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- Herausgeber: Lives and Letters
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
Muriel Spark's autobiography traces how one of the great modern writers in English emerged. Beginning with luminous evocations of a 1920s childhood in Edinburgh and memories of school, taught by the original 'Miss Jean Brodie', Spark recalls her formative years, up to the publication of her first novel in 1957. 'In order to write about life as I intended to do, I felt I had first to live,' Spark says. In her account of her unhappy marriage in colonial Kenya, her return to wartime London on a troop ship, working at the Foreign Office as one of the 'girls of slender means', editing Poetry Review and her conversion to Catholicism, Muriel Spark outlines the life that provided material for some of the best-loved novels of the twentieth century.
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MURIEL SPARK
CURRICULUM VITAE
A Volume of Autobiography
With a preface by ELAINE FEINSTEIN
CONTENTS
ILLUSTRATIONS
Bernard Camberg, Muriel’s father
Adelaide Uezzell, Muriel’s grandmother
Watford: the shop of all sorts
Muriel’s grandfather, Tom Uezzell; her mother (Cissy) and goat
Philip Camberg, Muriel’s brother
The soprano upstairs
Charlotte Rule (née Brodie) (MissMargaretRule)
Part of Muriel’s juvenilia
James Gillespie’s Girls’ School, Junior Class, 1930
Muriel aged 10
The WindsorCastle(TheHultonPictureLibrary)
Muriel in Bulawayo
The Victoria Falls (TheHultonPictureLibrary)
Muriel with her son Robin
Esther, Robin’s nanny
Marie Bonaparte (Princess George of Greece) (MaryEvans PictureLibrary)
Muriel aged 29
Robin Spark
Sarah Camberg (Cissy), Muriel’s mother
Bernard Camberg (Barney), Muriel’s father
Christmas Humphreys (Toby) (TheHultonPictureLibrary)
Sefton Delmer (TheHultonPictureLibrary)
Dr Marie Stopes (TheHultonPictureLibrary)
Graham Greene (TheHultonPictureLibrary)
Allington Castle: a Carmelite retreat (AylesfordPriory)
Muriel with Tiny Lazzari
Alan Maclean (AlanMaclean)
Bluebell
PREFACE
Spark– which suggests flash, danger and brevity – is a splendid name for a writer whose elegance has never dated. It was not, I now discover, Muriel’s own name but that of Sydney Oswald Spark, to whom she engaged herself at nineteen, ensnared by the promised adventure of a life in Kenya. She left him after only two years of marriage, alarmed by his violent moods; but she held on to his surname with the sure instinct of a poet.
Her name at birth was Camberg, and she had Jewish roots on both sides of her family. In TheMandelbaumGate, her Catholic heroine describes herself without qualm as a half-Jew. Spark always felt more estranged from the dour Scots Calvinism of Edinburgh where she grew up than from the ambiguities of her inheritance.
CurriculumVitae is a sly, tantalising account of her life. ‘Details fascinate me,’ Spark avers, but, rather like the figure in HothousebytheEastRiver whose shadow falls whichever way she chooses, she discloses only what she intends the reader to know. More than half the book is taken up with details of her childhood: the smell of bread shops, carefully made tea, the pink elastic garters which held up her grandmother’s black stockings, her mother’s superstitions, and the geniality of the rituals in the houses of her Watford relations.
When she abandoned her husband in 1944 after so brief a marriage, with some courage she returned to Britain on a troopship. Once in Scotland, poor and in ill-health, she determined to leave her son, Robin, with her parents in Edinburgh while she went to London, explaining: ‘There was not only very little scope for me to earn my living, but it was not at all convenient that I should continue to live with my parents.’ Sensible this may have been, but I am reminded of the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova leaving her own son with her husband’s mother; and of Storm Jameson making a similar decision but with more anguish. Both paid a terrible price for their common-sense selfishness. Spark does not seem to have been unduly troubled.
Her passion was literature, though her ambitions were at first humble enough. She was blonde and pretty, and though she had little formal education beyond her excellent schooling, charm and ebullience soon brought her a series of jobs in publishing. She had the enthusiasm of an autodidact. A knowledge of the novels of Ivy Compton Burnett secured her a job doing secret work at the Foreign Office. There she met Sefton Delmer and helped him to put out propaganda designed to deceive the Germans into thinking they had already lost the war.
Her avowed purpose in writing CurriculumVitae was to correct mistakes in a biography written by her former lover and one-time literary collaborator, Derek Stanford; he was portrayed savagely as Hector Bartlett in AFarCryfromKensington. It is hard not to feel rather sorry for him, since his crimes seem to have been careless rather than malicious. Spark, however, is convinced that her sudden celebrity had triggered literary envy, a poison she analyses unforgettably in MementoMori. Of Stanford she remarks flatly: ‘He endured a nervous breakdown at the time of my first success.’
