Afterword
To every writer who has ever published a book, there comes eventually that amusing though irritating moment when someone says pensively, “I have always thought that I could write a book—if only I had time.”
I have never been able to decide whether the subtle implication is that only those with an unfair amount of time at their disposal ever reach the point of seeing themselves in print, or whether it is a delicate way of saying that in order to write a book one must have neglected more pressing duties.
In my own experience, I can only say that I have never sat down to write a book with the feeling that I had any time in hand. And, apart from the fact that I write, happily and unashamedly, for the wicked old profit motive, any urge I may have has nothing whatever to do with the question of whether I have time or not.
But for some while now, I have had a sneaking sympathy for the “if I had time” school of thought, for this is the book that I have thought I should like to write—if only I had time.
I really have not time now. But something, I am not quite sure what, has pushed me a little further than the “if ” stage, and so I have begun the book, which will at least amuse me and some of my friends. And perhaps in the process, I may shed some light on the theory that writing is all a question of time.
To write your recollections or memoirs is to make a claim that, in your estimation at any rate, you have lived some interesting years. It is difficult not to associate a degree of egotism with this claim. But I am hoping a thin line draws a decent distinction between thinking myself an interesting person and being interested in what has happened to me. I am tremendously interested in what has happened to me—and incidentally my sister Louise, whose story this is, as much as my own. That is my sole excuse for supposing that a book about us should fascinate anyone but ourselves.
An autobiography should, I suppose, begin at the beginning of one’s life. So—I was born in Sunderland, Durham, the second daughter in a middle-class family of two girls and two boys. My father was an officer and later a surveyor of Customs and Excise. As this work entailed a good deal of moving, we four children were all born in different parts of England. In spite of this, there was always a tremendous sense of stability in our family life.
Although he was born in the country, my father always preferred town life. And my mother, though born within sound of Bow Bells—the now rare distinction that marks the true Cockney—always retained many of the characteristics of her farming ancestors. Without being in the least sentimental, I can state that both were enormously successful as parents. I should know: my father lived to be ninety-three and my mother eighty-nine, so I knew them a long while.
One of the most revealing conversations I ever had with my mother occurred just a few weeks before she died. I said to her ref lectively, “Mother, I’ve never seen you cry.”
She replied, “What do you mean? I never had anything to cry about. I had it all. I didn’t ask very much, but I had everything that mattered. I had a good husband”—I’m glad to say she added—“and good children. A good home and good health. No one must ask for anything else. Anything else is a bonus.”
And she meant it. No wonder she—and we—were happy.
Even as children, Louise and I always felt sorry for those children whose mothers had easily hurt feelings or whose fathers either could not assert their authority in their own homes or—the other awful extreme—became domestic tyrants.
Mother was never “hurt.” She could be cross with us, of course, which is quite a different thing. But half an hour later, she would be frying potatoes for us in the kitchen. Although we never thought of our father as anything but the head of the household, he would no more have played the domestic tyrant than been found drunk and disorderly in the street.
Both parents set a standard of personal integrity that gave us children a never-questioned scale of values and made life so much easier later on. Once, when we were very young, Dad did present his daughters with a painful problem: He thought it wrong to accept a reward if one found something valuable and could return it to the owner. This, he maintained, was one’s duty anyway, and no one should expect to be rewarded, merely for doing what was right.
Louise and I had a tremendous discussion on what to do if ever we found a diamond necklace. Finally, we asked Mother, who was kind and practical enough to suggest that anyone careless enough to lose a diamond necklace really ought to pay something for its recovery. This solution satisfied us completely, and we were able to go on looking for lost diamond necklaces with untroubled minds.
Mother had a great deal of common sense and was a most reassuring person. There is a pleasant story about Louise who, when she was about two, woke up crying in the night. When asked what was the matter, she said there was a dream in her pillow. Mother didn’t argue or seek deep reasons for her child’s extraordinary assertion. She simply said, “Then we’ll change the pillow”—which she did, and Louise slept peacefully after that.
Louise was the eldest child in our family, a blonde, beautiful and angelic baby. My poor parents thought all babies were like that until I arrived to disillusion them.
I am assured on excellent authority that I was the ugliest baby it is possible to imagine. Mother always declared that on his first seeing me, Dad could not help exclaiming, “Good lord! Isn’t she ugly!” But later, he was annoyed if anyone told that story, so perhaps it was just a family legend, hardened into fact by repetition.
However, Louise was enchanted with me. So much so that when the nurse took me out for my first airing, Louise was discovered in floods of tears at the bottom of the stairs, as she assumed I was only on loan and was not being brought back.
When I was two, we moved to Barnes, on the outskirts of London, and it is here that I recall the almost fabulous security and radiance of the last of the Edwardian era. I am glad that my memory does at least encompass a general impression of those days, because life before the First World War is impossible to imagine if one never experienced it.
Not that we were the kind of family who took any part in the social life of that—or indeed, any other—period. But I have a composite recollection of security, sunshine—though this could not have been as constant as it seems to me in retrospect—and the magnificence of Ranelagh, as gauged by the motorcars lined up in our road, waiting for the large-hatted and feather-boa-ed owners.
I remember a tremendous balloon race that took place in a thunderstorm, and I remember when a passing airplane was something so amazing that we rushed into the garden, gazed upwards and said confidently, “That’s probably Grahame-White.” Those days held the joys of choosing oddments for one’s Christmas shopping at the penny bazaars and the horrors of a newspaper announcement saying, “Titanic Sinks.”
To me, the limit of world wandering was the Albert Memorial. How I loved it. I still love it, come to that. Possibly, if I must be quite truthful about an old friend, I would prefer one fewer gaggle of angels at the summit. Otherwise, it is a dear landmark in more senses than one, and I have wandered around it many times while my father identified and explained those famous figures on it.
I remember my first day at school, when the story of Adam and Eve really impinged on my consciousness for the first
