Chapters from childhood ...

Foreword

THE literature of childhood is not voluminous. There is abundant literature and often admirable literature for the child, fairy tales and tales of adventure, and animal stories of the " Black Beauty " genre. Swift even turned his terrific wrath with mankind to the uses of the nursery, and Bunyan made the agonies of the spiritual pilgrim as thrilling and vivid an experience to the child as the tap of Pew's stick on the frosty ground in " Treasure Island/ ' But the literature of childhood, the literature which re-creates the thought and feelings of the child mind when the experiences of life are new and strange, and before the glamour of the revelation has faded into the light of common day, are rare. It demands many unusual qualities : an intense visual memory, an imaginative sympathy, and that power of recalling emotion long after the emotion has passed which has been described as the essential quality of poetry. It was in this evocation of the child that the genius of Dickens touched its highest expression, and there is no better title to immortality

VI FOREWORD

than the first part of " David Copperfield." The slighter sketches of Kenneth Graham in " The Golden Age " and " Dream Days " have the same revealing beauty ; but it is the beauty of childhood seen through the medium of disillusioning years. The humour and the joy are the character of the child, but the pathos is the pathos of memory. In these " Chapters from Childhood " we have, I think, an indisputable addition to the authentic literature of childhood. The writer had the advantage of an unusual setting for her experiences. To have had Ford Madox-Brown for grandfather and playmate, to have lived in the Rossetti circle was to have had an introduction to life of a quality that falls to few, and though it is not the circumstances of childhood, but the emotional reaction to circumstances, which is the soul of its literature, this record gains from the setting. The picture of F. M. B. in his old age, as seen through the eyes of his " little pigeon," has the untroubled beauty of the child vision, but no less remarkable are the thumbnail sketches, at once artless and penetrating, of the nameless and ordinary people who flit across the field of view, the amiable policeman, the lovesick cabman, the Reverend Mother, the nuns, the domestic servants. They are called from the past with a sudden freshness and a certainty of touch that convey the sense of personal contact.

FOREWORD Vll

They appear only to disappear, but they dwell in the memory with the significance of permanent types of the human drama. But the chief person on the little stage is the child herself, and it is as a record of the first impressions of things and the first intellectual and emotional reaction to ideas, that these chapters are chiefly valuable. The name of Mrs. Soskice is familiar to the reading world, through her remarkable rendering of the great poem of Nekrassov, " The Poet of the People's Sorrow/ ' the Piers Plowman of Russian literature. In this book she reveals an original gift of a high order from which the public will expect much.

A. G. GARDINER.

Author's Preface

THESE reminiscences, written a long time ago, are not a recital of facts from day to day, with stated names and dates, but merely the presentation of certain scenes and incidents of childhood, such as often remain clearly in the memory long after childhood has passed.

I trust that the memory of my late grandfather, Ford Madox-Brown, whom I have portrayed here, as far as my account goes, as faithfully, I think, as if I had had recourse to many dates and documents ; and that of my late uncle, William Michael Rossetti, whose household also figures in these notes, will serve as an apology for their appearance.

The fact that my mother, Mrs. Francis HuerTer, was, for the most part, ill and away during the period of my life herein recorded, and that my brothers, Oliver and Ford Madox-Hueffer, were boys at school older than myself, accounts for their being so little mentioned in these recollections.

I have included the chapter about my life in the convent because, I fancy, life in convent-schools is little known here in England, and may prove of interest to some readers.

J. s.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

FOREWORD, BY A. G. GARDINER . . V author's PREFACE ix

I. SOCIAL REFORMERS .... I

Chapter I Social Reformers I

OR some time after my father's death my mother was ill and away, and I was sent to live with my aunt and uncle. # They lived in a large grey house with steps up to the front door, and steps down to the area, and a great many stairs leading up to the top landings. The walls of all the rooms and staircases were covered with pictures, many with very bright colours in broad gilt frames. There were some portraits of other relations painted by a famous artist who was my uncle's brother .f

I had four cousins, who, though they were young, were social reformers. Mary was seven ; Helen was nine ; Arthur was about fourteen ; and Olive was fifteen at least. I was eight, and I became a social reformer too.

