Where Nothing Sleeps Volume One: The Complete Short Stories and Other Related Works

I CAN REMEMBER

I

I was born in China but I am not Chinese. My Father was English and my mother American; her family had been early settlers in Massachusetts and we had old glass and silver and china of theirs and some lovely christening robes, quite yellow, with lace like spun milk. There was also the great tablecloth we used at Christmas, covered with sheaves of arrows and eagles and peacocks and palm trees, inscribed with the names of four generations.

I think that one of the first things I remember is the summer we spent in the Diamond Mountains in Korea. There was a lake with petrified logs in it and amber and the whole ground was littered with sparkling quartz. I have never forgotten the thrill of finding this lovely crystal. I treasured most the spikes of treacle black.

I can remember the strange hats the Koreans wore and the terror I felt when in a car we crossed a stream on two planks.

One day, when I ran down to breakfast, my eldest brother was excitedly telling how a bear had been seen on the road through the forest above the house. I hardly dared venture out that day for fear of being hugged to death.

My two brothers would bathe naked in the rock pools. They looked beautiful against the trees and sky, but at three I had a strong sense of shame and was too self-conscious to join them—besides, I loved to wander alone in search of precious crystal and amber.

The next spring we came to England. This was not long after the end of the First War and I shall never forget my astonishment at seeing England intact and undamaged. I had known there was a war between England and Germany and could not understand why my parents wanted to go back to a country that must surely be nothing but a mass of gaunt and smoking ruins.

First we went to Frinton and stayed in a house on the front which had been lent to us. There were crackled green tiles in the hall. I could never understand how the crackle was done. Upstairs in the nursery was a tiny toy butcher’s shop, which fascinated me; there were beautifully carved joints of meat laid out on a marble slab, a curious subject for a child’s toy.

Our nurse gave us cod liver oil and malt after lunch and supper, and in this way stopped us from having the two sweets we were allowed a day. She said the malt was just as good.

I can remember finding myself at the bottom of my bed under the clothes and screaming terribly because I could not find the way out. I thought I should die, but my nurse came; she seemed an angel of goodness for once.

The wind whistled like a ghost round the four corners of this house and I can see myself sitting amongst the cushions in the dark drawing-room and feeling terrible mournfulness.

Soon a friend of my mother’s came to stay with us, bringing her daughter who was, I suppose, about sixteen. The friend’s name was Phyl. I hated her and called her Fidgety Phyl, as I had been told that this was a very evil person. Whenever she saw me downstairs she would send me up to the nursery, and I can never forgive the time she sent me to have tea with the nurse when I had permission to come down. Everyone seemed to obey Phyl.

Her daughter was quite different. I loved and admired her for her talent. She painted a wonderful picture of pansies on a vase and put real silver paint on the vase. She made a handkerchief box for her mother which I thought far too lovely for such a woman. It was covered in pink taffeta and lace, and had marvellous cherries and leaves in velvet and satin all stuffed and raised up in three dimensions.

One night the grown-ups and older children had a fancy-dress party. I was allowed down in my pyjamas and saw my eldest brother, who must have been about eleven, dressed as a cave man in a leopard-skin, carrying a big club with which he hit my mother hard. There was also another boy, dressed as a girl, with curls painted in black on his forehead and cheeks. I thought he looked very depraved.

My brothers used to ride on ponies while we were here and I would follow at a distance with my mother. She had a mustard yellow hat and scarf which I thought utterly spoiled her beauty. I implored her not to wear the dirty colour, but she persisted and now it is one of my own favourite colours.

One day our nurse took my second brother Paul and myself to the police station to inquire about a lapis lazuli carving my mother had lost. I was terrified, I thought that I was being taken there to prison because they believed I had hidden it. I was amazed at their barbarity in taking me off without even asking me privately at home. I could not believe that my mother meant me to go, but the nurse insisted and teased me all the way there. She was a wicked woman.