She revels in pointing out the real-life sources of some of her most popular novels. There is a wonderful portrait of her English teacher, Miss Christina Kay, who was the model for Miss Jean Brodie, and she vividly describes the shabby glamour of the Helena Club in Lancaster Gate, which became the May of Teck Club in TheGirlsofSlenderMeans.
Of emotional drama in her own life, however, she chooses to tell us little. She was not fortunate in her relationships with men. Another lover, Howard Sergeant, the editor of Outposts, is depicted as prone to envy and mental disorders rather as Stanford had been; he was, in addition, married. ‘Howard wrote a long anguished letter in which he described a scene with his wife…and repeated her arguments against a divorce, sensible enough, pointing out that I should “never be able to keep his house clean without assistance which he could not afford”.’ With cool candour, she admits the truth of this last observation.
Her earliest literary successes were as a poet. She became editor of PoetryReview in 1947, and is entertaining about her troubles with opponents of modern verse. She did not write novels until she was forty, and might perhaps never have done so if her short story ‘The Seraph and the Zambezi’ had not won a competition in the Observer. The rapidity of her success after TheComforters earned her the admiration of Evelyn Waugh and financial support from Graham Greene. Nearly forty years later, when she came to write CurriculumVitae, her cool confidence sounds unshakeable. It is intriguing to wonder about the conflicts and crises her genius enabled her to conceal.
ELAINE FEINSTEIN 2009
INTRODUCTION
I am a hoarder of two things: documents and trusted friends. The former outweigh the latter in quantity but the latter outdo the former in quality.
Details fascinate me. I love to pile up details. They create an atmosphere. Names, too, have a magic, be they never so humble. Most of the names in this, the following account of the first thirty-nine years of my life, are unknown to the public. For that very reason they are all the more precious to me.
So many strange and erroneous accounts of parts of my life have been written since I became well known, that I felt it time to put the record straight.
I determined to write nothing that cannot be supported by documentary evidence or by eyewitnesses; I have not relied on my memory alone, vivid though it is. The disturbing thing about false and erroneous statements is that well-meaning scholars tend to repeat each other. Lies are like fleas hopping from here to there, sucking the blood of the intellect. In my case, the truth is often less flattering, less romantic, but often more interesting than the false story. Truth by itself is neutral and has its own dear beauty; especially in a work of non-fiction it is to be cherished. Besides, false data lead to false premises and those to false conclusions. Is it fair to scholars and students of literature to let them be misled even on the most insignificant matters? One writer of a recent biography, having given a false account of me on a demonstrably non-existent occasion, expressed herself puzzled at my objection. Her scenario showed me in what she conceived a ‘good’ light. Be that as it might, it was all untrue. It showed me to be a flourishing hostess at a time when I was little known and poor. (And one does not want one’s early poverty mocked.) It showed me to have among my ‘guests’ two notable people who at that time I did not know. What was damaging about the lie, the biographer wanted to know. Damaging! Slices of three people’s biographies are falsified, mine and two others. But far worse than personal damage is the damage done to truth and to scholarship.
The above is only one example of irresponsible reportage; it can only confound literary history. I am sure that many of the life-stories of my successful colleagues suffer equally.
For the memories of my early youth my best source of confirmation and information is my brother Philip Camberg who, being five and a half years my elder, has been able to recall names, places, dates, facts, more clearly than I could. (A childhood memory from the age of four can obviously be more clearly realized when the same knowledge and experience were shared with a child of nine and a half.) My brother, now a retired research chemist in the United States, entered into the checking of my childhood memories with the greatest enthusiasm.
My cousin Violet Caro also helped to confirm my young memories, and my young cousin Martin Uezzell has been to a great deal of trouble to look up and unearth family details. My son Robin Spark has looked out for me some of our family photographs to enrich the supply sent to me by my brother Philip.
When a version of my childhood experiences first appeared in the NewYorker I was delighted by the number of people who wrote to me to confirm, modify and elaborate on what I had written. These were either eyewitness contemporaries or their children. One of my warmest correspondents is Barbara Below, daughter of the ‘Professor Rule’, a friend of my parents, who captured my imagination between the ages of three and four, and whose wife Charlotte taught me to read and write. Mrs Below has gone to endless trouble to identify incidents and dates, and obtain for me the charming photograph of Charlotte Rule reproduced in this book.
