An Autobiography Read online

  May came to London on her way back to New York, and displayed her elegant new neck. Mother and Grannie both wept and kissed her repeatedly, and May wept too, because it was like an impossible dream come true. Only after she had left for New York did mother say to Grannie, ‘How sad, though, how terribly sad, to think that she could have had this operation fifteen years ago. She must have been very badly advised by consultants in New York.’

  ‘And now, I suppose, it’s too late,’ said my grandmother thoughtfully. ‘She will never marry now.’

  But there, I am glad to say, Grannie was wrong.

  I think May had been terribly sad that marriage was not to be for her, and I don’t think for one moment she expected it so late in life. But some years later she came over to England bringing with her a clergyman who was the rector at one of the most important Episcopalian churches in New York, a man of great sincerity and personality. He had been told that he had only a year to live, but May, who had always been one of his most zealous parishioners, had insisted on getting together a subscription from the congregation and bringing him to London to consult doctors there. She said to Grannie: ‘You know, I am convinced that he will recover. He’s needed, badly needed. He does wonderful work in New York. He’s converted gamblers and gangsters, he’s gone into the most terrible brothels and places, he’s had no fear of public opinion or of being beaten up, and a lot of extraordinary characters have been converted by him.’ May brought him out to luncheon at Ealing. Afterwards, at her next visit, when she came to say goodbye, Grannie said to her, ‘May, that man’s in love with you.’

  ‘Why, Aunty,’ exclaimed May, ‘how can you say such a terrible thing? He never thinks of marriage. He is a convinced celibate.’

  ‘He may have been once,’ said Grannie, ‘but I don’t think he is now. And what’s all this about celibacy? He’s not a Roman. He’s got his eye on you, May.’

  May looked highly shocked.

  However, a year later, she wrote and told us that Andrew was restored to health and that they were getting married. It was a very happy marriage. No one could have been kinder, gentler and more understanding than Andrew was to May. ‘She does so need to be happy,’ he said once to Grannie. ‘She has been shut off from happiness for most of her life, and she has become so afraid of it that it has turned her almost into a Puritan.’ Andrew was always to be something of an invalid, but it did not stop his work. Dear May, I am so glad that happiness came to her as it did.

  IV

  In the year 1911 something that I considered fantastic happened. I went up in an aeroplane. Aeroplanes, of course, were one of the chief subjects of surmise, disbelief, argument, and all the rest of it. When I had been at school in Paris, we were taken one day to see Santos Dumont endeavour to get up off the ground in the Bois de Boulogne. As far as I remember, the aeroplane got up, flew a few yards, then crashed. All the same, we were impressed. Then there were the Wright brothers. We read about them eagerly.

  When taxis came into use in London, a system was introduced of whistling for cabs. You stood on your front doorstep: one whistle would produce a ‘growler’ (four-wheeled cab); two whistles a hansom, that gondola of the streets; three whistles (if you were very lucky) produced that new vehicle a taxi. A picture in Punch one week showed a small urchin saying to a butler standing on a stately doorstep, whistle in hand: ‘Try whistling four times, Guv’nor, you might get an aeroplane!’

  Now suddenly it seemed that that picture was not so funny or impossible as it had been. It might soon be true.

  On the occasion I am talking about, mother and I had been staying somewhere in the country, and we went one day to see a flying exhibition–a commercial venture. We saw planes zoom up into the air, circle round, and vol-plane down to earth again. Then a notice was put up: ‘£5 a flight.’ I looked at mother. My eyes grew large and pleading. ‘Could I? Oh, mother, couldn’t I? It would be so wonderful!’ I think it was my mother who was wonderful. To stand and watch her beloved child going up in the air in a plane! At that time they were crashing every day. She said, ‘If you really want to go, Agatha, you shall.’

  £5 was a lot of money in our life, but it was well spent. We went to the barricade. The pilot looked at me, and said, ‘Is that hat on tight? All right, get in.’ The flight only lasted five minutes. Up we went in the air, circled round several times–oh, it was wonderful! Then that switch-back down, and the vol-plane to earth again. Five minutes of ecstasy–and half a crown extra for a photograph: a faded old photograph that I still have showing a dot in the sky that is me in an aeroplane on May 10, 1911.

  The friends of one’s life are divided into two categories. First there are those that spring out of one’s environment; with whom you have in common the things you do. They are like the old-fashioned ribbon-dance. They wind and pass in and out of your life, and you pass in and out of theirs. Some you remember, some you forget. Then there are those whom I would describe as one’s elected friends–not many in number–whom a real interest on either side brings together, and who usually remain, if circumstances permit, all through your life. I should say I have had about seven or eight such friends, mostly men. My women friends have usually been environmental only.