On the beach there was a great round mine, left from the war. I was told that the fuse had been taken out, but I felt that it still might explode and was in a fever when my brother used to go up and hit it with his spade.

We found little miniature flat fish and crabs on the beach, which I loved. Unlike most fishermen I tried to catch the smallest, not the largest.

At Christmas we went to my grandfather, who lived in Sussex. The house was strange; it had had many additions and alterations. There was a miniature grand staircase, as there is on ships from the deck to the saloon. I thought the furniture very ugly, but I loved the coloured window at the top of the stairs; every pane was a different colour and one looked through each one in turn at a garden transformed.

This last was trim and intimate, with lawns and roses and a wonderful tree called Black Jack’s apple tree after a famous local smuggler. It was hung with mistletoe and my mother told me that this was the Druids’ sacred plant, and how they cut it with their golden sickles. Then there was the hot-house for the early grapes and the greenhouse for the grapes and peaches. How I loved the hot scented steam that passed for air in these houses.

In the bath one night my face flannel went down the waste hole. I thought it had sailed out to sea to vanish for ever. The next morning I saw—lying in the grating at the bottom of the drainpipe—my flannel. I rushed up to my mother with it, expecting her to be delighted, but she said it was dirty and must be thrown away—I thought this very wanton.

On another day I had my first introduction to paper money. Paul and I were building little houses out of twigs and mud and leaves, for caterpillars to live in, and when I found a piece of paper on the grass, light and crisp, I thought it would make an excellent roof. Just then my grandfather passed and, stooping down, saw what I had used. He picked the pound note up and spoilt my house. He asked me where I’d found it and when I told him he said he must have dropped it. I could not believe that it was really money. I thought money had to be precious like gold or silver.

My aunt had a new kitten at this time and I loved it and I racked my brains for the most lovely name there was. At last I decided on Yellow Rose Bud; pink roses, I felt, were prettier, but something told me that yellow ones were rarer and more sublime and I knew that my mother, when she picked roses, only liked the buds. My aunt, with great kindness I now realise, for ever afterwards called her cat Yellow Rose Bud.

We stayed with my grandfather until late spring; it was then that I went to my first fair.

Our nurse made Paul and myself kneel down at our beds to say our prayers in the early afternoon, so that when we came back from the fair we could get straight into bed. I thought it very unnatural and hated doing it. When it was over she led us to the common, where the merry-go-round was in full swing. I hated it all and carried nothing away but the impression of grotesque squalor which haunts me even now in circuses and fairs. I can remember too the first time I was taken to a musical comedy—how the rows of kicking girls appeared so sinister to me.

When my mother had finally settled my eldest brother at school, we left my grandfather for Canada, where we spent the summer on a ranch as the guests of some friends. There were great maple trees everywhere and a herd of Jersey cows whose cream was wonderful. Every morning we started breakfast in the cold dining-room with oranges cut in half and sugared. I loved this particular way of eating them for some reason. Then for lunch there would often be the wonderful lemon pie topped with white of egg and rich cream which my brother and I were so seldom allowed to touch. We would watch with terrible envy our nurse eating it while we toyed discontentedly with our rice pudding. In the drawing-room there was a copy of the Venus de Milo. I thought it very ugly and asked my mother if she knew what the arms had been like. She said, ‘Perhaps Venus was holding up a mirror.’ I thought that she ought, if anything, to be holding up her dress.

We used to go for long walks with our nurse, who was always whistling and murmuring, ‘I’m for ever blowing bubbles, pretty bubbles in the air.’ She said she thought it was the cleverest song in the world. She used to take us to the dairy on the ranch where the woman made the most delicious cakes. They were dark and rich with chocolate and iced with Hypolite or marshmallow. Then there was angel food, pure white like bread.

She had a daughter called Sally who taught my brother and myself American or Canadian slang. This made my mother laugh. Every day we had maple syrup too and hard sandy chunks of maple sugar. There was a lake to bathe in, with a boat house that I longed to live in always. If you wandered up the hill, pushing through the bushes, you came to the ruins of a house that had been burnt. I found a lump of melted glass, quite purple, like an amethyst.