And what would I have done for my Edinburgh school-days without the help of my friend Ian Barr and that of my schoolmates? Ian Barr, now retired, is a scholar and thinker with great attributes of warmth and entertainment-power; he has been indefatigable in producing data from difficult sources of information for me. Ian Barr, in the true Scottish style, was a young man in the Post Office before he rose to be Chairman of the Post Office Board; so many years later he still remembered my parents’ address in Edinburgh where telegrams and special messages were delivered. And my schoolmates; Frances Niven (now Cowell), my best friend of those years, has helped me throughout, not merely with corroborative facts but with the encouragement of an old and affectionate friendship. I am grateful to Cathie Davie (now Semeonoff) who has given me her invaluable memories of Bruntsfield Links as it was when we walked across it in our youth. I warmly thank Elizabeth Vance whose letters have amused and sustained me and whose vivid impressions of our life at James Gillespie’s School I have quoted from. Also for anecdotal reminiscences and amusing recollections about our school-days I thank Dorothy Forrester and Dorothy Forrest (now Rankine).
It is from the 1940s onward that I possess the greatest bulk of letters and other documents, and for her care of and deep interest in these archives over the past twenty-four years I express my gratitude to my constant supporter and companion, Penelope Jardine. It is thanks to her intelligent listing and docketing that I am able to lay hands on the papers required both to stimulate and verify my thoughts of the past. It is thanks to her sense of humour that I have enjoyed what at first looked like an alarming task. And it is Penelope Jardine to whom I owe gratitude for the use of rooms in her capacious house where she has stacked, arranged and accommodated this accumulation of papers.
The present memoir brings me up to early 1957, when I published my first novel. There are few famous names in this period of my life, but it was indeed full and rich. I hope to have given a picture of my formation as a creative writer.
I used to have an elderly friend in Rome, Lady Berkeley (Molly) whom I would sometimes visit in her flat in the Palazzo Borghese. Molly lived in style. When I asked her about the past, which she loved to talk about, she would send the butler for her book of family memoirs to check the facts. I thought it an excellent idea. Perhaps we should all write down our reminiscences to keep us from straying from reality in our latter days.
I have frequently written autobiographical pieces. What I have felt when composing them, and what I have experienced throughout my work on this volume, is a sense of enriched self-knowledge. ‘Who am I?’ is always a question for poets. I once had a play commissioned in the early days of my vocation. I met the producer for the first time one night to hand over the first act. Next day I received a wire: ‘Darling this is what we were hoping for. Ring me at ten a.m. tomorrow, darling.’ I duly phoned him at ten the next morning and gave the secretary my name. He came on the phone. I repeated my name. ‘Who are you, darling?’ he said.
I thought it a very good question, and still do. I resolved, all those years ago, to write an autobiography which would help to explain, to myself and others: Who am I.
I owe special acknowledgement to TheNewYorker magazine in whose pages a number of the following chapters appeared.
In addition to those of my friends and relations mentioned above, to whom I have expressed my indebtedness, I would like to thank the following people and institutions both for their useful volunteered information and for their unfailingly cheerful responsiveness to my questions:
The Hon. Peter Acton; The British Council, Rome; The British Institute, Florence; Mr Robert L. Bates; Mr Alan S. Bell, Rhodes House Library; Mr Nigel Billen; Mr Terence C. Charman, The Imperial War Museum, London; Mr Bill Denholm; Mr John Dunlap, Royal Mail, Edinburgh; Ms Mary Durham; Mr Tom Erhardt, Casarotto Ramsay Ltd; Mr Howard Gerwing, University of Victoria Library, BC; Prof. John Glavin; Mr Chris Green, The Poetry Society, London; Ms Jean Guild; Ms Cathy Henderson and Ms Sally Leach of the Harry Ransom Research Library, University of Texas at Austin; Mr Hardwicke Holderness; Mr Peter Hutcheon; Judge Don W. Kennedy; Prof. D.R.B. Kimbell, Faculty of Music, University of Edinburgh; The Merchant Company of Edinburgh; Mr Charles McGrath and the Checkers of TheNewYorker magazine; The McLellan Gallery, Glasgow; Mr Michael Olver; Mr Leslie A. Perowne; Mr Terence Ranger, St Anthony’s College, Oxford; Mr Kevin Ray, Washington University, St Louis, Mo.; Mr Colin Smith, Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food; Dr Jay Snyder; Mr Tony Strachan; The Hon. Guy Strutt; Mr Alan Taylor, Scotland on Sunday; M. Alain Vidal-Naquet; Mr Auberon Waugh; Mr Gerald Weiss; Mr Anthony Whittome and Ms Joan Winterkorn.
MURIEL SPARK
Oliveto, 1992
CHAPTER ONE
Bread,ButterandFlorrieForde
Groping for the luminous past of my first infancy I never fail to find it gleaming here and there; but never in chronological order as when I think of my later years. My childhood in Edinburgh, so far as my memory stretches back (to when I was three or four and on to my school-days) occurs in bright flashes, illuminating every detail of the scene. It would falsify the situation to try to connect my earliest years in a single narrative.
I was born in Edinburgh, at 160 Bruntsfield Place, the Morningside district, in 1918.
