Father and I

As A child, the toys I most enjoyed playing with — and in this I think I was typical of every child — all had about them an aura of the inexplicable. Thus I was specially fascinated by the magnesium tapes which when burned turned into the likeness of a coiled serpent, the dried pieces of paper from Japan that resembled dirty matchsticks but swelled into highly colored flowers when immersed in water, and even a simple magnet shaped like a horseshoe with which to pick up steel filings, or any puzzle that made use of that alchemist’s liquid metal, quicksilver, never to be made fast. But if I liked to be astonished, my father, I believe, liked to astonish, even his own small children; and when I was four or five he used to make magic for me by causing a penny to disappear from his hand and by shaping, with his fingers and the aid of a light, shadows of rabbits and cats and goats on the wall. I was immensely impressed by these achievements.

I can recall easily today the tall, authoritative man that he then was. Sometimes he would come to visit me on his way down to the drawing room before dinner, when he would be wearing full evening dress. This must have been at our Scarborough house, but at Renishaw he was able to produce a piece of magic which for me outshone all the others. I would be playing in the garden when I would hear him suddenly call my name from a distance; then, looking up, would see him waving at me from between the battlements on the roof. How did he rise to that altitude? By some process which many years later I learned to refer to as levitation? How did he get there? I wondered, rather in the style of the well-known question attributed to King George III, who is supposed to have asked repeatedly on one occasion, when faced with an apple dumpling: “How did the apple get inside the dumpling?” It never entered my head that he could do anything as prosaic as just climb a staircase. I did not find this out until a year or two after, but when I did discover it, his prestige suffered immensely in my eyes because, from being a sorcerer, he had sunk to being a mere conjurer, and sleight of hand was shown to have masqueraded as magic.

Nevertheless, I took a great fancy to the roof myself, and the door on the second story of the wooden staircase that led to it was conveniently opposite a nursery. By the side of the staircase stood a large, dappled rocking horse, which had been drawn a century before by Octavius Oakley, showing my grandfather holding and two of his sisters riding it, the elder girl dressed in the manner of some Cruikshank drawing, with knickers showing beneath her short skirts. I was not, of course, aware of this at the time, but I knew that I was forbidden to ride the rocking horse myself, on the score that a great-uncle of mine had fallen off it and had been killed. Whether this was true or an improvisation by my nurse, I never found out; but if it was an invention, it was outstandingly successful in frightening me, and nothing would have induced me to climb on its back. On the contrary, it seemed impossible to keep me off the roof for long. By stretching, I could just reach the handle of the first door leading to the little wooden staircase, and with more difficulty, the handle of the door at the top, within one of the three Gothic spires, leading to the roof itself. The keys had been lost, so there was no difficulty about locking or unlocking.

I made the expedition twice before I was caught. I was supposed to be resting after luncheon, but in the manner of all children my one idea after a meal was to rush around the room at tremendous speed and not to stop running, jumping, and singing for hours. So my nurse, on the first two occasions to which I refer, had been puzzled to find it much easier than usual to persuade me to lie down, and when she saw my hands at the end of my rest, she could not think how they had got so black. Though she had been in the next room, she had heard nothing, so quiet and careful had I been. Her favorite motto was: “Even a slave has an hour for his dinner”; and she might have added, “and another hour for digestion,” for that was the amount of time she liked.

But the fiasco of my third visit to the roof was entirely my own fault; if I had not acted foolishly, I should again have reached home safely, but it was a particularly fine day, calm and full of sunlight, and the roof was fascinating, the best place possible from which to seize the beauty of the whole layout, the counterpoint of light and shadow, of water and yew hedge, and from which to look down on the golden mound of the treetops. The roof also afforded an easy way to compute the age of the original house and the various additions to it, for the part with stone tiles belonged to the time of King Charles I, and the gray-blue slates to different periods in the eighteenth century, while the chimney stacks also afforded their clues. Of course, I did not realize this at the time, but the beauty of it, of the light and color, excited me and seems to have warped my judgment. By standing on the flat part of the roof and stretching on tiptoe, I could just get my head over the gap between two battlements. Suddenly I saw my father walking across the lawn alone. Overcome by the feeling of my own cleverness in reaching here unaided and by my pleasure at seeing him, because he was usually indoors at this hour, I determined to give him a pleasant surprise and shouted as loud as I could: “Father! Father!” I saw him turn around immediately, look up, and then begin running toward the house. What I think chiefly frightened him was the wooden planks which led from one ridge to another. It would be easy for a child to trip and fall over, and the valleys between the ridges were often very deep.

