The Queen, I find, has steamed past Yarmouth, landed at Alum Bay, and lunched there at the hotel.
William Allingham
1925 [while teaching at Arnold House school, Wales]
On Sunday I started on an awful thing called week’s duty. It means that I have no time at all from dawn to dusk so much to read a postcard or visit a water-closet. Already – today is Tuesday, Shrove Tuesday – my nerves are distraught. Yesterday I beat a charming boy called Clegg and kicked a hideous boy called Cooper and sent Cooke to the proprietor. Yesterday afternoon I had my first riding lesson and enjoyed it greatly. It is not an easy sport or a cheap one but most agreeable. No letter from Olivia.
Yesterday in a history paper the boy Howarth wrote: ‘In this year James II gave birth to a son but many people refused to believe it and said it had been brought to him in a hot water bottle.’
Evelyn Waugh
1947 [during miners’ stoppages crisis]
Another arctic day, colder than ever. I went to shop in Harrods, knowing that they generate their own electricity. At the centre of Harrods is a large hall with rows of armchairs, in which a posse of weary elderly people had come to roost, to spend the hours in comparative warmth by a glimmering light. What were they thinking of in this twilight? I suppose of past comforts, of houses with servants who answered bells and put coals on the fire and drew the blinds and curtains when dusk fell, and brought tea, and polished silver. But now they were grateful for this refuge, where it was too dark even to read.
I returned home, put on my best hat, and armed with a bicycle lamp against the black-out, set out to see Sybil Colefax. Rose Macaulay was there today. She said it was monstrous that the BBC had cut the Third Programme because of the fuel crisis, as it is the one good thing we get, and only broadcasts from six to eleven in the evenings. We all urged her to take the matter up. [V. S.] Pritchett was there, at a loose end because the New Statesman, like other periodicals, has been suspended.
Cynthia Gladwyn
19 February
1665
At supper, hearing by accident of my mayds letting in a rogueing Scotch woman to helpe them to washe and scoure in our house, I fell mightily out, and made my wife, to the disturbance of the house and neighbours, to beat our little girle, and then we shut her down into the cellar, and there she lay all night.
Samuel Pepys
1860
Sitting by his fireside, Flaubert told us the story of his first love. He was on his way to Corsica. Till then he had done no more than lose his innocence with his mother’s chambermaid. He happened on a little hotel in Marseilles where some women from Lima had arrived with sixteenth-century ebony furniture inlaid with mother-of-pearl at which everyone who saw it marvelled. Three women in silk dressing-gowns falling in a straight line from the back to the heels, together with a little Negro dressed in nankeen and wearing only Turkish slippers: for a young Norman who had hitherto travelled only from Normandy to Champagne and from Champagne to Normandy, all this was very tempting and exotic. It conjured up visions of a patio full of tropical flowers, with a fountain singing in the middle.
One day, coming back from a bathe in the Mediterranean and bringing with him all the life of that Fountain of Youth, he was invited into her bedroom by one of the women, a magnificent woman of thirty-five. He gave her one of those kisses into which one puts all one’s soul. The woman came to his room that night and started making love with him straight away. There followed an orgy of delight, then tears, then silence.
He has gone back to Marseilles several times since then, but nobody has ever been able to tell him what became of these women. The last time he went through, on his way to Tunis to collect material for his Carthaginian novel, he went as usual to have a look at the house, but could not find it. He looked for it, hunted for it, and finally noticed that it had been turned into a toyshop, with a barber’s on the first floor. He went upstairs, had himself shaved, and recognized the wallpaper of the bedroom.
The Brothers Goncourt
1932
Ellery Sedgwick, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, was here for dinner last night. Later in the evening Paul Patterson, Hamilton Owens, and John W. Owens dropped in. When Sedgwick left, along about midnight, Patterson and John Owens remained, and I finally got to bed a little after two o’clock.
Sedgwick was full of curious anecdotes. He told about being at a dinner party with the late Moorfield Storey. The name of Hearst came up, and Storey said: ‘Hearst married a prostitute, and then gradually dragged her down to his own level.’
H. L. Mencken
1981
In the evening I distributed the prizes at the Prendergast School in Lewisham. The school, with nearly six hundred girls, is in the process of changing from grammar to comprehensive and has a high academic reputation, which the young, vital and very pretty headmistress has no intention of allowing to decline. I predict a brilliant career for her. She told me hair-raising stories of threats to the staff in her last school. The headmaster was pursued with a gun. She was visited by two thuggish-looking men, who said that they had come to ‘do’ her because of the way she had treated one of their relatives. She informed them coolly that there was a policeman in the next room (by some lucky chance, but perhaps not entirely by coincidence, there was). The two thugs took to their heels.
I distributed a number of prizes to black girls and asked the headmistress why they seemed to be specially applauded. Did the other girls feel sorry for them? No, I was told, it’s because they are such good athletes. I am not an observant person, but I had noticed their long graceful limbs. ‘The athletes and the naughty ones are always cheered the loudest.’
Lord Longford
20 February
1841
When I am going out for an evening, I arrange the fire in my stove so that I do not fail to find a good one when I return though it would have engaged my frequent attention. So that, when I know I am to be at home, I sometimes make believe that I may go out, to save trouble. And this is the art of living, too, – to leave our life in a condition to go alone, and not to require a constant supervision. We will then sit down serenely to live, as by the side of a stove.
H. D. Thoreau
1890
K. told me these two tales when she was here. On her way North she overheard at the table a father and mother and two daughters talking. Father – ‘It’s delightful to be in a hotel where you can eat dinner without gloves on.’ Daughter – ‘Why, Father, I think it’s quite rulable to do so when the family is alone.’ Father – ‘Your mother doesn’t think so. I always have to eat my dinner and play whist with my gloves on.’ This she actually heard, so there must exist a gloved and ‘rulable’ race somewhere in the broad land. Kath. also told me that she was on one of the big Mississippi steam-boats. In the evenings they used to have a hop in the saloon off which the state-rooms opened. At the doors of their rooms the Mammas sat matronizing their daughters; as they grew tired, they gradually ‘retired,’ put themselves in their berths, re-opened their doors and continued their duties from that vantage point!