Bread
Bread came from Howden’s, the shop above the ovens where it was made. The pavement outside the shop was warm, and hot air steamed out of a grating near the door. The floury baker and his boy (known, not unkindly, as ‘the daft laddie’, since he was rather simple) were white all over, the baker wore a white hat, flat at the top like an upturned pie-dish, the boy’s was also flat-topped: they carried trays of bread on their heads. As they came up with their trays of bread into the shop their faces and hands, their overalls were white, and their shoes were flour-dusted.
Bread came in many forms including high pan, square pan, and cottage loaf. Of the first two you could buy a half-pan or a whole pan, according to your needs. High pan was an arch-topped rectangle, and made slices that, cut diagonally and spread with jam, were elegant for afternoon tea. Square pans were good for making up a lunch, known as a piece to take to work or school. They were also better for making breakfast toast. A cottage loaf looked like a domed chapel with a small square annexe. It looked decorative on the table.
In the morning, warm, round bappy rolls with a powdering of flour were procured from the baker, as also were bran scones, triangular and made of brown flour – virtuous, good for your health. Oat cakes, triangular biscuits, were even healthier. In the afternoon came a fresh supply of breads, sometimes Sally Lunns, embedded with currants and raisins. In Edinburgh the favourite tea-time bread was a shearer’s bap, which was flat and warm. (Bapper is the Scottish word for baker.) Soda scones were generally made at home, but Howden’s, too, did a brisk afternoon trade in those small, sharp-tasting lumps, thirsty for butter.
Butter
Butter came from the Buttercup Dairy Company.
A pink-and-white complexioned girl, with her hair in a cap and wearing a sparkling white overall under bright lights in winter, stood behind the marble-topped counter, beside two huge slabs of butter which reached to her shoulder. One of these slabs was fresh butter and the other was salt. Salt butter was cheaper and many people preferred it. Fresh butter was brought in from the farm every morning. The pink-and-white girl took a slice of greaseproof paper and laid it on the bright brass scales. She then took two large wooden butter-pats, one in each hand. Before she cut off your daily pound or half-pound she dipped the pats into a blue-and-white porcelain bowl of cold water. With the wooden pats she then placed each portion of butter deftly on the scales to be weighed, and she added or took away like a sculptor with his clay, until she had achieved the required weight. Now came the beautiful and clever part. The girl placed her butter, in its paper, on the counter; next, still with her pats, she cut it into cubic portions – small pieces of about a quarter of a pound – and then swiftly and neatly she worked each small cube into a flat round. Finally she took a wooden butter-stamp and, after dipping it in water, stamped each butter-medallion with a sharp slap. The imprint that was left was surrounded at the edge with the words ‘Buttercup Dairy Company’, and in the middle, on the butter, was the form of a small girl kneeling on one knee beside a friendly cow, under whose chin she held a buttercup. (This was a reference to our childhood custom of holding a buttercup under each other’s chin with the words ‘Do you like butter?’ If the skin reflected a small yellow glow the answer was Yes. So far as I recall the answer was never No.) All this butter performance took place in a twinkling of an eye.
From The Buttercup, as we called the shop, we also obtained eggs of various grades. New-laid eggs were best for breakfast, but preserved eggs which had been laid down in waterglass were cheaper and perfectly adequate for cake-making. One day The Buttercup installed a fascinating egg-illuminator, on which each egg was placed before it was sold. This process, known as candling, proved the freshness of the egg. The inward egg lit up, translucent, proving the egg was good. If it had been a bad egg, it would have been opaque, but I never saw one of those.
Before leaving the shop (as, indeed, every shop), you counted your change very carefully in case of mistakes. This performance was attentively watched by the assistant who served you.
It was with the Buttercup Dairy Company that I associated Robert Louis Stevenson’s lines from my earliest infancy:
One morning, very early, before the sun was up,
I rose and found the shining dew on every buttercup.
And the sparkle and morning-freshness of the shop, and the butter-conjuring girl, formed a mind-picture that accompanied the whole of my youth.
Tea
Sixty years ago is a short time in history. As recently as that I made at least one pot of tea for the family every day. It was delicious tea. Every schoolgirl, every schoolboy, knew how to make that exquisite pot of tea.
You boiled the kettle, and just before it came to the boil, you half-filled the teapot to warm it. When the kettle came to the boil, you kept it simmering while you threw out the water in the teapot and then put in a level spoonful of tea for each person and one for the pot. Up to four spoonfuls of tea from that sweetly odorous tea-caddy would make the perfect pot. The caddy spoon was a special shape, like a small silver shovel. You never took the kettle to the teapot; always the pot to the kettle, where you filled it, but never to the brim.
You let it stand, to ‘draw’, for three minutes.
The tea had to be drunk out of china, as thin at the rim as you could afford. Otherwise you lost the taste of the tea.
