vast parish was responding well, and Aston was now divided into seven districts, with willing helpers in each of them. But a few days after Christmas 1891, in the thick of the Christmas work, Ellen Knox caught influenza. She did not seem to be able to pick up. For the next eight months she had to be sent to one nursing home after another, the last one being at Brighton, “for the air”. Aunt Emily, Edmund’s kind, but harassed and ineffective, sister, came to keep house. She had no imagination, was not used to children, and had no idea what to do. There was an atmosphere, so frightening to children, of things not being quite right, and of discussions behind closed doors. The news from Brighton was worse. They were sent for, and although on this occasion their mother recovered, they never forgot that Aunt Emily had refused to let them travel, because it was Sunday. The immediate danger was said to have passed. Then, at the end of August a letter came from their father, addressed to all of them: “My dear, dear children.” Their mother had died that morning.
The blow to Eddie was such that in the course of a very long life, he, like his grandfather before him, never quite recovered from it. It gave him, at twelve years old, a spartan endurance and a determination not to risk himself too easily to life’s blows, which might, at times, have been mistaken for coldness.
For a year he remained alone at Aston with his father and Aunt Emily, while the others were distributed among relations. Edmund Knox could find relief from his misery only by working all day and half the night, so that the small boy was intensely lonely. He was old enough now to go to King Edward’s School; during the long miserable evenings he went up by himself to the box room and comforted himself by devising his own tramway system. It had to be horse-drawn, because he could not think how to represent the steam engines.
There was a large kitchen table in the box-room [Eddie wrote]; I cut the tramlines with a penknife and burnt them out to make them deeper with a knitting needle heated on a candle. The system was fairly accurate and I bought some little tin engines and Stöllwerk chocolate horses to pull them. These were very cheap, and lasted till they melted. The grown-ups found out, of course; they didn’t punish me, nor did they praise my industry.
Winnie, Ethel and Dilly were packed off to Eastbourne. Their broken-hearted father hardly knew which way to turn, and was prepared to accept any reasonable offer. The relative at Eastbourne was a widowed great-aunt, a sister of George Knox’s, who made it clear that by offering them a home (she was in fact being paid for their board and lodging) she was exceeding herself in Christian charity. Her Protestantism was of the “black” variety. When Dilly, shy and unmanageable, was told to kneel down and “give himself to Jesus” he took refuge in the coal hole. He had to go to an uncongenial preparatory school where he too rapidly learned all that they could teach him, and he was suffering the frustration of a natural athlete—there was no one at school who could play his spin bowling—and what sort of practice can you get in a coal hole? His sister describes him at this time as “brusque and cutting beyond endurance to the uppish or conceited, but kind beyond belief in one’s troubles.” Therefore although Dilly, like Eddie, had made a promise to himself not to care too much about anyone or anything again, he was obliged to break it every time the girls cried, or were given arithmetic homework.
The little boys, Wilfred and Ronnie, were far more fortunate. They were sent to their father’s younger brother, Uncle Lindsey, the vicar of Edmundthorpe, near Grantham, in Lincolnshire. It was a small country parish where life went by placidly, and on Sundays even the old horses in the fields knew what day it was and did not come down to the gate to be harnessed. The grandmother, Frances Knox, now widowed, occupied one of the rooms, and was so much respected that when she drove out, still in her Quaker cap and shawls, the whole village stood at their doors to see her. She was able to give a good deal of discreet financial help to the family (it was she who had paid for the Knox children’s seaside holidays) and “did much good”, as the saying went, locally. Three of the unmarried daughters also lived at the vicarage, and Lindsey, who had never married either, had very little say in the household. He lived a life of untroubled contentment. The ladies gave all the orders and told him what to say and do; sometimes he would forget, and wander off into the fields, returning with a hatful of mushrooms. This absent-mindedness was in part a self-protection, perhaps, but Uncle Lindsey had no grievances. He cared deeply for the welfare of his little flock. When a visitor’s carriage was ready to drive away he would emerge tremblingly on the front steps and cry: “Beware! Beware the parting pot!” The Parting Pot was, as it turned out, a public house at the crossroads from which his parishioners often came out in a confused condition and in danger of being run over. Farther than this ten-mile distance he rarely ventured. Some things which he saw in the newspapers he could hardly believe, and he put them out of his mind, which had room only for belief.
When Wilfred and Ronnie arrived they were told to pay particular respect to the stationmaster, because he had refused to put up Liberal posters during the election of 1886. “Conservative” was far too weak a word to describe the politics of Uncle Lindsey and the Aunts. Their lack of understanding of industrial and social problems was absolute.
On the other hand, they were most successful as hosts to young children, perhaps because they had never left childhood behind. The atmosphere at Edmundthorpe was quite unlike Waddon or even Kibworth; it was a sweet and primitive Evangelicalism, where Christ was felt as “the unseen guest” at every meal, and to be distressed if your umbrella was missing was “a sin of angry thought”. When Ronnie won fivepence at ludo—which, in a sense, was gaming—he felt it was tainted money, and put it in the collection. There were no harsh words; the motive power was always love. And Uncle Lindsey, like Mr Dick, had quite definite ideas as to what to do with a small boy, if one came his way: amuse it; wash it; feed it. With their uncle they collected honey, made bonfires of autumn leaves and jumped over them, and slid on the ice in winter. He also conceived the idea of starting their education, and crammed into his small nephews, aged six and four, an amazing quantity of Latin and Greek. He saw no difficulty in this, and in fact there was none. Ronnie was an exceedingly bright little boy, and Wilfred, who in some ways had the better brain of the two, was gifted with an exceptional memory. He could read through the Times leader once, shut his eyes, and repeat it word for word.
Ronnie accepted the régime in a less critical spirit than Wilfred, who had a sharper temper than his brother. But both of them were happy, and, above all, happy with each other. They shared all their games, all their confidences, and grew up, Winnie thought, “in absolute dependence on each other”. It was an alliance against fate, which, it seemed, Time would never have power to break.
It was during the four years at Edmundthorpe that Wilfred told, or rather implied, his only lie. While Ronnie and he were ambushing each other in the garden they had the bad luck to break off a branch of the flowering Judas tree. Wilfred dared not confess—not for fear of punishment, for there was none at Edmundthorpe, but because the Aunts were so fond of the tree. By bedtime he had still said nothing, and that night there was a storm, which scattered twigs and branches everywhere. All the damage was put down to the wind, but Wilfred’s conscience ached.
During the school holidays the children all went back to Aston for a noisy reunion. Different backgrounds had made them adjust differently, and they quarrelled, but at the approach of authority, all made an impenetrable common front together. Eddie and Dilly were particularly glad to see each other—“I can’t think what I’m going to do without you, you lazy hound,” Eddie wrote to Eastbourne—and disagreed particularly fiercely. Their father, coming home to uproar, was driven distracted. “It was specially painful to me,” he recalled, “to feel increasingly as each holiday came round the bereavement that I had sustained.” The doctor suggested a visit to the seaside, even if it could only be a shadow of their happiness at Penzance.
Aunt Emily, protesting feebly, embarked with them to Bridlington. They immediately escaped from her care, rushed down to the sea (which the doctor had forbidden), and for the first time in their lives saw a theatre, or rather a nigger minstrels’ fit-up, where Uncle Sam was clacking the bones, and inviting the audience to join in singing
Can’t
