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  Contents

  Edith Olivier

  Dedication

  Preface

  BOOK I

  PREAMBLE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  BOOK II

  PREAMBLE

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  BOOK III

  PREAMBLE

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Edith Olivier

  Without Knowing Mr Walkley

  Edith Olivier (1872–1948) was born in the Rectory at Wilton, Wiltshire, in the late 1870s. Her father was Rector there and later Canon of Salisbury. She came from an old Huguenot family which had been living in England for several generations, and was one of a family of ten children. She was educated at home until she won a scholarship to St Hugh’s College, Oxford. Her first novel, The Love Child, was published in 1927 and there followed four works of fiction: As Far as Jane’s Grandmother’s (1928), The Triumphant Footman (1930), Dwarf’s Blood (1930) and The Seraphim Room (1932). Her works of non-fiction were The Eccentric Life of Alexander Cruden (1934), Mary Magdalen (1934), Country Moods and Tenses (1941), Four Victorian Ladies of Wiltshire (1945), Night Thoughts of a Country Landlady (1945), her autobiography, Without Knowing Mr. Walkley (1938) and, posthumously published, Wiltshire (1951).

  Dedication

  For

  KITTY and EVELYN RAWLENCE

  and other friends

  who remember with me the old Wilton days

  There are several people whom I should like to thank for their help to me in bringing out this book. Miss Helen Waddell allowed me to use her beautiful translation of Fredugis’s ‘Lament for Alcuin’ from her Mediaeval Latin Scholars. The interesting photograph by Lewis Carroll (The Rev. C. L. Dodgson), of Dante Rossetti playing chess, is reproduced by kind permission of Major C. H. W. Dodgson; and the Officers of Court Pembroke and Montgomery of the Ancient Order of Foresters allowed me to photograph, specially for this book, the mid-Victorian banner which was so often carried through the Wilton streets when I was a child. I thank the Lamb family: Henry, who made the drawing for this book, and Henrietta and Felicia, who entertained me, while I was sitting, with their enchanting conversation. I have not succeeded in tracing the present owner of Sir William Richmond’s study of Lord Pembroke’s head, and I am printing it from an excellent reproduction possessed by Miss Elizabeth Mitchell and Mrs. Smith, who generously lent it to me for this purpose.

  No less than five of my illustrations are from photographs taken for me by Dr. Tibor Csato; and I thank my sister-in-law, Esther Olivier, for letting me use the water-colour of Blea Tarn which she possesses. The Trustees of the British Museum have been particularly kind about the model of Stonehenge by Mr. Henry Brown; and I glow with gratitude to Rex Whistler, whose drawing perpetuates, far better than any writing, the memory of delightful talks in my Long Room. E.O.

  The Daye House, Wilton

  18 March 1938

  BOOK I

  WILTON RECTORY

  PREAMBLE

  THE HOUSE AND GARDEN

  From a childhood at Wilton Rectory there comes a legacy which lasts through life. The broad, beneficent Georgian building of deep red brick stands only a few yards from the main street of the little town; yet, behind the house, one steps into the garden to see, beyond it, nothing but orchard land, a glimpse of water, meadows prankt with grey-green willows, and, in the distance, the downs topped by the Vesey Trees. On the right, a little path bordered by clipped and pointed yews leads to the great Romanesque church built in the ’ forties of the last century by Lord Herbert of Lea and his mother, the Russian Lady Pembroke. It stands high on a broad terrace.

  The house was there before the church, and old Mr. Moore of Wilton told me that his grandfather remembered its being built, about 1790, by the owner of the factory which then stood on the site of the present schools. This man possessed excellent and very restrained taste, and his buildings in West Street are extremely satisfying, perhaps because he himself was not easily satisfied. The semicircular wall and gateway which lead to the school have their own beauty, but they also show an unusual sense of proportion in relation to the street. This quality evidently belonged to their builder. When his own house was in building. Mr. Moore’s grandfather one day saw him stand in prolonged contemplation of its walls, which had then risen about two feet from the ground. They were not on the site of the present house, but stood almost flush with the street.

  ‘No’, he said. ‘I don’t like it’.

  The walls were taken down, and the building was recommenced in its present position. It now stands upon great cellars—high stone rooms of the same size as those on the ground floor—and when I had heard this anecdote from Mr. Moore, I began to think that there might also be vast secret crypts hidden underground where the first house was to have stood. The idea was romantic and terrifying. Our own cellars were frightening enough, but who lived in those other cellars beyond?

  The thought of them increased the exaggerated size already possessed by the haunts of one’s childhood. There they lay, unknown, on the other side of the cellar walls we saw. Some day perhaps a very heavy carriage would stop at the front door. The drive would collapse—to disclose a store of forgotten treasures.

