James’s sister Carrie married Rhalou’s brother Alexander Rangabe. James sold his commission in the King’s 73rd (later the 2nd Black Watch) to become a writer and diplomat, and they moved in with his parents, who, following their children’s example, had moved to Athens. James and Rhalou had seven children, including a daughter named Janie after James’s mother: she was to be Kathleen’s mother. The children’s aunt, Fifi Skene, would take them on walks to the Acropolis and tell them how the caryatids wept each night for their sister, kidnapped by wicked Lord Elgin (who was another cousin) and imprisoned in the British Museum; and their Greek nurses told them tales of Turkish cruelty. The family travelled a great deal: James Skene lived ‘as a sheik’ in Syria, and Fifi took the children to Paris, introduced them to a pasha’s wife in Bulgaria and, when the opportunity arose, showed them slaves being sold in the market and the head of a decapitated bandit.
When Janie was seven the Skene grandparents returned to Britain, and Janie and her sister Zoe, aged eight, went too. They lived a while in Oxford, where the sisters took lessons with dons and attended lectures. At seventeen Zoe married Dr William Thompson, a cleric who seemed to be promoted every time Zoe had a child: when he became Archbishop of York, Bishop Wilberforce commented that Mrs. Thompson had better be careful, because ‘there are only Canterbury and Heaven before him’. (Their son Basil became prime minister of Tonga.) Janie was twenty-seven when she found a priest of her own, the Rev. Lloyd Bruce, whom Zoe described as ‘dull, shabbily dressed and too old’ (he was thirty-four). Janie felt otherwise: ‘Oh, dear Zoe,’ she wrote, ‘I wish you could see him a little more with my eyes!’ In 1863 they were married at St Michael’s, Oxford.
Janie was energetic and charming and something of a beauty: she posed for Rossetti. However, her health was intermittently bad. Having six children (including two sets of twins) in three-and-a-half years did not improve it, though she said it was the raising not the bearing that wore her out. In 1868 she had a complete collapse and had to be fed at half-hourly intervals:
| 9am | Beef tea |
| 9.30 | Champagne |
| 10 | Chicken broth |
| 10.30 | Arrowroot with milk |
| 11 | Turtle soup or beef tea |
| 11.30 | Medicine |
| 11.45 | Champagne |
| 12 | Custard pudding |
| 12.30 | Beef tea |
| 1pm | A sandwich of chicken or mutton with a little brandy and water |
| 2 | Medicine |
| 2.30 | Chicken broth |
| 3 | Champagne |
| 3.30 | A cup of milk |
| 4 | Brandy and water |
| 5 | A cup of cocoa |
| 5.30 | Turtle soup |
| 6 | A cup of tea with two teaspoonfuls of brandy with a little heated butter |
| 7 | Medicine |
| 7.30 | Beef tea |
| 8 | Cocoa with a rusk |
| 9 | Chicken broth followed by champagne |
| 10 | Arrowroot with milk |
| 11 | Cup of tea with brandy |
| 12 | Chicken broth and champagne |
| 1 | Cocoa |
| 2 | Cup of tea. Brandy |
| 3 | Beef tea and a glass of champagne |
| 4 | Arrowroot and medicine |
| 5 | Cocoa |
| 6 | Beef tea and champagne |
| 7 | Tea and toast |
| 8 | Arrowroot with brandy and medicine |
Janie largely recovered from this illness (hysteria, said a London specialist, and who could blame her on that diet?) and on the advice of her doctor had more babies. Between times she took to illustrating photo albums with beautiful pictures of flowers, to raise extra money for the family (the pre-Raphaelite William Riviere had taught her to draw in Oxford). Zoe would sell them for three guineas each. The Bruces were not as well off as Zoe’s constantly elevated family, and Zoe continually (and in the face of Janie’s well-bred protests and deeply felt gratitude) plied them with petticoats and soldier outfits and whatever was needed. ‘You really are a witch to find out our wants as you do,’ Janie wrote.