I was happily playing in the sunshine when the hasty tread of feet on the creaking stairs announced his arrival. He was accompanied by my nurse, who on this occasion wore the woebegone expression of a saint in a picture by some Flemish artist such as Rogier van der Weyden, and a flustered nurserymaid. I was carried downstairs kicking, and put to bed. My mother, however, did her best for me as soon as she found out what had happened, pointing out to my father how lovely the day had been and how playing in the rare sunshine of our climate could do me nothing but good.

I did not quite understand what I had done, but whatever it might have been, I regretted it, because my nurse and Jenny were in disgrace, though my nurse never blamed me for it. However, she was usually in disgrace with my father, for she had been nurserymaid to my mother, and any faults my mother had developed, in his eyes, were attributed to her regime.

A RAP OVER THE KNUCKLES

Readers of my autobiography may recall that upon one occasion, when I was occupying the bedroom next to my father’s at Renishaw, I woke up in the small hours to hear his voice saying in a very sinister manner: “They May Think I Shall —But I Shan’t!” This pronouncement was followed by a prolonged chuckle. Now, whether these words were spoken in his sleep or when he was awake, I shall never know, but certainly they describe very precisely an attitude he often struck in his conscious hours. Indeed, “They May Think I Shall—But I Shan’t” ranked with him as a game, and one which, I believe, he was proud to have invented. First, you led your opponent on by niggling and worrying him over what course of action to pursue in a particular quandary, and then, just as, after a fever of fussing, you had induced him to think that you had settled on a specific line of action, you switched off that plan and onto another, which would then have to be argued all over again from the beginning.

My mind reverts especially to one instance of his using this very personal technique. It occurred sometime during the few enchanted years just before World War I, when summer appeared as if it would last forever and each hour showed its own special glow and luster; when Clio, the Muse of History, had apparently settled down to a placid middle age, and the only events she produced would turn out to be catalogues of pleasure. Such disputes as existed were the result of particular political problems, such as Home Rule for Ireland, Lloyd George’s budget — always afterward referred to as the budget, as though no other had ever been brought in — and that child of the budget, the Veto Bill, a bill intended to curb still further the powers of the House of Lords. This, apparently, could only be effected by Mr. Asquith, the Prime Minister, advising the King to create at once a large number of Liberal peers — a large enough number to pass the measure — but they, alas, always showed a most retrogressive tendency to adopt the Conservative creed, however much they had denounced it previously, the moment they entered the august precincts.

Many people were much concerned about these matters, my father among them. He had at last recovered from a long illness and was full of energy again. As usual, he constituted himself, as it were, a self-elected one-man government. Continually he wrestled in his mind with this problem: what, in particular, could be done to defeat the machinations of the Liberal politicians? — although he himself had recently and publicly adopted the Liberal faith. At last his ingenious mind found a way out. Accordingly, he wrote to the Conservative chief, Mr. Balfour, and in spite of personally holding the poorest opinion of him — he regarded him as little more than a half-baked philosopher, an amateur aesthete unduly fond of music, with none of the qualities of a leader, and as a man who had founded his position on the support of numerous influential relations and of a particular set in the social world — my father wrote to Mr. Balfour to tell him that he had thought out a plan by which Mr. Asquith’s threatened action could be averted and wondered whether the statesman would care to know about it. After a day or two an answer arrived stating that Mr. Balfour would indeed be very interested and asking my father if he would write to him and communicate it. My father then just wrote back, No, he would not, a prime instance of “They May Think I Shall — But I Shan’t!” Probably Mr. Balfour, in his vagueness, hardly registered the rap inflicted, for truly he was very vague.

Another of my father’s favorite phrases was, “He needs a rap over the knuckles,” such as the one administered below. He had a habit of discussing the high political questions of the day with his secretary and asking for his opinion on them. One day his secretary said to him at last: “How can I advise you about such matters, Sir George, when you know far more about them than I do?”, and my father replied: “It isn’t your advice I want. I need to hear somebody else’s view, it doesn’t matter whose, so that by a process of contrast and comparison I can more clearly formulate my own opinion.”

If my father’s principal motto was “They May Think I Shall — But I Shan’t!”, my mother’s, obversely, and though she would never declare it in words, was “They May Think I Shan’t — But I Shall!” There comes to my mind a particular instance of what I am trying to indicate. One cold winter my father decided to move from the country into a hotel in Florence: it would be warmer and he could economize; my mother would not be able to entertain so lavishly, nor to give such large parties as at Montegufoni. After a week or so at the hotel, my father suffered one of his recurrent attacks of imaginary illness and resolved to move again, this time into the Nursing Home of the Blue Nuns for a month.