You put in milk sufficient to cloud the clear liquid, and sugar if you had a sweet tooth. Sugar or not was the only personal choice allowed.
Everyone who came to the house was offered a cup of tea, as in Dostoyevsky. What his method of making tea was I don’t know. (Tea from samovars must have been different, certainly without milk, and served in a glass set in a brass or silver holder.)
Tea at five o’clock was an occasion for visitors. One ate bread and butter first, graduating to cakes and biscuits. Five o’clock tea was something you ‘took’. If you had it at six you ‘ate’ your tea.
Tea at half-past six was high tea, a full meal which resembled breakfast. You had kippers, smoked haddock (smokies), ham, eggs or sausages for high tea. Potatoes did not accompany this meal. But a pot of tea, with bread, butter and jam, was always part of it.
AuntieGertieandFlorrieForde
‘The English’ in the Edinburgh of my childhood were considered to be superficial and hypocritical. And over-dressed. My mother, who was English, used to come and fetch me from school. It was my daily dread that she should open her mouth and thus betray her suspect origins. ‘Foreigners’ were fairly tolerated but ‘the English’ were something quite different. It was not only the accent that betrayed Englishness. It was also turns of phrase and idiomatic usage. One day, outside the school, I heard my mother remark to another mother, ‘I have some shopping to do.’ I nearly died. She should have said, ‘I’ve got to get the messages,’ that’s what she should have said. My mother also wore a winter coat trimmed with beige fox fur in the style of the then Duchess of York, now the Queen Mother (who still, and sublimely, wears those fox-trimmed coats). This was entirely out of place. My mother ought to have worn tweed or, in very cold weather, musquash. My mother wore peach-coloured silk or rayon stockings, which should have been lisle-thread, grey. It was only through her natural amiability to everyone she encountered that she managed to squeeze by the censor. She completely enjoyed meeting and greeting people. Before I was born she had been a ‘teacher of pianoforte’. I still have her brass plate inscribed to that effect.
My father spoke with a strong Edinburgh accent, and although he was a Jew, having been born and educated in Edinburgh of Scottish-Jewish parents, he wore the same sort of clothes as the other fathers and spoke as they did, about the same things. So he was no problem. He was an engineer. I still have the contract of his seven-year apprenticeship signed, in schoolboy calligraphy, ‘Bertie Camberg’.
‘Scotch or English?’ was a game played by rough boys. They would tie a stone to a length of string and whirl it around, accosting other boys with the challenge: ‘Are you Scotch or English?’ The invariable response was to say ‘English’ and run fast. The essence of the game was the ensuing chase and stone-batter. There were no real English boys involved.
Another version of the game was ‘Scotch or Irish?’, both harking back to what Wordsworth called,
… old, unhappy, far-off things
And battles long ago.
In an old book of memoirs (MarySomerville edited by her daughter Martha Somerville, 1873) the author’s mother recalls in her Scottish childhood c. 1788 playing a game called Scotch and English, which ‘represented a raid on the debatable land, or Border between Scotland and England, in which each party tried to rob the other of their play-things. The little ones were always compelled to be English, for the bigger girls thought it too degrading.’
At home, if I left the tap running in the bathroom, my mother would say, ‘Turn off the tap,’ but my father’s command was, ‘Turn off the well.’
Taps were also wells to his young sister, my Auntie Gertie, as they were to our God-fearing neighbours. Auntie Gertie stayed with us for a while. She went out with boyfriends, dressed in a short-skirted navy blue outfit and a cherry-red hat that hugged her bobbed hair. She regarded most of her boyfriends as objects of amusement, regaling us, on her return, with pointed, merry anecdotes. Once, when she had been taken to admire a beauty spot, my auntie had remarked, in her lively way, ‘Very pictureskew!’ To which the boyfriend solemnly replied, ‘Oh, is that how it’s pronounced?’
We often laughed at others in our house, and I picked up the craft of being polite while people were present and laughing later if there was anything to laugh about, or criticizing later if there was anything to deplore. At this time I must have been four or five. Sometimes people got nicknames for use amongst ourselves. Like other nuggets of my early childhood, they continue to gleam in my mind, although often I forget who the people were to whom the nicknames were attached. One friend of a friend, whom my mother and I encountered sometimes at the putting green of Bruntsfield Links, was called the Ray of Sunshine. She was lodging with a couple known to my parents; the husband had assured them that this lady was ‘a ray of sunshine’. In reality she looked terribly grim as she tried in a vexed way to get her golf ball into the hole. ‘We met the Ray of Sunshine,’ my mother merrily told my father when we got home for tea.
I had been given a dolls’ pram constructed for twins, with a folding hood at each end. My dolls, Red Rosie and Queenie, sat facing each other. I remember one day I was crying and bawling for some reason. My father fetched a face-cloth and wiped the faces of my two dolls, bidding them each not to cry. I was so fascinated by this performance that I stopped crying, and I distinctly recall experiencing a sensation or instinct that, if I could have put it into words, would have been ‘I’m not taken in by his ruse, but at the same time what a good child-psychologist he is!’