  But even without the other cellars, the Rectory was, like all houses, far bigger for the children than for the grown-ups. Children use parts of a house which are hardly even seen by their elders. There were at Wilton Rectory long secret passages in the roof, which were entered from the attic through bolted doors. Here we stepped, in semi-darkness, from beam to beam, over spaces where lay a hollow plaster floor; and now and again we came upon a complicated barricade of interlacing roof supports which had to be got through somehow. Icy draughts and narrow shafts of light broke in upon the dusty stuffiness of this exciting domain.

  Then there were numbers of cupboards in the walls, in which we spent our afternoons when it was too wet to go out. In every house, an immense amount of space is lost to the grown-up people who never sit in cupboards. We had first of all the big nursery cupboard where Mildred and I played houses, each on her own shelf, for we were not sophisticated enough to call them flats. There was the vast cupboard in Mamma’s room where one could walk about on the floor, as well as clamber on the shelves among her hats. In the attic was the Bird Cupboard, called from a painting of magpies which surrounded it. It was like a long low room, and we heaped pillows at its two ends and pretended to go to sleep in it. And then there was the tiny cupboard high up in the dark wall on the back stairs. It could only be reached by someone who was very small and very agile. I was both, and so I often got into it, and remained lost fo
r hours. When I remember Wilton Rectory, I think of it as larger by all these cupboards than it ever could have been for my parents, who only sat in the rooms.

  It was the same with the garden. The kitchen-garden wall made for us a long terrace walk upon which we ran and danced. When we made the grand tour round it, we always jumped the doorways, as it was looked upon as a disgrace to come to earth in the course of the circuit. If my father saw us on the wall, he always ordered us to come down, so we lay quite flat if we heard him come out of the garden door, and hoped that he would not look up.

  Of course, like other children, we had ‘houses’ in the shrubberies, under stacks of faggots, up in the mulberry tree, and in the disused duck-house on the island. We walked, bent double, in the underground channel which carried the water from the pond into the river. We sat on projecting stones in the middle of the waterfall; and on summer evenings, we ran and danced on the roof, or sat astride upon its very top, while people talked and called to each other in the street below, and our parents strolled in the garden, innocently fancying that ‘the little ones’ were safely tucked up in bed.

  Because of all this, no place for me can ever compare with Wilton Rectory for spaciousness and room in which to live.

  In that part of the house which we shared with those less adventurous people, the ‘grown-ups’, the hall is what I best remember. This must be because (except for Christmas Day) it is always summer in one’s childhood, and in the summer the garden door stood open, and people sat both inside and out of it, in the hall or on the steps. Here I used to hear those sounds which will always call up before my eyes the clear poignant picture of my earliest home. A church bell tolling for one of the many services: the waterfall far off beyond the lawn: the pit pat of tennis balls, and voices calling the score: footsteps on the landing upstairs: the peculiar sound made by turning the handle of the front door: and the Blobs. I am now the only person left alive who heard the whisper: ‘The Blobs are on,’ or who could guess what it meant. Yet we said it every night for about fifteen years; and because, unless I record it, no one again will ever learn that magical phrase, I must satisfy myself by writing it down. Till I was eighteen, Mildred and I (and Harold too before he went to school) always came down for dessert after dinner. As we waited in the hall, we wheedled from the parlour-maid titbits from the dishes she carried out, and then, when dinner was over, we listened to hear her put the dessert plates on to the table. A Blob for each diner. One of us always stood as sentry to hear the sounds, and then, as the others skipped about in the garden or on the stairs, there came the ominous hiss: ‘The Blobs are on.’ This meant our entrance into the dining-room and our curtseys. My father remembered that his sisters had always curtseyed to their parents, and he insisted that we should do so too. We hated it, and it made us very shy if guests were present, because no other girls of our age were expected to curtsey as we did; but now I think it must have been a pretty and graceful thing to see. And the more so, because we probably looked so embarrassed as we did it.

  Throughout the summer mornings, the hall was entirely given up to ‘doing the roses’. When we were children, Mildred and I watched Mamie, my elder sister, doing this; and after she married, we took our turn. It was almost a ritual observance.

  My father was a famous rose-grower, and, by the time I knew him, his garden had become his chief recreation. It was an extension of himself; and as he was completely unlike any other person whom I have ever seen, his attitude towards his garden was also individual. He was primarily a florist, loving his flowers as separate blossoms, rather than treating them as decoration. He found that the roses liked the kitchen-garden soil better than that in the flower garden, so most of them were hidden there, well out of sight. If a flower lover was ardent enough to venture past the onions and the asparagus bed, to resist the call of the cabbages, and not to linger among the strawberries, he would probably after all be disappointed, and would find that most of the blooms had already been carried into the house.