II

We left Canada. By 1921 we were back in Shanghai again, in our house with its long, heavy arched verandas aflame with Virginia creeper. Inside it was cool and lofty, the floors smelt of polish and the drawing-room was scattered with baskets of flowers that friends had sent to welcome my mother on her return.

Now settled in a time of living almost entirely in myself, the last stage of infancy, a quiet time of playing with my brother in the garden, building houses in the bushes and hiding in the branches of the camphor tree. We would ask the cook for eggs and sugar, then would rush out with them to the summer house and whip them together into a honey-coloured froth. This we would then eat with outward relish, but I did not like it really, it revolted me a little. We had a swing shaped like a boat; it would fly up at one end into the scented bushes, and one was lost for a second in the pink froth, to be torn out again like a rushing wind.

At the bottom of the garden were the coach-house and stables, over which the mafoo, or coachman, lived, for at this time my father still kept a most antique carriage which had belonged to my grandmother; it used to stand next to the cars, one open and one closed, looking like a broken-down aristocrat trying to keep pace with two smart parvenus.

I adored the carriage; it was our special vehicle. My brother and I looked on it as almost our own. One day when a mouse ran out from under the seat I was almost mad with excitement. The leather was so cracked with sun and weather and so polished that it seemed to resemble some ancient lacquer.

Oh the joy of starting out for the afternoon with the old mafoo in his green braided coat with many capes, and his little conical hat. Girlie, the white horse of twenty-three, would be between the shafts and our nurse would be sitting in the middle of the back seat, the aromatic and fusty mole-skin rug over her knees, keeping a nervous eye on Paul and myself as we stood upon the steps on each side pretending to be firemen. For this purpose we always would insist on taking our topees with us, winter or summer, so that we should have something which vaguely resembled a fireman’s helmet. And it was lucky that we did, for one day, in a frenzy of excitement, my brother fell off the step, while we were in motion, and landed on his head; he was not hurt a bit, and after the first shock I thoroughly appreciated this artistic touch to our fireman act.

It was about this time that another accident happened which I remember well. Paul and I had our coats on and were waiting in the hall for nurse to take us out for our walk. We were playing with a walking-stick of my father’s; it was made of flexible steel and bound with polished leather. After a little while there was an argument and, still no nurse appearing, we each gripped one end of the stick and pulled, trying to gain possession of the whole stick. I somehow mounted the stairs step by step, pulling hard; then there seemed to be a deadlock and, suspecting that my brother meant suddenly to let go, I leant forward so that he should not have the satisfaction of seeing me fall over backwards.

He let go, I overbalanced and fell headlong downstairs on to a corner of the iron radiator.

There was blood, great oozing drops of it seeping into the terracotta carpet—I lay half stunned, a great cut on my forehead. My brother screamed and nurse came rushing down, enveloped me and carried me, still dripping, up the stairs, my brother running at her side shrieking, ‘Will he die? Will he die?’ It did not hurt; my mind was like a clear pale page on which these happenings were written.

Nurse laid me on the sofa in my mother’s bedroom and rang for basins and hot water; the doctor was fetched. Soon I lay still and peaceful, my head a satisfying mass of bandages. I felt most pale and interesting. My chastened brother hung about the sofa and nurse seemed almost human for once. Soon I heard the wheels of the car on the drive. There was the opening of the front door and a noise of voices—then, swiftly; I heard my mother running up the stairs. She kissed me many times and laughed and smiled and brought me all her jewels and trinkets to play with; she knew that I loved these winking bright things better than anything else and trusted me implicitly to take care of them.

Soon after this I had strange dreams—I floated slowly down the stairs, I skimmed their surface. They were built round three sides of the hall, and at the second flight I saw my mother. She lay by the telephone, in a heap, her hair over her face and she was crying. I could not stop; I glided by into the horror of the dark hall.