We were anarchists. We believed that all people

should be equal, and that nobody should possess

more than anybody else ; and we hoped for the

* Mr. and Mrs. William Michael Rossetti. t Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

social revolution. We had one big red banner in common, and we three little ones had a smaller one of the same colour for our special use. They both had some words on them, cut out of silver paper and pasted on with glue. I don't remember the words, but they were mottoes of some kind. The banners looked very bright and expensive, especially in the open air.

We had an anarchist page-boy. He was the son of my aunt's French cook. He had red hair and a cross, spotty face, and he used to open the door in the afternoon when visitors came. When he wasn't sitting in the hall he was supposed to be helping his mother in the kitchen, peeling potatoes and cleaning boots. But he never seemed to do much work. He disliked work because it tired him so. When he was in the kitchen he used to sit by the table with his arms spread out upon it and eat whatever his mother put in front of him, and when she would not give him any more he went into the larder to find food. He never said what he was going to eat, so that we were always being disappointed at table because at the last moment he had eaten something that was needed in the cooking. At first his mother used to say it was the cat, but after a time it couldn't be hidden any longer, because he ate so many things no cat would ever touch. He sulked when he was spoken to about it, and grumbled because he had not been educated to be a public speaker.

He, of course, also thought that everybody should be equal and possess no more than everybody else. He said that he, for instance, was a uniformed slave of the capitalist system. He used to lie on the dining-room sofa with his legs thrown up over the back of it and his coat unbuttoned and explain his views about it. He thought it was a shame that he was forced to wear a coat with a long row of degrading buttons up the front as a token of servitude, and waste his youth on helping his mother who toiled and sweated in our kitchens while we, the representatives of the tyrant classes, wore what we liked and were provided for.

He said that he was a son of France, and that in France they had once got up a revolution and chopped the heads off all the tyrants. Tyrants' heads rolled off into the basket underneath the guillotine as quickly as peas out of the shucks into the basin when his mother shelled them. One day, he said, the same thing would happen here, and then " our " turn would come, and he and his mother and their kind would triumph. Till then they would be patient and hug their grief in secret. French people are more excitable and say more serious things than the English do, We used to sit round him on the floor, and hug our knees and listen. We felt ashamed and apologetic, and it was very difficult to think of anything to say to comfort him. Of course, it wasn't our fault, and we longed for the revolution. It was in our programme. Once my aunt came in and found him lying on the sofa, and she grabbed him by the ear and led him straight out of the room, right to the top of the kitchen stairs. She said she only kept him for his mother's sake. We all got up from the floor and stood close together. I shall never forget how angry we were, and how terrible our faces looked when she was doing it. It seemed to come just as a proof of what he was always saying : how unjust the world was, and how the tyrants always got the best of it.

We had an anarchist printing press down in the front room of the basement. We printed an anarchist newspaper on it. Olive and Arthur wrote most of the articles themselves. The page always promised to write something for it, but he never did, because he said he couldn't find the time. Sometimes they got an article from a real outside social reformer. The paper was called The Torch, and we used to sell it in Hyde Park on Sunday, and on the platforms of the biggest railway stations. I think it must have been interesting and uncommon, because whenever anybody bought a copy they would first stand for some time staring at the cover, and as soon as they got to the title of the first article they would to an absolute certainty (we knew because we used to watch) turn round suddenly and stare after us. I can't remember the headings of any of the articles, but I think there was an incitement to revolution in every copy. It was probably most about the moans of the classes trodden under foot, and the bloody (if it couldn't be done otherwise) repression of tyrants. That is what we were chiefly interested in at the time.

My aunt* didn't like the printing press. She was tall and narrow-shouldered and stooping. She had a broad, high nose, and a long, rather severe face. She kept her mouth shut tight except when she was speaking, and her lips jutted out a little, especially when she was thinking about something interesting.

She was always moving about very quickly over the house. She used to sweep into the schoolroom early in the morning in a brown cloth dressing-gown, when we were having lessons, and listen for a minute. Then she would whirl the governess out of her chair and give us the lessons herself. She knew how to hit on the parts we knew least. Her voice went very high and very low, and she explained beautifully.

