sake, a duality that impressed his nephew. Years later, a school friend remembered Denys speaking frequently of “the ‘Avunculus Hector’ whose life excited him to emulation.”