The banisters of these stairs seemed built for sliding down. They were large and ample; turning the corners was horribly exciting. At the bottom, fixed to the pedestal, was a sort of pagoda of bells, of all sizes and tones, used for calling us to meals. The fun of striking this on landing was tremendous.

In the well of the stairs hung a full-length portrait of my mother, at a desk with flowers and pictures on a wall behind her. She sat there for ever with a long string of ivory beads round her neck.

Another part of the house that I loved was the attic. This was large and divided into four rooms, two large and two small. In the first large room my eldest brother had at one time had boxing lessons with some other friends. It was not kept locked and so was comparatively commonplace. We used sometimes to try sliding down the stairs on a tray and I always remember the time I tried to pick myself up by sitting on the tray and pulling at the two handles on either side of me.

It was the other three rooms that were so exciting. They were always kept locked except when my mother went into them for some reason. Sometimes I would hear her in there and would rush up so that I could be let in too. One passed first through a little dark room in which was kept an old dressing-case filled with Victorian jewellery which had belonged to my grandmother.

There were strange, thick, gold bracelets, a great ring with a fleur-de-lys on it in fire-opal, a mourning brooch of jet and pearls, a long necklace of white sapphires fitted into a chain; scent bottles, chatelaines, vinaigrettes and belts of cast silver. The whole case seemed filled with treasure to me, and I never tired of undoing the little leather boxes and unwrapping the faint-mauve cotton wool.

Also in this room were the white elephants, the wedding presents that my mother did not like: grotesque carved blackwood tables and chests.

Through this was the other big room. Trunks were ranged all round the walls. In these were stored all the small relics of the past that I loved so: the yellowed christening robes, a flowered waistcoat of grey satin, little wax dolls, a card case of cut velvet and another of tortoise-shell and gold, a strange old cribbage set in ivory and satinwood, the picture cards all having feet instead of the two heads of today. There were the old tablecloths and shawls, the fans, the lace, the miniatures, the wonderful book of flower pictures meticulously painted by my great-grandmother.

The farthest room was a cul-de-sac; in it slumbered a baby’s cot and the remnants of a lacquer screen, with curtain rods hung with great wooden rings.

The storeroom downstairs next to the pantry was another locked room and another source of delight. Here were kept rows of earthenware and glass jars, filled with jellies, jams, chutneys and pickles. The tea was in painted boxes lined with silver, and the coffee-grinding machine reared its strange head at the corner of the table.

China and glass were stored here too—I can see now the harlequin set of glasses, one red, one blue, one yellow, one purple, one white, each wreathed with vine leaves, that must have once graced Victorian tennis parties.

At meals my brother and I each had our own utensils, without which we would not eat. They were our christening presents. Each had a silver mug and porringer, a silver knife, fork and spoon. When I went back to China for a year after I had left school, I found my place at table laid with my spoon, my knife and fork—our old cook had told the boy that I would eat with no other.

III

Soon after this I went to my first school. It was a small kindergarten. I shuddered when I heard the sentence and implored my mother not to send me, but she said she was sure I would like it and it would be so nice to learn something. So one morning I was taken with my brother into the Jaws of Hell.

There I was left with some other children and a woman with pale hair. They horrified me. I was given a little desk and the woman with pale hair wrote strange signs in my new book; she said that they were numbers up to nine and would I copy them very nicely underneath? I began laboriously to copy, my heart swelling with the feeling of captivity. When I had got to five I noticed the little dash at the top and, feeling sure that she had made a mistake, I carefully copied it out several times leaving the stroke out. The teacher came up a little later and put them all in, but I hardly believed it to be correct even then.

The next thing we did was to begin making a little church out of match-boxes and coloured paper. This was much more to my taste and I began soon to be thoroughly interested. This lovely church grew in the succeeding days and I will always remember the day that I put the coloured transparent paper in the windows.

I soon began to get fond of Miss W., and from her I learnt many things. Of course there were unhappy times too. There was the terrible day when I came to school with golden sailor buttons on my shirt. One of them became loose and, in the way that children have, I began to push it up one nostril and to gently blow it out again.