In 1878 the Bruces were living in the Jacobean rectory at Carlton-in-Lindrick, near Worksop. It was a grand place, with stables and a lake, a millpond, pillars in the drawing room and Italian mosaic floors upstairs, and a garden large enough to hold the village fête in. Archbishop Thompson was to thank for putting this suitable living the way of his impoverished but fecund brother-in-law. Here Janie gave birth to her eleventh child, which made it another five in seven years. This last, born on 27 March 1878, was Kathleen.
Kathleen weighed eleven pounds when she was born, and her hands were nearly as big at birth as those of her two-year-old sister Jane. Jane, known as Podge, and the littlest brother, Wilfrid, were taken in to see the new baby: Wilfrid stared at her, slapped her face and ran away. Podge remembered Kathleen as a baby ‘scrambling over poor unfortunate mother’. Not surprisingly, Janie was ill again. She wrote to her sister Zoe, telling her everything the doctor had said: ‘I am using my spectacles … they do not help me as yet as much as I had hoped … failure of sight . .. disease of the kidneys … paralysis of the optic nerve … my heart etc. is weak… I might have burst a little vessel in the brain.’ She finished up admitting that ‘I have given you a horrible history of my proceedings.’ But the proceedings were horrible. She went to the seaside for a couple of days to rest, and wrote again to her sister, in pencil: ‘I have been very badly since Thursday, two days in bed and two days creeping around wrapped in a shawl …’ She had slept in a damp bed, but didn’t want to make a fuss and get the servants into trouble. On 1 October 1880 she died of pneumonia, aggravated by what was known then as Bright’s Disease—inflammation of the kidneys. She was forty-two, and her youngest daughter was one.
Kathleen, writing in 1932, recalls her mother thus: ‘This long suffering lady went blind when I was born, and for the brief time that she lived afterwards she lay gently feeling her last lusty baby’s face, tracing the small features. Even a dozen had not taken completely from her the sense of the miraculous. How would it have been had she been able to hear, twenty, thirty, forty years later, this same me stretching out my arms to love, or the sun, with a “Thank God my mother had eleven children; just suppose she’d stopped short at ten!”’
The day Janie died Kathleen was propped in the windowsill of the day nursery as the servants passed through from the back stairs to the front stairs, and then back again, weeping and covering their faces with their aprons. Then Aunt Zoe Thompson took Kathleen, Podge and Wilfrid into the spare bedroom and told them, crying, that their mother was dead. Podge claimed it meant ‘nothing, absolutely nothing’. She was speaking for herself. Some years later she and Kathleen saw the corpse of a man who had fallen from scaffolding and been killed: Kathleen was haunted by the sight of his boots sticking out from under the blanket on the stretcher, they filled her ‘with every form of creepiness’, but Podge ‘had no such feelings. Death and dead bodies never affected me.’ The same cannot be assumed of Kathleen.
The Bruces were very much a Victorian family: huge, resilient, religious, stiff-upper-lipped, and with a streak of eccentricity. They were brought up on Robinson’s Patent Barley and Groats, with nursery maids, schoolrooms and white pinafores. Lloyd Bruce was by this time a canon of York and used to pay his little daughters a halfpenny a time to collect wheelbarrows of weeds, and tell them not to spend their earnings all at once. Though he had adored Janie and was grief stricken at her death, nine months to the day later he married a well-to-do widow from Sheffield named Mrs. Parker, who he hoped and believed would help with the children. She had a bonnet with both roses and feathers on it, and the elder children were not at all sure about her, even though she had been a friend of their mother. Douglas, the eldest boy, suggested that they call her mother in gratitude for her coming to look after them, but Rosslyn, the seventh child, said he would only ever call her Mrs. Parker. The only benefit he saw was the fact that Mrs. Parker’s sister was married to Sir Luke Mappin, who had built the bear and goat terraces at London Zoo. Even that didn’t help much. Rosslyn had a performing flea, and when Lady Mappin came to stay there was uproar because it was discovered on her