It must have been about 1923, just before I went to school, that I went to my first theatre show, a matinée at the Lyceum. It was surely a public holiday, for neither Auntie Gertie nor my father went to work. Instead, my parents left me in the charge of Gertie and went off in high spirits to the Musselburgh races. Presumably, my brother, five years my elder, went with them or had been sent somewhere else. Auntie Gertie and I were alone. We had our lunch, which was ‘dinner’ to us. She then dressed me in my best clothes and, herself looking very natty in her cherry hat and her skirt that showed her knees, conveyed me forth ‘to see Florrie Forde’.
Florrie Forde was a music-hall performer. The house was packed. I had never been in a house so big, in such a big room, with so many people sitting in tiers going up and up. The curtain rose to reveal buxom Miss Forde, dressed in a one-piece suit resembling the modern body-tights, all gold-bronze spangles.
There was a thunder of applause. I was accustomed to hearing applause, because my parents used to have ‘musical evenings’, when my mother played, and my father sang ‘Forever and Forever’, or my mother herself sang ‘Rose in the Bud’; on such occasions our guests would clap their hands warmly at the end of the piece. But this affair of Florrie Forde down there on the stage was so vastly public that I was full of wonder at how she could carry it all without apparently feeling shy.
She carried it off as if the stage were her own home. Other people on the stage came and went, especially men in evening dress, but Florrie in her spangles dominated the enormous house. She sang to the accompaniment of an orchestra and also danced. Only one of her numbers has remained in my memory. Miss Forde reclined glittering in the middle of the stage beside an enormous wireless set with multi-coloured, illuminated ‘valves’, which looked like light bulbs. Radios with valves were then a luxury in our parts. My brother had only recently constructed a wireless set that was operated by a small lump of uneven and shining metal called ‘the crystal’ and a wire called ‘the cat’s whisker’. It was a complicated and awe-inspiring contraption, which, when attached to headphones (thirty shillings) and acoustically tuned in with a tender scratching of the cat’s whisker on the crystal, gave us a fugitive and intermittent programme from the BBC, London. A wireless set with valves (whatever they actually were) was as yet beyond our means.
But not beyond Florrie Forde’s. She rested on one elbow and with the other hand twiddled the knobs on her glamorous wireless set; meanwhile she sang a slow song called ‘Dream, Daddy’.
Auntie Gertie and I were home before my parents returned from the races. By the time they arrived the kitchen table was set for our tea. We hadn’t yet sat down; my parents were full of which horses had won a place and which, in my father’s words, were ‘still coming up the field’. And what had we done with our day?
‘We went to see Florrie Forde,’ said Auntie Gertie, to such great amusement of my parents that my auntie looked at me in an almost fellow-juvenile amazement. My father and mother couldn’t stop laughing. ‘Gertie took her to see Florrie Forde,’ my mother managed to splutter.
‘They’re killing themselves laughing,’ murmured my auntie.
And why they were standing there laughing in the kitchen, falling into each other’s arms in their mirth, I did not know and will never know.
MrsRule,FishJeanandTheKaiser
I was fascinated from the earliest age I can remember by how people arranged themselves. I can’t remember a time when I was not a person-watcher, a behaviourist. I was also an avid listener. It seems to me that my parents’ friends and the people who called at our small flat were endless. I can remember the names and faces of people dating from my pre-school years far better than any others at any other period of my life.
Most important to me were Mrs Rule and her husband Professor Rule. They were a young American couple; he, originally from New Zealand, was already a Presbyterian minister but was doing a further course in theology at the University of Edinburgh. They stayed with us for a time, during which a pretty baby (born in a nursing home in Edinburgh) appeared. I looked over the crib at this wonder. I also recall how impressed my mother was when Professor Rule washed the baby’s clothes. I remember Mrs Rule by the fireside with her dimples and an exciting set of cards one-inch square, each with a letter on it. With these she taught me to read, egged on by Andrew K. Rule DD, as I found out her husband was, when I was well able to read his name on an envelope. I was between the ages of three and four. It was an early start, although in Edinburgh at that time it was not unusual for children to read and write fluently before they were five. The firelight played on Mrs Rule’s hands and face, on Professor Rule’s bearded smile, and on my lettered, red-backed cards on a tray before me, as I sat at the fire on a low puffy stool, while Mrs Rule declared that a ‘t’ and an ‘h’ together sounded ‘th’. The Rules went home to America, from where they wrote letters to my mother, leaving with me the precious cards.