Suddenly I sniffed inwards instead of blowing out. The button stuck, I tried to blow, it wouldn’t move. I let out a terrible wail, Miss W. rushed up. I told her what had happened and she took me quickly to a room and told me to lie down on the table (I don’t know why to this day). Then she must have telephoned my mother for, through my tears and despair, I heard her footsteps and her voice and soon we were both sitting in the car going to the doctor to have the button removed. The situation had improved enormously the moment my mother had appeared. I felt I could bear the fact of having a button in my nose for life if she was with me; now in the car I was almost calm and my mother said, ‘Now, darling, let’s try once more to blow it down,’ but it was no good. So we went to the doctor and I sat in front of the window, and with his little forceps he jerked the button sharply out. Oh the flood of relief, the laughing and tears! I loved the button now and wanted to keep it, but when it had been pulled out the doctor had thrown the little golden ball far out of the high window over the tree tops into the street.

There was another horrible occasion when some of the little girls at the kindergarten were dressed up as gnomes for some play. I arrived late and, seeing these little apparitions, thought that some of my schoolmates had been transformed by a wicked fairy. To make matters worse, these children, seeing how superstitious I was, began to lay strange spells on me. These I did not quite believe, but it was enough to make the day a failure—to feel that at any moment I might—just might—become a toad.

I believed so many things at this time. I believed my toy wrist-watch really ticked. I believed the terrible story a friend told me of some children who played truant from school and were stolen by gypsies to be used in a circus. They were skinned, and wolves’ hides sewn on instead. She said the nuns had told her this as a warning not to stray from home or play truant from school. I believed that babies were born out of breasts and that just the miracle of being married made them appear.

This summer we went to Wei-hai-wei, which is by the sea. We had taken a house in Half Moon Bay, on the cliffs, with a great apricot tree overshadowing the front. The baths in the house were enormous earthenware kongs, or jars, decorated with patterns of birds in yellow and brown glaze. We had had to leave our nurse behind in Shanghai, as she had fallen in love with a man and wanted to marry him. He afterwards turned out to be married already and my mother told me that our nurse was very unhappy and she had died. I suppose now that she killed herself.

Every day we would take a picnic and our bathing-suits to the beach below and spend the day there. To get to this bay one either walked across the promontory or went round it in the rowing boat. When the sea was rough, I found the passage in the boat very terrifying and would insist on walking by myself through the fields where the peanuts and maize grew, down the deep-cut path with the little rock plants growing between the stones.

Arriving on the beach, I would see the boat rising and falling as they tried to beach it and would feel glad I was not in it. We had a little house of matting made on the beach and in this we would undress and keep our things. After our bathes we would be given two ginger biscuits each—I loved these, and the Huntley & Palmer tin gives pleasure to me even now.

My brother and I had a passion for the shells that we found. We laid them out in wooden boxes on cotton wool. Fan shells were the most rare; they varied from white and pink to deep coral. Sometimes the coral ones were tiny, like a lacquered fingernail.

We would make expeditions to other parts of the coast, sailing and then walking over miles of cushioned thyme and tufted grass. Perhaps we would eat by a wayside shrine, the little painted gods and painted walls washed and faded by the weather.

Once we were taken to a Chinese play. The theatre had been hastily constructed on the beach, near the Chinese town, and as we walked towards it in the evening we passed the salted shark which was lying out to dry in the sun. When it was ready it would be eaten. The play was an exciting pandemonium: terrifying warriors, wonderfully dressed, were standing on tables piled on top of each other; soon one threw himself off and lay as if dead. Another was riding on a fantastic hobby-horse. There was strange, nasal singing and hot scented towels were distributed for the audience to steam their faces in. Here was something old and so conventionalised as to be almost like a religious ceremonial.

