Edith Morley Before and After (eBook)

CHAPTER 1:

Childhood background

I was born in 1875, in the tall Bayswater house which was to be my home until my mother’s death in 1926. My father was a surgeon-dentist with a West End practice, and since he had six children, the eldest an invalid, there was never much money to spare for luxuries. On the other hand, since he was a great stickler for professional etiquette and the proprieties, we were brought up strictly in accordance with the middle-class conventions of the day, which included, happily, a beloved nurse and as good an education as could be managed for all of us, a six-weeks country or seaside holiday every summer and regular visits to the pantomime or theatre at Christmas or on birthdays. Certainly in my own home and in the houses we visited, nothing was known of the Victorian suppression and repression of children about which so much is read today. On the contrary, I was myself a much indulged and very spoiled little girl, very conscious of my importance as the only sister among four brothers, two much older, one near my own age, and one nine years younger. But I did hate being a girl* and can still remember my indignation at hearing my brother told that only girls cheated at games and the like, or cried when they were hurt. And how I hated and resented wearing gloves. When quite small I suffered from a thick woollen veil, which was supposed to safeguard the complexion, but my very noisy and voluble protests soon relieved me of that infliction – old-fashioned and unusual even in those days. I also resented and constantly disobeyed the rule that I must not slide down the banisters or turn head over heels! I had gymnastic lessons, however, and learned to swim, but I yearned for more of the team games which girls did not yet play and suffered a good deal from insufficient outlets for my physical exuberance. Walks in Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park were no adequate substitute, even when enlivened by forbidden tree climbing and jumping of railings, or by games of hide-and-seek.

My father wished me to be educated at home by a governess but luckily yielded to my desire to go to school. When I was just five, I was sent to a neighbouring kindergarten which was kept by a natural history enthusiast, to whose wise guidance my childhood owed an incalculable debt. ‘Brownie’ as we called her, became a family friend: she spent many holidays with us and even succeeded in persuading my nurse that muddied clothes didn’t matter if they were the results of dredging expeditions. From her, I learned to collect everything that crept and crawled: I kept silkworms, spiders (until they got loose in the drawing room), tadpoles and newts; I pressed and named flowers; looked for fossils, collected shells and joined a ‘Practical Naturalists’ Society’. And when my ‘museum’ – a glass case with sliding trays and bookshelves on the top of the cabinet – was supplemented by a real microscope, my satisfaction was complete. I learned to make slides, and thereby hangs a truly Victorian tale.

When I was eleven, I discovered a little boy about a year older who had similar tastes. I used to go to tea with him, and to his nurse’s horror we spent hours together in his bedroom making slides and looking at them. These highly improper proceedings had to be sanctioned by the parents of both sinners before we could be allowed to seclude ourselves in so unseemly a fashion! Then there were the long and happy hours spent at the Natural History Museum, identifying various specimens and the never-to-be-forgotten afternoon when the Director (he called me ‘madam’!) invited me, subject to my nurse’s permission, to come downstairs and help his young men to name their shells. I had tea with them and was fully convinced that they needed my assistance, and my brother was not asked too, and altogether it was a delightful and wonderful experience and one which filled me with self-importance.

Kindergarten days over, I was sent to a select private school because Notting Hill High School was at least twenty-five minutes’ walk from our home and the nursemaid could not be spared to take and fetch me. Besides I might have made friends there with tradesmen’s daughters or someone equally undesirable! However the Doreck College was very good in its old-fashioned way, and I was well taught and spent four happy years there before I was sent, when just fourteen, to Hanover to learn German, and also to be turned into a ‘young lady’ and acquire some of the feminine accomplishments I refused to have anything to do with at home.

It was not uncommon at that period for girls to be sent abroad to a finishing school, though more often to Paris than elsewhere. The Hanover school to which I went was kept by an English woman, a friend of my mother in their youth, and many girls in our circle went there. It was very cosmopolitan in its clientèle and most of the pupils were between sixteen and eighteen years of age, so I was among the youngest. The teaching and methods were entirely German, and the English head died and was succeeded by a German while I was there. We were thoroughly instructed in modern languages, in German, French and English literature, universal history (not then a subject often taught in English schools) and history of art. Arithmetic was rudimentary, and at fourteen I already knew a good deal more of that subject than my foreign schoolfellows and did not add to my knowledge while there. We learned no Latin and no mathematics or science, but at that date that would probably also have been the case at a private school at home.

What most perturbed me was the unblushing way in which all, except the English girls, read their lessons from books concealed under the desk and otherwise cheated – doubtless because no-one was believed to be truthful without proof. I was of course used to the opposite method: at home every child was trusted unless discovered to be a liar, and I suffered a good deal from the unwonted treatment and its effects on the girls’ morale. I also disliked and never got used to the system of favouritism and spying which prevailed, nor to the encouragement of tell-tales. On the whole, however, I was very happy in Hanover and stayed an extra session by my own desire – a fact which made my last year one of continuous spoiling by the authorities, with repeated visits to the theatre and the like, from which my alleged ill-conduct had almost wholly debarred me during my first years at the school. The Hoftheater in Hanover had very good companies, and the performances of classics and modern drama were a pleasant way of improving our knowledge of the language. Twice during the summer holidays I went with the school to the Harz Mountains and on other occasions visited the homes of fellow pupils in other towns.

Kaiser Wilhelm had only recently succeeded to the throne when I went to Hanover, and I well remember how the ‘Reise Kaiser’ was criticised by his subjects as compared with his father, the ‘Weise Kaiser’, and his grandfather, the ‘Greise Kaiser’.1 He arrived unexpectedly at Hanover one morning at about 3am and made a tremendous to-do because at that hour there was not a proper turnout of the guard at the barracks. Later in the day, he rode past our Pensionat and, to our great satisfaction, stopped to salute our Union Jack. A subsequent memory is of a visit to a former schoolfellow in Berlin who feared I should be arrested for lèse-majesté if I expressed my views so openly as I was doing in a café, where they might be overheard.

Apart from school altogether, I had the inestimable benefit of living at home in a house that was full of books, to any and all of which I had access. My mother was herself an omnivorous reader and an exceptionally intelligent woman. Luckily she also held the opinion that it would do far more harm than good to try to control my reading. So I read everything I could lay my hands on – boys’ books by Henty, Ballantyne, Kingston, Anthony Hope, Manville Fenn,2 etc., girls’ books (usually very inferior to those meant for boys), nursery classics, such as Miss Edgeworth, Harriet Martineau, Charlotte Yonge, Mrs Molesworth, Mrs Ewing,3 and Lewis Carroll; grown-up classics such as Scott, Dickens, George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë; dozens of three-volume trash from Mudie’s4 which had the beneficent result of putting me permanently off that kind of thing later on. I also devoured many books that dated from my mother’s childhood or were at any rate old-fashioned in my time – Miss Porter’s Days of Bruce, Queechy and The Wide Wide World (many grammar lessons were enlivened by surreptitious counting of the number of times the heroines cried and fainted); Peter Parley’s Voyages, Mrs Markham’s Histories, even Magnall’s Questions, Little Mary’s Grammar and The Parent’s Assistant.5

We took in Little Folks and the Boys’ Own Paper; the grown-ups read all the better periodicals from which I was at liberty to extract what I could; my eldest brother was at the period engrossed by Carlyle, RUSKIN and by such lesser reformers as Bellamy and his Looking Backward.6 If I did not read through all of these, at least I knew what they looked like and the kind of thing I could find there. Hugh Miller7 and Charles Darwin I did tackle seriously, and the first book I ever bought with my own pocket-money, supplemented by a final 2/–...