  I don’t know exactly what brings about a friendship between man and woman–men do not by nature ever want a woman as a friend. It comes about by accident–often because the man is already sensually attracted by some other woman and quite wants to talk about her. Women do often crave after friendship with men–and are willing to come to it by taking an interest in someone else’s love affair. Then there comes about a very stable and enduring relationship–you become interested in each other as people. There is a flavour of sex, of course, the touch of salt as a condiment.

  According to an elderly doctor friend of mine, a man looks at every woman he meets and wonders what she would be like to sleep with–possibly proceeding to whether she’d be likely to sleep with him if he wanted it. ‘Direct and coarse–that’s a man,’ he put it. They don’t consider a woman as a possible wife.

  Women, I think, quite simply try on, as it were, every man they meet as a possible husband. I don’t believe any woman has ever looked across a room and fallen in love at first sight with a man; lots of men have with a woman.

  We used to have a family game, invented by my sister and a friend of hers–it was called ‘Agatha’s Husbands’. The idea was that they picked out two or at most three of the most repellent-looking strangers in a room, and it was then put to me that I had to choose one of them as a husband, on pain of death or slow torture by the Chinese.

  ‘Now then, Agatha, which will you have–the fat young one with pimples, and the scurfy head, or that black one like a gorilla with the bulging eyes?’

  ‘Oh, I can’t–they’re so awful.’

  ‘You must–it’s got to be one of them. Or else red hot needles and water torture.’

  ‘Oh dear, then the gorilla.’

  In the end we got into a habit of labelling any physically hideous individual as ‘an Agatha’s husband’: ‘Oh! Look! That’s a really ugly man–a real Agatha’s husband.’

  My one important woman friend was Eileen Morris. She was a friend of our family. I had in a way known her all my life, but did not get to know her properly until I was about nineteen and had ‘caught up’ with her, since she was some years older than I was. She lived with five maiden aunts in a large house overlooking the sea, and her brother was a schoolmaster. She and he were very alike, and she had a mind with the clarity of a man’s rather than a woman’s. Her father was a nice, quiet, dull man–his wife had been, my mother told me, one of the gayest and most beautiful women she had ever seen. Eileen was rather plain, but she had a remarkable mind. It ranged over so many subjects. She was the first person I had come across with whom I could discuss ideas. She was one of the most impersonal people I have ever known; one never heard anything about her own feelings. I knew her for many years, yet I often wonder in what her private life consisted. We ne
ver confided anything personal in each other, but whenever we met we had something to discuss, and plenty to talk about. She was quite a good poet, and knowledgeable about music. I remember that I had a song which I liked, because I enjoyed the music of it so much, but unfortunately it had remarkably silly words. When I commented on this to Eileen, she said she would like to try to write some different words for it. This she did, improving the song enormously from my point of view.

  I, too, wrote poetry–perhaps everyone did at my age. Some of my earlier examples are unbelievably awful. I remember one poem I wrote when I was eleven:

  I knew a little cowslip and a pretty flower too,

  Who wished she was a bluebell and had a robe of blue.

  You can guess how it went on. She got a robe of blue, became a bluebell, and didn’t like it. Could anything be more suggestive of a complete lack of literary talent? By the age of seventeen or eighteen, however, I was doing better. I wrote a series of poems on the Harlequin legend: Harlequin’s song, Columbine’s, Pierrot, Pierrette, etc. I sent one or two poems to The Poetry Review. I was very pleased when I got a guinea prize. After that, I won several prizes and also had poems printed there. I felt very proud of myself when I was successful. I wrote quite a lot of poems from time to time. A sudden excitement would come over me and I would rush off to write down what I felt gurgling round in my mind. I had no lofty ambitions. An occasional prize in The Poetry Review was all I asked. One poem of mine that I re-read lately I think is not bad; at least it has in it something of what I wanted to express. I reproduce it here for that reason:

  DOWN IN THE WOOD

  Bare brown branches against a blue sky

  (And Silence within the wood),

  Leaves that, listless, lie under your feet,

  Bold brown boles that are biding their time

  (And Silence within the wood).

  Spring has been fair in the fashion of youth,

  Summer with languorous largesse of love,

  Autumn with passion that passes to pain,

  Leaf, flower, and flame–they have fallen and failed

  And Beauty–bare Beauty is left in the wood!

  Bare brown branches against a mad moon

  (And Something that stirs in the wood),

  Leaves that rustle and rise from the dead,

  Branches that beckon and leer in the light

  (And Something that walks in the wood).

  Skirling and whirling, the leaves are alive!

  Driven by Death in a devilish dance!

  Shrieking and swaying of terrified trees!

  A wind that goes sobbing and shivering by…

  And Fear–naked Fear passes out of the wood!

  I occasionally tried to set one of my poems to music. My composition was not of a high order–a fairly simple ballad I could do not too badly. I also wrote a waltz with a trite tune, and a rather extraordinary title–I don’t know where I got it from–‘One Hour With Thee.’