The British warships in China would spend much time at Wei-hai-wei, and one day we woke up to see the long grey ships lying in the harbour by the island. My brother was wildly excited and at length persuaded Lara, the handsome Italian boy whom my brother adored and whose parents had a nearby house, to sail out with him to the nearest of the ships. Lara was about seventeen and so much older than Paul. He sailed a boat and rather enjoyed having Paul as a willing slave. They set out secretly the next day, early in the morning. We knew nothing of it until Paul returned at lunch, flushed and happy. By great good luck they had reached the warship safely and the officers had taken them on board and entertained them.

One night we had a most exciting party out of doors. All the grown-ups were to dress as children and the older children as grownups. I was only allowed just to go and see the beginning before I went to bed.

The party was being held on an old tennis-court behind the beach. Lanterns were lit on poles all round and there were trestles covered with white cloths and heaped with what I imagined to be delicious food. I tiptoed up to look and to my horror discovered that the food was an elaborate mixture of horrible things. There were great jellyfish on silver platters. Heaps of queer seaweed and sand, decorated with sea urchins, bloated deep-sea fish and a sinister collection of animals in shells. Then there was every sort of berry one had been told not to eat, and fantastic-looking fungus and toadstools heaped in a cake-basket.

This was Lara’s grotesque joke. All the real food was hidden under the trestles.

The air was purple and the moon was beginning to shine on the sea. Lara was playing on his flute and I was crying with disappointment that I had to go to bed. I lay in the dark under my mosquito net and looked at the shadow of my toy junk which had red-brown sails and was varnished bright yellow.

I had a strange habit at this time of asking my mother for her signet ring, which I would thread in a lock of my hair, tying it firmly with another. Then I would run along the beach looking for shells or exploring, and as I ran I would feel it bang and bob against my head. My hair was very curly, like my mother’s, and I could knot it easily, but one day I lost the ring while I was on the beach. I hunted everywhere. I waited until the tide went out, but I never saw it again. My mother was not very angry, but I missed this toy very much. It was my fetish and talisman.

I would like to smarm my hair down after we had been bathing so that I made a glossy cap. I thought it looked very smart and grown-up like this.

Sometimes when we went out in the hired carriage on the bumpy roads I would pretend to be a very bad-tempered woman called Lady de Courcy. Nothing was ever right for her. I would sit on the step issuing strange orders and finding fault with everyone and everything. I can always remember the abuse this imaginary lady heaped on Americans—because they wore their hats crooked!

During this time in Wei-hai-wei I was painfully learning to swim. I had a life-belt made of kapok which I always wore, but nothing would induce me to jump in out of my depth. One day in the boat my mother wickedly pushed me in. I gasped and gurgled and thought she had got tired of me and was going to drown me. I could not forgive her for days afterwards.

IV

In 1922 we came to England again, this time to leave my second brother Paul at school. He was only eight, but still it was decided that he should be left. Our great-aunt Blanche had suggested that we should take a house near her at Birchington and consequently we soon found ourselves at St Anthony’s.

It was squat and urban, with a sun-lounge. In the garden was a miniature building with one room which we were to call the Wendy House, at the sentimental prompting of Wooly, the governess that was soon to come to us.

Before her we had Miss T., who took us to see her friends who lived in what she called the Smuggler’s Cottage. There were horrible snakes and centipedes in bottles of spirit on shelves in the bathroom of this house, and I could hardly wait to escape.

Miss T. was very artistic and, as I already showed signs of a certain aptitude, she thought she would teach me to draw. She set up some drapery and gave me a piece of charcoal. I laboured and smudged and rebelled, I ran with my charcoal into the garden. I can see now the impatient whisk of her skirt as she turned her back on me and went into the house, clutching the board and the paper. Soon after this she left and I was allowed to go on with my childish drawing.

Hilda, a friend of my mother’s who was staying with us at this time, has told me since that one day she found me drawing a conventional sun, but instead of the straight rays I had made waving, sinuous ones. Asking me why I did this, I thought for a minute and then said, ‘It’s the sun with the wind in its hair.’