It is only more recently that I have been able to confirm the reality of my impressions of this exciting and kind couple. My brother tells me that Charlotte Rule played the piano excellently, which must have delighted my mother. Philip also remembers how beautiful she was. Charlotte Rule died after their return to the United States. The daughter of Andrew K. Rule’s second marriage, Barbara Below, has been a valuable source of corroboration of the images of my infancy. When I told her, for instance, that her father taught us to make popcorn (and I can still see the popping corn in the pan held over the fire), Mrs Below confirmed that her father told her how, all those years ago, he showed his Scottish friends how to make popcorn.
I knew about everyone who wrote letters to my parents and everyone who called at the house. We had a spatially small life, and my mother could never forbear to comment on any happening. I used to love the doorbell to ring.
It was a joy to go out visiting with my mother. No special arrangements were made to entertain children. We were just brought along, and we were expected to sit quietly. Not all children liked to do this, but for me it was better that way. I liked to listen. Not only did I feel at home with the immense list of characters who peopled our lives, and who largely ignored me, but there were also those whom I knew by hearsay, and often I touched people who had touched real history.
Such a person was Mrs Lipetz as she was to us, Susan to her husband. I was aware that she was elderly. She sat every afternoon at her bow-fronted window on their ground-floor flat in Bruntsfield Crescent, a sweep of tall houses that had been constructed in 1870 and that one could see from our front windows. Mrs Lipetz had been born in Alsace-Lorraine but spoke without a foreign accent. One day, when we went to see her, I heard her tell how, when she was a schoolgirl in Alsace-Lorraine, after the Franco-Prussian war, the children had to run and hide their French books because the Kaiser was visiting the school. This must have been in 1871, after the peace treaty of Frankfurt, when France ceded Alsace-Lorraine to the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm I. And it still amazes me to reflect that the childhood experience of my friend Mrs Lipetz going back to 1871 coincided with the year of publication of Middlemarch by George Eliot, TheDescentofMan by Charles Darwin and ThroughtheLookingGlass by Lewis Carroll. At the time, of course, I had no historical awe, only an attraction to Mrs Lipetz’s words ‘run and hide our French books’ and ‘the Kaiser’. For a while I confused this Kaiser with the other Kaiser, his grandson, about whom people still talked. The Great War had only been over a few years. But then I was told that Mrs Lipetz’s Kaiser was dead.
Another legendary character whom I missed by being born just too late was Fish Jean, who was much reminisced over by my father and his friends. (‘Do you mind Fish Jean?’ they would say, meaning, do you remember her?) Whether Fish Jean was the same as a certain Herrin’ Jenny of Edinburgh fame, I doubt. It seems to me they were two characters, Herrin’ Jenny probably fictional, preceding Fish Jean. The wonder of Fish Jean was not that, like other fish-wives of the fairly prosperous Newhaven fishing community, she went through the streets crying her wares, but that she did so in such flamboyant style. The driving seat of her horse-cart had to be made specially wide to take Fish Jean’s great girth; she wore large diamond rings on all her fingers down to the knuckles, and would plunge these diamond-covered hands in amongst her glittering herrings and mackerels, proudly to serve her customers.
Another person I never met except through hearsay was Emmeline Pankhurst, the leader of the women’s rights movement of those days. Their main aim was to obtain the vote for women. My maternal grandmother, Adelaide Uezzell, in the Watford group of the Suffragette movement (as they called themselves), had marched with Mrs Pankhurst, carrying an umbrella, as they all did. My grandmother told me about these events, from an early age. But it was too late for me to know or see Mrs Pankhurst. I had to imagine the scene.
Dead, both dead, Mrs Lipetz’s Kaiser and my father’s Fish Jean, before I could even set eyes on them. And my grandmother’s Mrs Pankhurst – to me only an item of hearsay. This was something inexplicable.
Commodities
Shopping with my mother was a geography lesson, although she wouldn’t have known it. There were grocers’ shops with their sacks of beans and other products, and price tags stuck into them. Everything in those days came from somewhere. Rice came from Patna. Tea came from the then Ceylon. Bacon came from Ayrshire or Wiltshire. Beef came from Angus (it was marked Angus Beef).
Lamb and mutton came from Wales or Scotland when it didn’t come from New Zealand.
Sometimes butter, too, came from New Zealand, but mainly from nearby Dumfries.
Cream came from Ayrshire, Cornwall or Devon.
Cheese came from Cheddar. I remember no other in my pre-school days. Later we had Gorgonzola all the way from Gorgonzola.
Fish came from the North Sea or (for the best herring) Loch Fyne. Besides herrings there were mackerel, John Dory, haddock, halibut, turbot, plaice, flounders and sole.
‘Caller herrin” meant fresh herring. The popular ballad went:
Wha’ll buy my caller herrin’?
They’re bonny fish and halesome farin’.
Wha’ll buy my caller herrin’?
New drawn frae the Forth.