When he mentioned this decision to my mother, he was rather surprised to find her in such a cooperative mood, for usually she would insinuate that his illnesses were hypothetical; but on this occasion she told him that she thought he was quite right to take his indisposition seriously, and so, with a valedictory exhortation to the strictest economy in his absence, he was wafted off in the Ark the same evening for a month’s rest on the sunny heights of Fiesole.

Henry Moat, his discerning butler, would bring the English papers to him every afternoon, but one day they were late. In consequence, one of the nurses, feeling sorry for my father, confined as he was to the books he had brought with him — A Flutter Through Manorial Dovecotes in the Sixteenth Century, Over the Border: An Account of Flodden Field, Wool-Gathering in Nottinghamshire in the Dark Ages, Rotherham Before the Norman Conquest, Medieval Fools: A Study of Court Jesters During the Wars of the Roses, and The Stone Age on the Yorkshire Moors — took pity on him and brought him a weekly paper, printed in French and published in Florence in the cause of tourism. It was devoted in the main to most favorable accounts of local social events and to fascinating lists of the guests staying in the various hotels — a paper which he had not seen before and probably would never have set eyes on at all if Henry had not failed him on this single occasion.

My father opened it at random, and the first paragraph that caught his eye was headed: “Lady Ida Sitwell gives a fête at the Hôtel Ali Baba at Macheath.” The account of it said that Lady Ida Sitwell had offered a dinner to forty people in honor of the visit of her sister Lady Mildred Cooke. (It did not say, however, how shy Lady Mildred was, nor how much she must have hated it.) Then came the menu of the dinner, the names and order of the wines and liqueurs, and an account of the table, decorated with pink roses that had been specially flown from the Riviera. It was fortunate that my father was already in a nursing home, for certainly this information would have sent him to one, in order to recover from the shock of the announcement of my mother’s determined stand for economy during his absence. The feast occupied his mind for weeks. In the list of convives, as the paper called them, occurred the names of all the best-known pique-assiette in Florence, and I remember his telling me that when the bill came in and he queried the amounts charged for liqueurs, he was informed that some of the guests had ordered full bottles of brandy and Cointreau and other imported liqueurs to take home with them.

Henry Moat was the person who suffered most, for not having told my father about it. It was disgraceful of him, my father said.

“But I heard nothing about it, Sir George.”

“Well, then, you ought to have found out.”

“But how could I, Sir George?”

“Don’t argue; it stimulates the brain cells and prevents me from sleeping.”

CREATING

My father, as by this time the reader will have concluded, worked himself up easily into an exaggerative state of mind with little or no facts to support this condition. His imagination was wont to catch fire suddenly, but he was more likely to grieve and deplore than rejoiee. When at last an auditor would inquire: “On what foundation are you deducing these deplorable events you foresee?”, he would take refuge in one of his favorite apothegms, delivered with an Olympian air: “We happen to know.” Thus, though he was not to be numbered among all those thousands who glimpsed bearded Cossacks with the snow still on their boots from crossing the fringe of the Arctic Circle, and if he had seen them he would certainly have concluded that they were German troops dressed up as Russians and ordered here specially to nab him (I have elsewhere related how he thought the German Fleet was sent after him at Scarborough when the town was bombarded), nor could he be counted among those later mystics who, so many of them, beheld the Angel of Mons; nevertheless, he had his visions, but of a depressing order and equally divorced from fact.

One morning in the autumn of the second year of the 1914-1918 War, when he was deeply engaged in farming and I was just off to the Battle of Loos — which, incidentally, gave me the idea for my first alliterative entry in Who’s Who, where, under “Recreations”, I entered: “Fightingin Flanders and Farming with Father” — he rushed into the estate office, flourishing in one hand a paper of some sort. It was September, the guests were leaving, everything was closing down for the winter, and the family was just off to Scarborough. He was plainly agitated and called to Maynard Hollingworth, the agent: “I have just received notice that troops are to be billeted in the house. The servants will all leave, and there will be no one to look after anything. It means the ruin of the estate, for they will probably take it over.”

Here, Maynard Hollingworth interrupted, saying: “Can I see the Billeting Order, Sir George?”

My father continued to wave the paper about without troubling to answer Hollingworth. This refusal to let anyone see a paper clutched in his hand was a well-known symptom of his workingup; thus, when he stood there, the document could be seen to resemble that sole shilling that is buried under the foundation stone of some great structure. (These huge edifices that my father built for himself were plainly a form of creation, albeit somewhat gloomy, and it demonstrates what a useful thing slang is, for the slang use of the word “creating” expresses perfectly the mental processes. “Sir George is creating this morningsomething terrible!”)