Auntie Blanche’s house was reached by a footpath through a waving field of corn. In her hall were Chinese pictures on rice paper of horrible tortures. Bright and delicate, they horrified, yet held my eyes. There was a round turret at one corner of the house. I hated it. It seemed so imitation.

I was desolate the day my brother went to school. I wandered in the garden and went to look at the underground house we had made for worms the day before. The worms had all escaped through the earth and only the little cardboard lids and strange food we had laid out remained. I found a bit of string that we had played with and I thought I should never get over my loneliness.

On my depression burst a new bomb. This was Wooly. She wore pince-nez and had two wings of hair that left her ears exposed. She took Kruschen salts, and I always remember the queer feeling I had on that first night when she bathed me.

She was energetic and full of anecdotes, always about herself and her past. She managed me very much more than I had ever been managed before. With Wooly, the ginger pudding always had to be eaten to the very last crumb, even if it choked one and the sullen tears were streaming down one’s cheeks.

My life became defined. There were special ways of drying oneself, eating, sleeping, brushing one’s hair, folding one’s clothes, and these rules must not be broken.

But in spite of all this, I liked her. We would walk along the cliffs or go into the town to do some shopping, and always I would be holding on to her elbow and playing with it by rubbing the loose skin over the hard bone. It gave me a curious sensation which I have never forgotten. Wooly’s arms were white and heavy. Only this protruding bone was without the cushion of flesh; there was only the loose supple skin that I would roll backwards and forwards over it. Later I can remember rubbing the cheeks of my dog in just such a way when his jaws were taut and rounded by holding a ball.

There were funny little darts in one shop that we went to. They had bright coloured fluff for a tail and tiny needle points. I liked the red and yellow ones best and Wooly would call me ‘red and yaller’, as if it were a term of abuse.

She would tell me on these walks of her past life: of the enormity of her sister who took the Crown Derby tea-set when their mother died, whereas it should really have come to Wooly; of her life in Africa with her late husband, when all the natives would come to her saying they were dying and all they really needed was a little castor oil which she would give them, after which they were her willing slaves and eternally grateful.

She would tell me of the terrible whips the Boers used and how they would rub salt afterwards into the wounds they had inflicted on the natives.

There was the story of her industrious childhood too: how she would apply herself to any problem that she did not understand until she had mastered it, how she never liked to be beaten by anything. Sometimes, after these intense bouts of application, she would go to bed and lie staring at the wallpaper until the roses wove themselves into the pattern of her dreams and ran riot, taking strange forms, opening and shutting their mouths.

‘This child,’ her parents said, ‘will certainly have brain fever, if we do not stop her working.’

And she was made to sit quietly in the old garden. I imagined her, at the time, in the frilly trousers and hooped skirt of the thirties and forties of the last century, bowling a hoop, thus unconsciously placing her birth quite sixty years too early.

It is strange that I had these bright mental pictures of Wooly’s childhood. She must have thrown an unreal air of romance over it all that attracted me.

Wooly had a jewel-box, in which were many interesting things. There was the Queen Anne threepenny-bit, and the George II florin that had been enamelled in different colours on one side and made into a brooch.

One day a friend of my eldest brother’s came over for the day on his bicycle. He told us that he collected coins. Wooly came down after lunch with the threepenny-bit and gave it to him. I felt stiff. and thick inside with jealousy and envy—to give it to a complete stranger when I had coveted it for months!

Wooly was the first person to tell me of the beauty of wild flowers, of cowslips and primroses. I secretly knew that they were not nearly so beautiful as roses and lilies, until she took me one day to picnic in the bluebell wood. One could not walk for crushing them. I did not know what to do until Wooly said that it couldn’t be helped and plumped firmly down on her coat in the midst of them.

At St Anthony’s I slept in a room which was on the ground floor. She told me that I must not be frightened and then repeated a terrible story about a girl she knew whose hair had gone white in a night because a burglar had pressed himself against the window and made frightful faces at her.