  Between two and three hundred roses were picked every morning, and they seemed to my sisters and me to be such completely independent beings, that we called to each other from room to room, that ‘the roses have come in’ as if they had walked in of their own volition. In very hot weather, they ‘came in’ before we were up, as my father knew that they disliked the sun, so he used to get up between five and six to pick them. Every evening, sheets of newspaper were laid upon the long polished tables in the hall, and soup-plates filled with water were placed upon these. Here the roses rested when they first came in. It took hours to arrange them; and, in the house as in the garden, my father would not allow his pets to be used merely for decoration. Each flower must be given its solitary honour, and the vases he preferred were simple specimen glasses in which a single bloom could sit in undisturbed beauty, its perfect form controlled by a vase which exactly fitted it. The loveliest specimens were chosen to be set up one by one in green wood show-cases; and then they remained in the large cool hall where my father visited them from time to time, coming out of the study to stare at them for a few moments, and then going back. At midsummer, when the roses were most plentiful, and again in the autumn, when they bloom irregularly, and are not true to type, we sometimes did succeed in grouping some of the flowers in big vases and bowls; but this was really desecration in my father’s eyes. It was making a queen into a chorus girl. Roses picked by him were also very difficult to arrange freely, as when he cut them, he thought only of the good of the tree, so they often had impossibly short stalks which could only reach the water in the little round vases which we placed, with the saltcellars, at the corners of the dinner table.

  They were very characteristic of Wilton Rectory, those long summer mornings doing the flowers in the hall, when little puffs of wind came in through the open garden door, and we heard in the study the voices of my parents, he ‘in a fuss’ about something, and she trying to calm him.

  The hall itself had the large square proportions of the later Georgian buildings. It was broad and high, the three flights of the staircase filling one end. The original character of the hall had been considerably modified by a good many pieces of large and somewhat incongruous furniture which now filled it. Chief among these was an enormous thing called ‘Old Stroud’ This was a sideboard made of many pieces of medieval carved wood, which had been collected and joined together by a remarkable old cabinet maker who then lived in Wilton. The carvings were ecclesiastical in character—angels, saints, eagles, and mythical creatures; and this combination of a wine-cellar with a reredos gave to the spacious Georgian hall at Wilton Rectory, a look of Newstead in the days of Lord Byron. My father never thought of it in that way. He liked Old Stroud.

  One side of the hall was occupied by two mahogany tables, where we did the roses in the summer, and there was a carved oak chest containing Altar Frontals, on which the curates put their hats on Monday mornings when they came for the ‘Chapter Meeting’. There was a round table covered with an embroidered cloth where there always stood a fern or a primula in a pot, surrounded by a circle of photograph books. There was a rosewood cabinet containing my grandfather’s collection of shells, and there were three fine old Chippendale chairs, left in her will to my father by an old woman in the parish.

  A jumble of ‘pieces’, each with its own character, and each placed where it stood in order to be used. Appearance had not first been considered. Perhaps the total effect was inharmonious, and yet I can scarcely think so. The individuality of each of my parents was so strong, and their united view of life was so forceful, that I believe that they succeeded in wresting harmony out of those seemingly discordant elements. The house which they inhabited, the furniture which they placed in it, and the life which they regulated within its walls, made a unity, which was a definite creation. We grew up to breathe this atmosphere, austere, yet richly compounded. Our lungs adapted themselves to it, and I believe that if I could find it again, I should find myself once more at home.

  Chap
ter One

  CHIEFLY ABOUT PROCESSIONS

  I used to say that if I died without knowing Mr. Walkley, I should have lived in vain. And now—I have. Or rather, Mr. Walkley died without knowing me. He was The Times Dramatic Critic when I was in the school room, and in those days it was my passionate desire to become an actress. The idea was grotesque. My father thought a professional actress was as improper as a Restoration Play, and an actor was almost as bad. My brother Alfred, in spite of his irresistible charm, was never really forgiven for having preferred the stage to his seat at the bottom of the Infants’ Class in Dr. Marks’s school for Burmese Princes in Rangoon. Alfred was on his way to a post in the Burmese Civil Service, and he was put to learn the language in this humble position, when a travelling company came to the town. It was too much. He was ‘off with the raggle taggle gipsies’ and he went through India with them, returning at last to go on to the London stage. My father minded this so much that my own secret desire was never even mentioned, and Mr. Walkley remained my one link with the world of my dreams. It was through his eyes alone that I saw most of the plays of those days, for we seldom went to London, and our only ‘theatre’ was an occasional visit to Salisbury of Mr. Benson’s Shakespearian Company. It is true that I was present at Mrs. Patrick Campbell’s first appearance on the stage, but that took place at Wilton when Lord Pembroke had invited Ben Greet’s Company to play As You Like It in the Park. It had been played there once before, when Shakespeare himself was one of the actors. It is curious that as a girl I saw so few plays, for we all loved acting. Even now I have never seen a pantomime, though I have acted in more than one; but my father never imagined that his children could enjoy what would have bored himself, and a provincial pantomime did not attract him.