without any further word of admonition. However, Marie never denounced me to authority; she pleaded, she sighed, but she never reported me. On the other hand, if I did not give her obedience, I did give her love. I loved her very much.
On only one occasion do I really remember having upset her, and that was entirely inadvertent. It happened after we had come back to England, in the course of an argument on some subject or other which was proceeding quite amicably. Finally, in exasperation, and wishing to prove my point of view, I was saying: ‘Mais, ma pauvre fille, vous ne savez done pas les chemins defer sont: At this point, to my utter amazement, Marie suddenly burst into tears. I stared at her. I had no idea what was the matter. Then words came amongst the sobs. Yes–she was indeed a ‘pauvre fille‘. Her parents were poor, not rich like those of Mees. They kept a cafe, where all the sons and daughters worked. But it was not gentille, it was not bien élevée of her dear Mees to reproach her with her poverty.
‘But, Marie,’ I expostulated, ‘Marie, I didn’t mean that at all’.’ It seemed impossible to explain that no idea of poverty had been in my mind, that ‘ma pauvre fille’ was a mere expression of impatience. Poor Marie had been hurt in her feelings, and it took at least half an hour of protestations, caresses, and reiterated assurances of affection before she was soothed. After that, all was healed between us. I was terribly careful in future never to use that particular expression.
I think that Marie, established at our house in Torquay, felt lonely and homesick for the first time. No doubt in the hotels where we had stayed there had been other maids, nurses, governesses, and so on–cosmopolitan ones–and she had not felt the separation from her family. But here in England she came in contact with girls of her own age, or at any rate of not much more than her own age. We had at that time, I think, a youngish housemaid and a parlourmaid of perhaps thirty. But their point of view was so different from Marie’s that it must have made her feel a complete alien. They criticised the plainness of her clothes, the fact that she never spent any money on finery, ribbons, gloves, all the rest of it.
Marie was receiving what were to her fantastically good wages. She asked Monsieur every month if he would be so kind as to remit practically the whole of her pay to her mother in Pau. She herself kept a tiny sum. This was to her natural and proper; she was saving up for her dot, that precious sum of money that all French girls at that time (and perhaps now, I do not know) industriously put by as a dowry–a necessity for the future, for lacking it they may easily not get married at all. It is the equivalent, I suppose, of what we call in England ‘my bottom drawer’, but far more serious. It was a good and sensible idea, and I think in vogue nowadays in England, because young people want to buy a house and therefore both the man and the girl save money towards it. But in the time I am speaking of, girls did not save up for marriage–that was the man’s business. He must provide a home and the wherewithal to feed, clothe and look after his wife. Therefore the ‘girls in good service’ and the lower class of shop-girls, considered the money they earned was their own to use for the frivolous things of life. They bought new hats, and coloured blouses, an occasional necklace or brooch. One might say, I suppose, that they used their wages as courting money–to attract a suitable male of the species. But here was Marie, in her neat little black coat and skirt, and her little toque and her plain blouses, never adding to her wardrobe, never buying anything unnecessary. I don’t think they meant to be unkind, but they laughed at her; they despised her. It made her very unhappy.
It was really my mother’s insight and kindness that helped her through the first four or five months. She was homesick, she wanted to go home. My mother, however, talked to Marie, consoled her, told her that she was a wise girl and doing the right thing, that English girls were not as far-seeing and prudent as French girls. She also, I think, had a word with the servants themselves and with Jane, saying that they were making this French girl unhappy. She was far away from home, and they must think what it would be like if they were in a foreign country. So after a month or two Marie cheered up.
I feel that, at this point, anyone who has had the patience to read so far will exclaim: ‘But didn’t you have any lessons to do?’
The answer is, ‘No, I did not.’
I was, I suppose, nine years old by now, and most children of my age had governesses–though these were engaged, I fancy, largely from the point of view of child care, to exercise and supervise. What they taught you in the way of ‘lessons’ depended entirely on the tastes of the individual governesses.
I remember dimly a governess or two in friends’ houses. One held complete faith in Dr Brewer’s Child’s Guide to Knowledge–a counterpart of our modern ‘Quiz’. I retain scraps of knowledge thus acquired–‘What are the three diseases of wheat?’ Rust, mildew, and soot.’ Those have gone with me all through life–though unfortunately they have never been of practical use to me. ‘What is the principal manufacture in the town of Redditch?’ ‘Needles.’ ‘What is the date of the Battle of Hastings?’ ‘1066.’
Another governess, I remember, instructed her pupils in natural history, but little else. A great deal of picking of leaves and berries and wild flowers went on–and a suitable dissection of the same. It was incredibly boring. ‘I do hate all this pulling things to pieces,’ confided my small friend to me. I entirely agreed, and indeed the word Botany all through my life has made me shy like a nervous horse.
My mother had gone to school in her own youth, to an establishment in Cheshire. She sent my sister Madge to boarding school but was now entirely converted to the view that the best way to bring up girls was to let them run wild as much as possible; to give them good food, fresh air, and not to force their minds in any way. (None of this, of course, applied to boys: boys had to have a strictly conventional education.)
As I have already mentioned, she had a theory that no child should be allowed to read until it was eight. This having been frustrated, I was allowed to read as much as I pleased, and I took every opportunity to do so. The schoolroom, as it was called, was a big room at the top of the house, almost completely lined with books. There were shelves of children’s books–Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, the earlier, sentimental Victorian tales which I have already mentioned, such as Our White Violet, Charlotte Yonge’s books, including The Daisy Chain, a complete set, I should think, of Henty, and, besides that, any amount of school-books, novels, and others. I read indiscriminately, picking up anything that interested me, reading quite a lot of things which I did not understand but which nevertheless held my attention.
In the course of my reading I found a French play which father discovered me reading. ‘How did you get hold of that?’ he asked, picking it up, horrified. It was one of a series of French novels and plays which he usually kept carefully locked up in the smoking-room for the perusal of adults only.
‘It was in the school-room,’ I said.
‘It shouldn’t have been there,’ said father. ‘It should have been in my cupboard.’
I relinquished it cheerfully. Truth to tell, I had found it somewhat difficult to understand. I returned happily to reading Mémoires d’un Âne, Sans Famille, and other innocuous French literature.
I suppose I must have had lessons of some kind, but I did not have a governess. I continued to do arithmetic with my father, passing proudly through fractions to decimals. I eventually arrived at the point where so many cows ate so much grass, and tanks filled with water in so many hours–I found it quite enthralling.
My sister was now officially ‘out’, which entailed parties, dresses, visits to London, and so on. This kept my mother busy, and she had less time for me. Sometimes I became jealous, feeling that Madge had all the attention. My mother had had a dull girlhood herself. Though her aunt was a rich woman, and though Clara had travelled to and fro across the Atlantic with her, she had seen no reason to give her a social debut of any