* Mrs. Rossetti was the eldest daughter of Ford Madox- Brown.

Whenever my uncle gave me half-a-crown to spend she took it away to buy my stockings with. She loved me, but she thought that children should be taught to be economical. She was very clever and used to lecture about the rights of women ; and she had written several books and painted pictures. She knew a great deal about education. Sometimes she whipped her children when they fell down and hurt themselves, to teach them to be more careful, but she never did at any other time. In the afternoon when she was not busy she would nearly always smile and answer the most difficult questions.

She used to sweep along the streets just as quickly as she swept about the house. When we went out with her we used to follow in a tail quite out of breath.

She said that no one had the right to spend one idle moment on this globe. If she couldn't write or teach and lecture she would scrub, or sweep the streets, or clean drains rather than be idle. She said work, work, work, was the object of life.

She wore quite old clothes in the street, because she said it was wrong to spend much money on clothes. She cut down Olive's dresses for Helen when Olive had done with them, and cut them still smaller for Mary when Helen had. She ate up all the fat and gristly pieces on her plate because she said luxurious habits were detestable, and she made us eat them too, except Helen, because she was delicate.

She was very kind to the poor. Once we met a man in Tottenham Court Road, and he asked her for a penny to buy some food. She went into a shop and bought a big white roll for him and a hunk of cheese. When she came out and gave it to him, he opened it and said, quite quietly and not angrily at all, " You might have stood a pat of butter, Madam, " and she looked at him and went back into the shop and paid the shopman to cut the roll and spread some butter on it. Then the man began to eat it at once. We thought she would have been angry, but she was not, only thoughtful.

Sometimes she would say, " And now we'll go and see Christina,"* and we did so.

She was a very kind poetess who lived in one of a row of houses in Torrington Square and wrote poems that usually ended sadly. She was very religious, and sometimes she used to put on a long black veil and go into a sisterhood to pray. But at other times she wore a black dress and a white lace cap, and we used to find her in the back room of her house with her hands folded, thinking and waiting for the kettle to boil. But, of course, she did other * Christina Rossetti.

things as well. Once she made me a tiny dining-room table and half a dozen chairs out of chestnuts and pins and red string, and put them in a little box and gave them to me and said, " When you look at them, remember Aunt Christina, " and I did.

She had a mild religious face, and smooth hair, and very big grey eyes, rather prominent. When we came in she was always glad, and she used to say, " Welcome, merry little maidens," and made us sit round the table and have tea, and eat as much as we wanted. She had a big cupboard with sweets in it, and a glass tank full of gold-fish, and two very ancient ugly aunts who lay in beds on the opposite sides of a room, with a strip of carpet in the middle.

They were so old that they couldn't stand up, and they could hardly talk. They always seemed to me to be waving their long skinny hands. They wore big nightcaps with frills round the edges and flowered bed-jackets.

They were very fond of children and, after tea, I used to be sent up for them to look at. They used to stretch out their hands to me, and I used to stand on the strip of carpet between them and seem rude and unwilling to make friends. But it was really because I was frightened, for they reminded me of the wolf when he had eaten Red- Riding-Hood's grandmother up, and put on her nightcap and got into bed. They were, in fact, very affectionate, and wanted to be kind to me. It was only because they were so old and dried and wrinkled that I was frightened.

The reason that my aunt disliked the printing machine was that the day on which the paper went to press we were all quite black with the part that comes oif on your hands and face, and Olive and Arthur were hot and irritable. Besides, she said, it was not right for my uncle, who was employed by the Government, to have a paper of that kind printed in his house. When people of importance came to see my uncle it could be heard quite plainly from his study, groaning in the basement. But Uncle William stood up for us and protected it.

He had a head and face that, joined together, were an exact oval. His head was perfectly bald and shiny on the top, but he had a little white tufty fringe at the back that reached right down to his collar. He was tall and rather bent, and he wore a black frock-coat with a turn-down collar, and rather wide trousers. He had thick white eyebrows and dark eyes. We loved him almost better than any one, because he was so gentle and stuck to us through thick and thin about everything, not only about the printing press. He always read the articles in the paper, and he would smile and make suggestions in

IO CHAPTERS FROM CHILDHOOD

his kind soft voice. But he always said to us, " Don't you think so ? " not at all as if he really knew better than we. Aunt Lucy didn't really keep the page-boy so much for his mother's sake as that Uncle William protected him and said he had an interesting character, and he was going to send him to the Polytechnic.

