the play because ‘the heroine is just like you, and it will do you good to know what you are like.’ Kathleen didn’t think she was like her at all, but rather hoped she was. Back at Addison Gardens there was an exotic brother, Hener, playing the piano ‘with great vigour and grandeur’. He was younger, wilder, stranger and more beautiful than Willie, and Kathleen was delighted with him and his thick black hair and wild gypsy-black eyes (Willie’s hair was red). She asked him to play Bach, the only composer she had ever heard of, but he played Liszt which she found quite delirious and intoxicating. (Their Great-Aunt Carrie had been taught to play the piano by Liszt in Paris: ‘a wild looking long-haired excitable man,’ Great-Aunt Fifi had called him. He liked giving girls one or two lessons so they could say they had been taught by him.)
The next morning Kathleen saw Hener out of the window, swinging a live cat by the tail, hitting its head against the wall, and was less delighted. She poured the water from her jug over him and threw up in her basin. Felix Skene did try to discipline his wayward sons. ‘I have had the hell of a row with my guvnor,’ Willie wrote to Presh. ‘He told me to leave the bally hovel and I said I wouldn’t and threatened to get him expelled from the Athenaeum.’ Willie was always short of money to lose on the horses: at one point he considered blackmailing Aunt Zoe, the Archbishop’s wife, by betrothing himself to a chorus girl.
It was Willie who sowed the seed of art as a living in Kathleen’s brain. She wanted to make up to him for being so taken with his brother when after all it had been Willie who had taken her out, so the next day, after the cat incident, she showed him some ‘very feeble but pretty’ watercolours that she had done, as a gesture of friendliness. At this stage she was meant to be going to be a teacher, like Irene and Presh—it was respectable, and would keep her out of trouble. ‘Why on earth go in for teaching?’ said Willie. ‘Why not go in for art?’ He probably forgot all about the suggestion. In 1900, after his wicked life had resulted in him ‘absquatulating’ to Bombay (where he worked for a bank, lived with an Indian boy in a tent, shot vultures, shocked the memsahibs and wrote scandalous letters to Presh asking her to send him ‘naughty French papers’), he wondered whether ‘pretty little Kathleen’ had become a duchess yet. But in 1895 he told his seventeen-year-old cousin to hell with mathematics and Latin, she was lovely and should have a lovely life. Nonsense, she replied, but she didn’t think it was nonsense at all.
1898–1901
‘IN THE FIRST YEARS of the twentieth century to say that a lass, perhaps not out of her teens, had gone prancing off to Paris to study art was to say that she had gone irretrievably to Hell.’ Kathleen didn’t write these words until thirty years later, but she knew at the time that they were true. To say this had no effect on her would be inaccurate; to say it discouraged her would be more so. Despite having every respect for education, and very much regretting that women could not take university degrees—she asked Rosslyn, when he had been to Oxford, to ‘pass on anything that he had picked up there’—Kathleen did not want to teach. Though it was not apparent to everyone, she was going to be an artist.
Kathleen left school at eighteen, and the world was quite clearly, to her eyes, her oyster. To the relatives, it was more the case that something had to be done with her. One option was that she go and stay in Ulster with another old uncle, Sir Hervey Bruce. His father, Tory true-blue and Ulster Orange member for Coleraine for many years, used to stand up on his seat in the House of Commons and crow like a bantam cock whenever a Liberal or Irish member got up to speak. The son, Kathleen’s uncle, was noted for contributing to the collection plate in church in inverse proportion to the length of the sermon—a sovereign for ten minutes, half a sovereign for twenty, and so on. Like Rosslyn, he had the Bruce weakness for animals: he once offered to peel a peach for a dinner guest, saying it was ‘too ripe for the monkey’. Kathleen stayed with Sir Hervey for Christmas 1899 at Downhill, his house in Ulster.
Downhill was huge. Sir Hervey’s son Henry, known as Benjie, who was brought up there, described it as ‘a fantastic place … a flawless gem … a great granite bathing box… a sombre grey granite mass, perched on an Atlantic cliff with nothing but the distant Scotch Isle of Jura between it and the North Pole. On the bleak down on which it stood no tree, shrub or flower could survive. For flowers we had seagulls, assembled in hundreds on the grass and all facing the wind.’ Often it was too windy to leave the house; Benjie’s diary records an occasion when ‘some of the servants went out but couldn’t get back except on their hands and knees. Seagulls tearing past the windows.’
Kathleen liked all that, and the sea and the lake and the wild country, but she didn’t much like her uncle.
He seemed to me an incredibly coarse and vulgar old man, and in my innocence I did not think baronets should be so. But we must remember that I was brought up in a convent, and he at Eton some sixty years before, where shirts were probably not the necessary outfit for a weekly bath, and chastity and propriety were less rigid. My puritanical rearing made me cringe with shame at his playful taunts. Nearly I loathed him, until one fine afternoon he took me across to the church yard, and showed me his wife’s grave, a wife who had died some thirty years before. ‘I miss her, my dear,’ he said, and I was ashamed that I could not express the spontaneity of sympathy that I would have expressed to a young male creature.
That evening after tea he said to me, ‘Look here, my dear, would you like to live here? You would pour out the tea and mend the china and things, and there’s no one here for you to get into mischief with. Think it over. You wouldn’t be in my way.’
She thought it over. She tossed and turned in her four-poster bed, and she concluded: ‘But I want to get into mischief!’
Kathleen declined Uncle Hervey’s offer, and went instead to London. She joined the Slade art school—not yet Paris, but in the right direction. She did stay with relatives, but she fantasized constantly about flats in Chelsea that she might take, either with another girl or—if only—on her own. But twenty-year-old daughters of the clergy did not live alone in Chelsea in 1900.
She managed to have an extremely jolly life all the same. It was made up largely of work, social fun and extra curricular self-improvement. Work was the Slade. She studied under Henry Tonks, whose face, she said, was ‘full of grey old miseries’. He was by all accounts a strict but rewarding teacher. His great respect was for draughtsmanship, and as a former medic he had considerable knowledge of anatomy. Another of his early pupils was Augustus John, whose work Kathleen greatly admired. She studied drawing, painting, criticism, and on 14 November 1901 her diary notes ‘modelling—first clay from life’. She was good at it. ‘Tremendous praise, I wonder why, I can’t really be doing it well I should think,’ she wrote. And ‘Went to modelling. Same as ever, “Very good indeed”, “excellent”, “you’ll make something of this” and so on.’
She loved her studies. ‘Oct 9: Oh how excellently do I want to go back to the Slade,’ she wrote, before term began again, and ‘Monday 14: First day of Slade very pleasant.’ But they were not enough for her. On a visit to the Royal Academy she had come across a quotation from Walt Whitman under a painting: ‘It is not enough to have this globe or a certain time. I will have thousands of globes and all time.’ On the strength of that she invested in a copy of Leaves of Grass, and, she said, ‘life began’.
The immediate globes she went for were art, music, theatre, philosophy, and people, but that was not all. Her diary records her eclectic interests: Wagner’s reaction to Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony (he fell into a fever and took to wearing silk and satin to compose); the fact that codfish lay two million spawn for two to come to maturity; Nietzsche; Herbert Spencer’s Data of Ethics; developing photos; Baudelaire; Swinburne ‘till satiated’; Goethe; Hegel; Hedda Gabler (with Max Behrens—‘Immense’); the