In the morning I would rush into my mother’s room and watch her having early-morning tea. Sometimes she would still be lying asleep and I would have the faint feeling of not quite wanting to kiss her until she was fresh and alive and not still half asleep. By the basin was a bottle of glycerine, honey and cucumber hand-lotion. I could never believe that it was really made from honey and cucumber; I would ask my mother about it and pour some on my hands to smell it and to feel its stickiness.

Wooly would read to me sometimes in the Wendy House. She had a book of stories which elaborated the nursery rhymes and I was told not to interrupt; I would listen, taking it all in, but still half watching the many earwigs which would crawl in from outside. My eldest brother, when he came back for the holidays, would put these earwigs on pennies and then would pass electric shocks through them and kill them.

One day of the holidays my eldest brother said he wanted to go to the films. He had a friend with him and after lunch they both got ready to go. Paul implored my mother to let him go too, but neither of us was allowed to. He began to cry and shout, and at last he climbed on to the roof of the Wendy House and said that he would swear at everyone if he was not allowed to go. I had a superstitious terror of what might happen. I waited and waited. Paul cried and shouted still. Then, disappointed past all endurance, he shrieked, ‘Damn fool, damn fool, damn fool!’ I did not know what would happen, I was overawed at this boldness and wickedness.

The outburst seemed, however, to have relieved the situation and he soon came down quite quietly and smarmed his hair with water. Tea was very quiet that afternoon and my brother and his friend had the decency not to mention the film they had seen.

This friend, who was at Uppingham at the time, had brought with him his violin. I never heard him play it, but he would take it out from under the bed and hold it under his chin with the little velvet cushion wedged against him.

One night he made a booby-trap for Wooly. It was a pillow and some shoes placed over her door so that they fell on her when she went in.

Wooly told me what terrible things she would do to him. She sewed up his pyjamas, she made an apple-pie bed, she stuffed his socks with holly. To no avail—he never blinked or said a word.

My mother had difficulty with the servants at that time. The cook ran out one day into the garden, saying, ‘It’s no good, I’ve beaten until my arm aches and it won’t go right.’ She was referring to the mayonnaise which my mother had asked her to make. I think she imagined the request to be the height of unreasonableness, when all most people did was to go and buy a bottle of salad cream.

After she left I went into the kitchen with my mother, and right on top of the dresser we found fragments of sauce-boats and dishes and cups she had broken and hidden there. We could not get anyone to replace her straight away, and so our food was sent from a hotel in a sort of covered cart. I remember the miracle of it being hot and its typical hotel taste. I liked the excitement, but my mother thought it very nasty.

I was taken soon after this to Canterbury and saw St Augustine’s throne. I wanted to sit on it—I wanted to sit on a real throne—but no one would let me. I was secretly very disappointed that it was not studded with precious stones and never had been.

We went to Reculver as well and I can remember the tombs in the ruined nave and the feeling I had that the sea might at any moment come in and engulf it all.

The love for old things had been growing in me ever since I could remember and now I wanted to know about everything old. Wooly filled this need a little.

One day we went to visit my Aunt Dos’s mother who lived at Broadstairs. It was hot and I had on my white sailor-suit with the long trousers. It was cut exactly like a real sailor’s and I was very proud in it, but I would never wear the cap. I refused to wear a hat all my childhood, on account of the terror of having to take it off to strange ladies and the feeling I had that hats were like the collars round dogs’ necks—a mark of servitude.

We had lunch first in a restaurant in Broadstairs; there was salmon and salad, and I felt afterwards the tightness of my sailor trousers round the waist as we walked along the hot street. My mother was very pretty in cool linen, and she had just bought me some miniature tumblers and a decanter on a glass tray; they had black and red lines round them.

We arrived at the door and were led down the long glassed-in corridor that joined the garden gate to the house. It was dark and cool, with early nineteenth-century Gothic windows. We were taken out into the garden, with its wide lawns and great ilex trees. In one corner was a concrete staircase leading right into the ground.

We were taken