II

We three little ones had a special mission of our own, although it was all part of the same work. It was the reformation of policemen. Of course, we understood very well that if we could get them on our side it would be a very great thing. We felt nervous when we undertook the work, but Olive told us that that kind of agitation was quite within the law until the policemen had actually begun to rebel against their chiefs. Then, of course, it would be a case of save yourself whoever can. I think she looked it up in some sort of Blue Book before we started. She was always getting worried and looking things up because she was so anxious that no mistakes should be made.

What we had to explain to the police was that it was most unfair to put a man in prison merely for taking what he needed from another man who had more than the first man had. There are so many

SOCIAL REFORMERS II

riches in the world that there is no reason why every man should not have enough for himself, and if the second man has too much and can't be persuaded by kindness to share it with the first man who hasn't enough, then the first man has every right to take it from the second by force. The second man depends entirely upon the armed supporters of the law, who are the police and military, to aid and abet him in his greediness, and every right-minded policeman should feel ashamed to strike a blow in such a horrid cause. That was our programme in a nutshell.

We took our banner, the smaller one, with us to give us confidence, and we arranged it as we went along. We had simply to hem the police in as they stood at their corners, so that we could force them to listen to us. I was to stand in the middle holding the banner in front of me, and I was to begin the address.

The policeman nearest to us was at the corner of Avenue Road in the St. John's Wood Road. We came down from Primrose Hill in a row, with the banner flying. We didn't mind the people stopping to stare after us. We were used to being stared at, even when we hadn't got the banner with us, because Aunt Lucy always dressed us in artistic style, and we were busy listening to Helen explaining to us exactly what to do. We took some copies of the paper with us, but the police were not to pay for them.

Helen really thought that there might be some chance of our being arrested and dragged off to prison, but she said we were not to mind because other people had been through far worse. She said that the police did really sometimes go beyond their duty, but that we were in the right, and we ought to be ready to die if necessary. But in any case, there was not the slightest danger of our being executed or anything really serious. She herself wouldn't have minded being executed in the very least. She didn't say so, but I'm sure she wouldn't. She was very brave, although she had a cough, and was so thin and delicate. Once she cut her finger open and wrote a document in her own blood, swearing that when she was dead she would rise from the grave if it were possible and walk into our bedroom so that we might really know once for all whether it were possible for the spirit to exist without the body or not. Helen thought she was going to die quite soon because of her weak chest, and other people thought so too. But she wasn't at all frightened. She said it was absolutely the only way of finding out for certain several things she wanted to know. She was not religious. Once she put Mary's doll out on the bedroom window-sill in the soaking rain, and made us pray to God to keep it dry as a sign that He really did exist and was able to do anything He wanted. When we took it in the morning, you wouldn't have known it for the same creature. Helen said that it was a sure sign that there wasn't any God, because if there had been He would have been only too happy to have saved our souls by anything so simple. Mary nearly cried when she saw the sodden shapeless mass. But she stopped herself because she had really meant to offer it as a sacrifice. She thought it meant that there was a God and He had wanted to punish us for being so presumptuous and uncertain. Helen did not have dolls, or she would have used one of her own. We buried her document behind a loose brick in the old wall at the bottom of Acacia Road, and whenever we went past she made a sort of Freemason sign with her finger to show that she remembered it and was going to keep her vow.

Mary was so frightened by what Helen had said about the executions that she had nearly begun to cry before we reached the bottom of St. Edmund's Terrace, which was quite near the first policeman. She was afraid we really might be executed by some mistake. She said that terrible mistakes were made. Once a poor man was hanged three times and nearly killed before they found out it wasn't the right man.

If the rope hadn't broken they'd never have found out then.