Cotton came from India or Egypt. Silk came from Milan and Lyons. Lisle thread (for our stockings and summer underwear) came from Lille (formerly Lisle) in France.
Straw hats came from Leghorn or Panama.
Money was pounds (paper notes) or, equally, sovereigns (gold), silver half-crowns (eight to the pound), silver florins (ten to the pound), silver shillings (twenty made one pound), sixpenny bits (silver, half a shilling), tiny silver threepenny bits (half a sixpence), bronze pennies (known as ‘coppers’, twelve to one shilling), and, of the same alloy, halfpennies (pronounced ‘haypnies’, half a penny), and farthings (half a halfpenny). There were also genteel guineas, but there were no notes or coins for these. A guinea merely meant one pound plus one shilling. Doctors sent in their bills in guineas, as did furriers and high-class dressmakers and hatters. The best clothes shops marked their wares in guineas, but children’s clothes were in pounds, shillings and pence, as were food and railway tickets.
My mother and father were obviously unaware of the custom that furriers were paid in guineas. I remember a local furrier, Mrs Madge Forrester, a large-bosomed lady, had been altering a fur cape of my mother’s for a prequoted price that my parents took to be five pounds but which the furrier insisted was guineas. Mrs Forrester sat in the bow window of our sitting-room, having delivered the restructured fur cape; she was silhouetted against the light, repeating, ‘No, not five pounds, five guineas. I said five. We furriers always mean guineas. I said five.’ I remember my father forking out the extra five shillings in question; and always afterwards my parents referred to Mrs Forrester as ‘I said Five’. They loved to repeat the phrase after each other. ‘I said Five’ lived and worked opposite our house, so we saw her frequently from the window. ‘Good afternoon, Mrs Forrester,’ my mother would say, passing her in the street. But later she would tell my father, ‘I saw “I said Five”.’
Neighbours
Meeting people in the street meant that you stopped and talked or you said something about the weather and went on. If the weather was good the amiable comment was ‘Good morning, Mrs X. Fine day.’ If it was raining, blowing hard from the north or snowing, the words in passing were ‘Good morning, Mrs X. Seasonable weather.’ First names were never used. Amongst the older Edinburgh women it was not unusual to address a married lady as Mistress X instead of Mrs. All during the ’thirties a very elderly and well-educated friend, Mrs Hardie, called my mother ‘Mistress Camberg’.
On the ground floor of the block of flats next to ours was a jeweller’s shop, the back premises of which were occupied by the owners, the Page family. On Sunday mornings Mr Page used to go to the Mound, which is the panoramic Hyde Park Corner of Edinburgh, there to set up his box and preach the Bible, or about the Bible. What his message was I do not know. At the Mound on Sundays everyone and anyone was, and still is, permitted to say their say about anything, mainly politics or religion, so long as it isn’t obscene or seditious in a fairly large sense. On Sunday afternoons, his duty fulfilled, red-haired Mr Page would set off with his motorbike and side-car to the country. His red-haired son James, still a schoolboy, rode on the pillion while Mrs Page sat in the side-car with their small daughter, Isobel, on her knee. My brother and I were both red-heads and so I considered it right that there should be some red-haired neighbours. The percentage of red-heads in Scotland is always comparatively high.
Isobel was exactly my age, and my first playmate. The back windows of our flats looked out on a pretty stretch of greens which formed a large grassy courtyard within four sides of a street block. And there we could play safely under the watchful glances of our mothers from their respective windows. Isobel and I played with our dolls, pitched a rudimentary tent or embarked on digging a hole to Australia until it was time to be called in to tea. Scottish summer days are long. The weather cannot always have been good enough for us to play outside, but when we did the sunlight went on for ever. On miraculous days Mrs Kerr, our upstairs neighbour, would open her window at about three in the afternoon and let down a picnic in a basket. I don’t remember what exactly this picnic consisted of, except that we were always delighted with it and ate it all up.
Mrs Kerr was a good deal older than my mother. Her daughter, Maudie, was already in her twenties, training to be a singer. She had a job in the Civil Service, but a career as a singer was her ambition, testified to night after night from the flat above. We never complained, even amongst ourselves. It was accepted that Maudie was in a destined category. Mrs Kerr told us about Maudie’s training in legendary tones meant to impress us as much as they actually did. Maudie was to sing in a concert: ‘Of course she has to eat liver for her voice.’ Great bouquets of flowers were ordered to be made up, so that they should be handed to blonde, blue-eyed Maudie on the stage. ‘They all do it,’ said Mrs Kerr. ‘All singers get their own bouquets sent up to them on the stage.’
It was Mrs Kerr who taught my mother to make soup. ‘Three brees to a bane,’ said Mrs Kerr, which sounded shivery and poetic to me, like a line from a Border ballad. But I quickly realized what she meant: you got three brews out of every bone.