Maynard Hollingworth reiterated: “Isn’t that a check in your hand, Sir George? If you’d let me look at it, I might be able to help.”

My father made no attempt to reply or to give it to him but went on reciting his dream of destruction.

“There is no knowing what may happen,” he continued. “The books in the library will all be burned, and no doubt my Family History, which has taken many years of work, will disappear. The stables will be pulled to pieces; all the trees in the park will be cut down for firewood.”

Later in the day, Hollingworth contrived to obtain a glance at the paper. He found it to be a check in payment for the billeting of horses in the stables, which had ended a month before my father received the document.

My father was later deeply distressed by the government’s granting permission to Lord Gowdray’s firm, S. Pearson & Son, Ltd., to bore for oil on the Sitwell estate just outside the park near Foxton Wood. Accordingly, he permitted himself to be persuaded by the general manager of the neighboring coal mine that oil could be reached much more easily and quickly in Eckington Woods, also on Sitwell property. The reader will not be surprised to learn that after a single talk on oil my father became a self-decreed expert on it. (“Such a pity not to consult me before they started work.”) And the very next day he sent a telegram to Lloyd George, who was by then Prime Minister: “Have I your permission to bore for oil? Can reach it months before Cowdray.” He received no reply. On the other hand, nobody there ever struck oil, though Lord Cowdray’s oil experts drilled through the coal measures and through Mountain Limestone and Millstone Grit, only at the end to be faced with brine.

Creating, in its other and opposite form, now began. When he heard that brine had been found, my father remarked that they would soon have to abandon the site and perhaps he would be able to build a health resort, similar to Harrogate or Droitwich, and inaugurate brine baths as a cure for arthritis. “The doctors, I know, will be enthusiastic about it, and I could go to Lutyens for the plan of the town — luckily, he has had plenty of practice with New Delhi. Nothing too ambitious, just a group of stone nymphs and another group illustrating the Seven Ages of Man, but in an opposite order from that in which they generally appear, so as not to depress the patients unduly. First of all, there would have to be hotels and shops. These could easily be built within a few months after the war ends. The doctors would all be housed in a separate quarter. (They would enjoy being together.) Then there would have to be an arcade for patients to walk in on rainy days, and the nature of the ground gives ample opportunity for me to make a fine garden for them. Nothing rheumatic patients enjoy so much as being able to sit in a garden. It needn’t be big — about twelve acres. Then there is the question of the swimming bath itself. It should be two or three hundred yards long, with an arcade, and made of scagliola. And the opening ceremony — what would you advise for that?”

“I think you should dive in to open the pool,” I suggested.

“Yes, that would amuse my friends, but I’m afraid my diving days are over” —and they certainly were. None of us had ever known him to swim.

THE NEW JERUSALEM

Of a fine evening in August during the twenties, after a solitary and early tea, my father, wearing a lightweight gray suit, a gray wide-awake hat, and brown shoes rather too delicate for country mud and for the wet tufts of rank grass near the water, liked to walk down to the lake and around it, in order to see how the plantations he had made were prospering. As a younger man, he would have been found at this hour paddling along in a canoe, with Monarch, a black spaniel, following behind in the water at a discreet distance, though one from which he could still splash his master if he wished, or even try to board the boat and succeed in swamping it. But Monarch was long dead, and my father now preferred to walk around the lake. Sometimes he would ask me to join him. We would descend the flight of steps in the middle of the garden and then go through the iron gate at the top of the hill. At this season, the yellowing grass was close-cropped and the only flowers in the park would be drifts of harebells with their translucent blue cups swinging on invisible stalks, clumps of toadflax in their two tones of yellow, and jungle tangles of convolvulus engaged in gradually strangling the green bushes on which they climbed, but in spite of this nefarious procedure, they produced large white trumpet flowers having an air of unusual innocence.

Partly running down the hill, for it was so steep that it impelled us to run, we reached the lake through a thicket of wild raspberries. Here at the water’s edge was an entirely different set of flowers, fragrant clumps of lilac-colored wild mint, the clustered spires of magenta loosestrife, and just inside the banks, groups of meadowsweet and bulrushes. On the water itself, in the middle of the lake, two kinds of yellow lilies floated, one a large, round-petaled nenuphar with a red center resembling the inside of a pomegranate, the other, a small, yellow flower, insignificant except for the abundance of its blossoms, but the leaves of both formed big golden circles floating on the darkness of the water.