  It was not until several of my partners had remarked that an hour was a pretty hefty time for a waltz to last that I realised the title was somewhat ambiguous. I was proud because one of the principal bands, Joyce’s Band, which played at most of the dances, included it occasionally in its repertoire. However, that waltz, I can see now, is exceedingly bad music. Considering my own feelings about waltzes, I cannot imagine why I tried to write one.

  The Tango was another matter. A deputy of Mrs Wordsworth started a dancing evening for adults at Newton Abbot, and I and others used to go over for instruction. There I made what I called ‘my Tango friend’–a young man whose Christian name was Ronald and whose last name I cannot remember. We rarely spoke to each other or took the least interest in each other–our whole mind was engrossed with our feet. We had been partnered together fairly early, had found the same enthusiasm, and danced well together. We became the principal exponents of the art of the Tango. At all dances where we met we reserved the Tango for each other without question.

  Another excitement was Lily Elsie’s famous dance in The Merry Widow or The Count of Luxembourg, I can’t remember which, when she and her partner waltzed up a staircase and down again. This I practised with the boy next door. Max Mellor was at Eton at the time, about three years younger than I was. His father was a very ill man with tuberculosis, who had to lie out in the garden in an open-air hut where he slept at night. Max was their only son. He fell deeply in love with me as an older girl, and grown up, and used to parade himself for my benefit, or so his mother told me, wearing a shooting jacket and shooting boots, shooting sparrows with an airgun. He also began to wash (quite a novelty on his part, since his mother had had to worry him for several years about the state of his hands, neck, etc.), bought several pale mauve and lavender ties, and in fact showed every sign of growing up. We got together on the subject of dancing, and I would repair to the Mellors’ house to practise with him on their stairs, which were more suitable than ours, being shallower and wider. I don’t know that we were a great success. We had a lot of extremely painful falls, but persevered. He had a nice tutor, a young man called, I think, Mr Shaw, about whom Marguerite Lucy commented, ‘A nice little nature–it’s a pity his legs are so common.’

  I must say that ever since I have been unable to stop myself applying this criterion to any male stranger. Good-looking, perhaps–but are his legs common?

  V

  One unpleasant winter’s day, I was lying in bed recovering from influenza. I was bored. I had read lots of books, had attempted to do The Demon thirteen times, brought out Miss Milligan successfully, and was now reduced to dealing myself bridge hands. My mother looked in.

  ‘Why don’t you write a story?’ she suggested.

  ‘Write a story?’ I said, rather startled.

  ‘Yes,’ said mother. ‘Like Madge.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think I could.’

  ‘Why not?’ she asked.

  There didn’t seem any reason why not, except that….

  ‘You don’t know that you can’t,’ mother pointed out, ‘because you’ve never tried.’

  That was fair enough. She disappeared with her usual suddenness and reappeared five minutes later with an exercise book in her hand. ‘There are only some laundry entries at one end,’ she said. ‘The rest of it is quite all right. You can begin your story now.’

  When my mother suggested doing anything one practically always did it. I sat up in bed and began thinking about writing a story. At any rate it was better than doing Miss Milligan again.

  I can’t remember now how long it took me–not long, I think, in fact, I believe it was finished by the evening of the following day. I began hesitantly on various different themes, then abandoned them, and finally found myself thoroughly interested and going along at a great rate. It was exhausting, and did not assist my convalescence, but it was exciting too.

  ‘I’ll rout out Madge’s old typewriter,’ said mother, ‘then you can type it.

  This first story of mine was called The House of Beauty. It is no masterpiece but I think on the whole that it is good; the first thing I ever wrote that showed any sign of promise. Amateurishly written, of course, and showing the influence of all that I had read the week before. This is something you can hardly avoid when you first begin to write. Just then I had obviously been reading D. H. Lawrence. I remember that The Plumed Serpent, Sons and Lovers, The White Peacock etc. were great favourites of mine about then. I had also read some books by someone called Mrs Everard Cotes, whose style I much admired. This first story was rather precious, and written so that it was difficult to know exactly what the author meant, but though the style was derivative the story itself shows at least imagination.

  After that I wrote other stories–The Call of Wings (not bad), The Lonely God (result of reading The City of Beautiful Nonsense: regrettably sentimental), a short dialogue between a deaf lady and a nervous man at a party, and a grisly story about a seance (which I re-wrote many years later). I typed all these stories on Madge’s mach
ine–an Empire typewriter, I remember–and hopefully sent them off to various magazines, choosing different pseudonyms from time to time as the fancy took me.

  Madge had called herself Mostyn Miller; I called myself Mack Miller, then changed to Nathaniel Miller (my grandfather’s name). I had not much hope of success, and I did not get it. The stories all returned promptly with the usual slip: ‘The Editor regrets…’ Then I would parcel them up again and send them off to some other magazine.