insisted on locking Pa’s dressing-room door each night, whence he had been banished since before my birth, and filled the house at weekends with arty young men, female battle-axes and damned revolutionaries who couldn’t even speak the King’s English. So, after a year of enforced abstinence, with little regret, perhaps even a sense of relief, Pa returned to his old stamping grounds: in particular, a charmer by the name of Stella, who had a topping little hideaway in Pimlico and provided with considerable panache — she was very expensive — all the delights of the flesh he had for so long been deprived.
And so their life continued, a rough compromise, as are so many marriages. They even became reconciled to the fact of my not being a boy. Ma, I think, saw me as a sort of human guinea pig sent from heaven in order that she might put into practice her ‘advanced’ ideas on the bringing-up of children. And I made Pa laugh, albeit from the very beginning he always considered me ‘too sharp by half’. In other words, he would have preferred a more amenable and fluffy-headed daughter of the ‘Cuddles’ variety so popular then. I think he feared too that I might grow up to be like Ma — God save the mark!
It was the Eton and Harrow match in the summer of 1908 that brought my parents together again in the bed department. Pa , as was his custom, took a large party. Harrow was his old school and despite the fact a good deal of his time there had been spent in more or less total misery, he nevertheless, from the safe platform of adulthood, viewed it through a haze of nostalgic sentimentality, and would have died rather than miss the famous, annual cricket match at Lords.
They dined afterwards at the Savoy. Ma, for once, had sparkled and refrained from lecturing, and whether it was the heat, the champagne, or the fact Harrow had won, they never afterwards knew, but Ma left the door unlocked between their adjoining rooms at Brown’s Hotel, and Pa at long last had his way.
For a few short weeks passion returned; the heady days of their honeymoon were lived all over again. Until, that is, just as cubbing was about to begin, the apples in the orchard were ripening and the cottage gardens ablaze with Michaelmas daisies, Ma discovered, to her considerable annoyance, she was once again pregnant. She took to lying about on sofas (a habit she continued to the end of her life), gave up hunting, and a governess was engaged for me. I was a precocious child anyway, and Ma was very hot on education for girls as well as boys.
The task of telling me of an addition to the family and of my own impending incarceration in the school room was given to my Nanny. Ma was feeling too unwell to cope with such trivialities as her daughter’s possibly tiresome reaction to the news and Pa, naturally, would be useless at such a task.
So it was that one evening early in the year 1909 Nanny, seated in her special chair by the nursery fire, took me on her knee and cuddled me in the way she used to do, but had not done for a long time. I was feeling comfortable and sleepy after my bath, my skin tingling from the brisk towelling, with the delicious taste of toothpaste in my mouth. The high nursery fender shone with polishing and through its mesh I could see the fire castles flickering in the blackleaded grate. Outside, the wind blew and rain pattered on the roof of the verandah, but inside all was peace. Old Nanny, as she always did, smelt of camphor, a not unpleasant smell, and I burrowed my head into the cleft between her enormous bosoms and listened to the fast tick of the tiny gold watch that hung on a black ribbon round her neck. It had once belonged to Nanny’s mother, hard though it was to imagine Nanny having a mother, and was very old and fragile, so she said.
‘ Tell me a story, Nan, come on.’ I knew all Nanny’s stories by heart, but that wasn’t important, it was the telling of the story that was important. Silence. ‘Come on, Nan.
And so their life continued, a rough compromise, as are so many marriages. They even became reconciled to the fact of my not being a boy. Ma, I think, saw me as a sort of human guinea pig sent from heaven in order that she might put into practice her ‘advanced’ ideas on the bringing-up of children. And I made Pa laugh, albeit from the very beginning he always considered me ‘too sharp by half’. In other words, he would have preferred a more amenable and fluffy-headed daughter of the ‘Cuddles’ variety so popular then. I think he feared too that I might grow up to be like Ma — God save the mark!
It was the Eton and Harrow match in the summer of 1908 that brought my parents together again in the bed department. Pa , as was his custom, took a large party. Harrow was his old school and despite the fact a good deal of his time there had been spent in more or less total misery, he nevertheless, from the safe platform of adulthood, viewed it through a haze of nostalgic sentimentality, and would have died rather than miss the famous, annual cricket match at Lords.
They dined afterwards at the Savoy. Ma, for once, had sparkled and refrained from lecturing, and whether it was the heat, the champagne, or the fact Harrow had won, they never afterwards knew, but Ma left the door unlocked between their adjoining rooms at Brown’s Hotel, and Pa at long last had his way.
For a few short weeks passion returned; the heady days of their honeymoon were lived all over again. Until, that is, just as cubbing was about to begin, the apples in the orchard were ripening and the cottage gardens ablaze with Michaelmas daisies, Ma discovered, to her considerable annoyance, she was once again pregnant. She took to lying about on sofas (a habit she continued to the end of her life), gave up hunting, and a governess was engaged for me. I was a precocious child anyway, and Ma was very hot on education for girls as well as boys.
The task of telling me of an addition to the family and of my own impending incarceration in the school room was given to my Nanny. Ma was feeling too unwell to cope with such trivialities as her daughter’s possibly tiresome reaction to the news and Pa, naturally, would be useless at such a task.
So it was that one evening early in the year 1909 Nanny, seated in her special chair by the nursery fire, took me on her knee and cuddled me in the way she used to do, but had not done for a long time. I was feeling comfortable and sleepy after my bath, my skin tingling from the brisk towelling, with the delicious taste of toothpaste in my mouth. The high nursery fender shone with polishing and through its mesh I could see the fire castles flickering in the blackleaded grate. Outside, the wind blew and rain pattered on the roof of the verandah, but inside all was peace. Old Nanny, as she always did, smelt of camphor, a not unpleasant smell, and I burrowed my head into the cleft between her enormous bosoms and listened to the fast tick of the tiny gold watch that hung on a black ribbon round her neck. It had once belonged to Nanny’s mother, hard though it was to imagine Nanny having a mother, and was very old and fragile, so she said.
‘ Tell me a story, Nan, come on.’ I knew all Nanny’s stories by heart, but that wasn’t important, it was the telling of the story that was important. Silence. ‘Come on, Nan.
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