A difference was visible, too, in the insect world: here the dragonflies darted and skimmed; it was too late in the year for the great quantities of azure dragonflies which were to be seen in July, though a few might survive, but it was those of a larger species which now attracted attention as they sped on dark gauze wings in dry crackling flight. Their bodies were brown and varnished or marked with green, blue, and yellow like a grass snake’s belly; their eyes, protuberent and endowed with more facets than man has ever contrived to cut in the largest and finest diamond. Occasionally a kingfisher would flash by and, more rarely, a heron would be seen fishing in the marshy part of the lake opposite Half-Moon Plantation, having flown apparently some forty miles for an evening’s sport, since the heronry nearest to us was at Kedleston.

My father walked very fast and, as was his wont, would stop suddenly — abruptly enough, indeed, to make anyone walking behind him collide with him — and raise binoculars up to his eyes in order to obtain the distant views. Sometimes we would cross the path of a trespasser, a miner off work for a day or two and engaged in gathering a bunch of wild flowers to make into a posy to compete at a local horticultural show where there would be competitions in flower arrangements; and very pretty the bouquets would be, with flower heads of each sort, pressed together in concentric, concolorous circles; very pretty and unexpectedly fastidious, with their contrasts of texture, of the lacy interweaving cow parsley and meadowsweet contrasting with more robust flowers, and reminiscent of the bouquets clasped in the hot hands of bridesmaids dressed in early-Victorian style at fashionable weddings. It seems odd that miners, after their heavy work, should indulge in such fragile and elegant fantasies, but in those days people made their own amusements and were happier for it.

My father would not notice the interloper, his mind being occupied with other matters and distant enough to bring out sometimes a real surprise. Thus one evening, suddenly interrupting himself in the middle of explaining how unselfish of him it had been to make all the improvements he had effected here — lakes and plantations and a drive through the wood — for the benefit of generations unborn, he looked up at the hill and, forgetting what he had just said, pronounced:

“This wicked taxation will most probably drive you out of England, in which case you must emigrate to Canada or America and build a copy of the house there; but though I shan’t, I fear, still be here to help you and the architect with my advice, I can give you a few tips now. The new Renishaw must be an exact replica of the present house and garden, except in one respect: the stones needn’t be numbered and moved one by one across the Atlantic, nor need it even be built of the same stone; but you must find a position for it with a natural resemblance to the original site.”

I was floored and stunned by the outlining of these new measures of economy.

“How am I to pay for it?” I asked.

“You must keep expenses down in every other direction. It needn’t cost so much: it would be unnecessary, for instance, to make the lake at first. You could wait for that until you had settled in the house; then you could keep an eye on the work yourself.”

“But what I want to know is,” I reiterated, “how I am to pay for the site and for the building?”

“As for that, there are always the Building Societies. I understand they exist, as their name implies, for the purpose of encouraging building. They’d be only too pleased to help, I imagine. It’d be a real chance for them. Now you’ll see, my dear boy, why it is so important to be economical in small things. The pocket money you have enjoyed might have come in very useful, for a shilling a week soon mounts up at compound interest.”

“It’s too late to do anything about that now, I’m afraid,” I said, rather unsympathetically. “The question is, who is going to find the money for everything?”

“I have already told you — the Building Societies. You may have to draw on more than one of them, on two or three perhaps, but of course they’d jump at it. It’s the sort of opportunity they don’t often get.”

“The building operations you suggest are not of the kind that the directors would support,” I objected.

“Then they’ve no right to call themselves Building Societies,” he replied crossly. “It’s a piece of imposture. I never heard of such a thing. But of course you’re wrong. They’d jump at it. Meanwhile, I can continue, as long as I am still with you, to advise you about details which will save you money. For example, when you’ve made the lake, you needn’t plant English wild flowers around the water at once. You can take your time over it. You’ll find all the arrangements very enjoyable. Then, in making the lake, you can leave out the island. That’ll mean a big saving, and it’s not really necessary, anyhow not at present. You’ll have, of course, to make a copy of the lake pavilion. But you can’t do that until I’ve built the original, so you see why it’s so important for me to get on with it immediately. It ought to be started at once. All the plans are ready. One other point: it would pay you probably to sell the furniture and pictures in the house and to have exact copies made to furnish the new Renishaw. This is an age of copying, and we ought to learn to make use of it. No one out there would know the difference, and it would mean a great saving.”

At this moment, those elegant cannibals, the jays, burst out from their dark castles in the trees, gave a screech and a mocking cackle of laughter, and my father, suddenly recalled to himself, said: “I suppose it’s time to start back now.”