I felt sorry for Mary. She was small and fat and her face was broad. She often used to get anxious about things. She liked digging up remains in the back garden and wondering what they were. Once she dug up some bones and was certain they belonged to a victim who had been buried by a murderer, as you read about it in the paper. She was very frightened, but Helen said no, they were some chicken bones abandoned by the cat; and so they were. And she dug up a scrap of paper, and was sure she could see traces of a mysterious message written on it, but we couldn't see anything. We put it under the microscope, and there was nothing written on it at all. But she said she could see it, so she kept it. When she dug up an old piece of glass or tin she used to believe they were Roman remains, because she said she was sure it was the Romans who had begun to build the waterworks at the foot of Primrose Hill. She didn't believe it really, but she wanted to so much that she almost did. She wasn't very brave, and she used to cry a good deal because she was always being frightened by the grave things Helen talked about.

Helen stopped short in the middle of the road and began to scold her. Her face was quite white with anger. She said, " Coward, coward, coward, only fit for nursing dolls and hemming pocket handkerchiefs." She said we must fight, fight, fight. All the great men and women in the world had lived fighting and died fighting. If we were afraid of a perfectly peaceful policeman now where should we be when the social revolution came ?

She began to cough in the middle, and Mary gave way at once. Every one gave way to her when she began to cough, because it made them so sorry for her. It shook her so and made her look so thin and ill.

I secretly hoped that the policeman would not be at his corner. But he was. He had just settled down in it again after a short walk to and fro. He wasn't going to move again just then.

He was a very broad and tall policeman with a large head and fat red cheeks. His eyes were blue and turned up at the corners. They weren't bright, but they were very gay and kind.

We stood in a row in front of him just as we had said we would. I held the banner with one hand and the papers with the other, so I felt that I was rooted to the spot. It was a horrid feeling.

I fancy he must have thought us very small, because he stooped right down with a hand on each knee to look at us. He smiled right across his face.

He was just like the giant in our picture book when he stooped down and looked at Jack and was thinking how glad he was that he was going to eat him.

His face was quite near mine, and I felt sure that he was going to take a bite out of my cheek. But it was the banner that attracted him. He was trying to read what was pasted on it, but I knew he couldn't because some of the letters were turned the wrong way round, and they were a good many different sizes.

He said, " That's a pretty thing you've got there ; what's writ across it ? "

His voice was a little hoarse as though he used to have a sore throat rather often. I daresay it was ruined by standing in the damp. But he himself was not rough.

I knew what I ought to say, but I couldn't think of it. It was because of the banner and the papers, and being rather near. If I could have run across the road and stood on the other side I could have explained quite well.

I held up the literature and said, " Would you read the paper, please ? "

This was stupid, because of course he wouldn't want to read the paper until he had had it properly explained to him.

Mary's eyes and mouth were quite wide open, she was so frightened. Helen couldn't wait any longer. She was always impatient. She began to help and she did it beautifully.

First, she pointed out each word on the banner with her finger and explained exactly what it meant, and the policeman was interested. Then she flung the hair back off her shoulder and put her hand on her hip. She always stood like that when she was giving explanations. Her face looked very affectionate and truthful, and her voice went up and down a little, something like Aunt Lucy's. She explained our whole programme from beginning to end, not only that part especially for the use of the police.

She said there was no reason why policemen shouldn't have things just as nice as a king. They were both human beings. It was only just an accident that one had been born a king and the other a policeman. If the other had been born a king and the one a policeman nobody would ever have noticed the difference. A policeman was as good as any king, in fact, better, because he was honest and cheap and worked for his living, while a king was useless and expensive, and only kept for showing off.

The policeman hitched up his belt with both his thumbs and said, " Ah, that's what they call Socialism, that is. What's yours is mine, and what's mine's my own sort o' business, eh ? "

Helen said, " What is is everybody's," very gravely.

" That'll want a deal o' putting straight, that will, if ever that comes in," said the policeman, and he hitched himself up all round again and stamped both his feet, first one and then the other. " That'll take a deal o' thinking of."

" Well, but will you think about it ? " Helen said. Her face looked shining and transparent like the face of the little boy Christ talking to the old Jews in the picture in the Tate Gallery.