A Life of Contrasts: The Autobiography of Diana Mosley Read online

  The painter Henry Lamb once told me he thought it great good luck to be born in an inconspicuous place in the family; my place was inconspicuous. Tom was one year older, Pam two and Nancy five. They were all more noticed than I was, particularly Nancy, the eldest, and Tom because he was a boy. ‘Oh, it’s quite different for Tom; he’s a boy’; these words were often heard in our nursery. Lamb’s theory was that a child should grow untrammelled by the excessive attentions of its elders. Anxieties about such things as exams, a future career, or even physical development communicate themselves in a crippling way to the child from its over-loving or possessive parents, he thought. This certainly never happened to me; my very existence was of interest only to Nanny and to Tom, who was almost my twin.

  The unkind Nanny left, and Nanny came. All my first memories are of her. I can remember the warm, creaking pram hood, raising my head from the comfortable pillow and seeing Nanny in her black straw bonnet with a black velvet bow and her dear, beloved face. She used to manoeuvre the pram on to the pavement at Mr. Turner’s shop and collect her Daily Chronicle. We lived in Victoria Road and went twice a day to Kensington Gardens.

  Nanny was a Liberal and on her day off she went to the Congregational Church. For her church we collected farthings for lepers, and silver paper; she told us to be careful not to let it get smudged with chocolate because dirty silver paper was no use to the lepers.

  After tea I used to sit for a little while on her lap. She paid no attention to me but went on talking to Ida our nurserymaid. Then she put me down in a hurry saying: ‘Come along now, you children, hurry up and get dressed.’ We were changed into clean frocks and taken down to the drawing-room to see Muv. An hour later Nanny fetched us, it was bed time. I said my prayers to her: God bless Mother and Father, sisters and brother, Nanny and Ada and Ida, and make Diana a good girl amen. If she was not too busy she sang a hymn; we preferred her hymns to our Church of England ones. The favourites were ‘There were ninety and nine’ and ‘Shall we gather at the river?’

  On Sundays we were taken to the children’s service at St. Mary Abbots. It was quite short, and one was given a stamp with a picture of a Bible story on it. By thus invoking the common human passion for collecting, the clergyman made sure of his congregation; a blank space in the stamp book was not to be thought of.

  When I was four the war began and we were all—including Tom—given wooden frames and scratchy wool and taught to make long tube-like mufflers for the soldiers. My father joined his regiment, the Northumberland Fusiliers, and disappeared to ‘the front’. Aged twenty-two he had fought in the Boer War; he had been badly wounded and went through life with only one lung. My mother gave birth to another daughter, and called her Unity Valkyrie.

  We used to spend August with Grandfather Bowles at Bournhill Cottage, a house by the Solent. Dressed in striped bathing gowns we dipped in the cold sea and were given a petit beurre when we came out. Nanny dried me on a rough towel while I ate the biscuit; it got sand on it from my salty, numb fingers. We played for hours under the pines, on the jetty and near the sea with our cousins Dick and Dooley Bailey, and after tea Caddick, my grandfather’s butler, came down to bathe; he wore a bathing cap to keep his hair neat.

  One night we were woken and bundled out of the house in a hurry and hustled on to the lawn. Bournhill Cottage was on fire. My grandfather could be seen throwing everything he could lay hands on out of the windows, and Caddick also dashed to and fro carrying his silver. We were sitting huddled on the lawn wrapped in blankets, with jerseys over our nightgowns; we were told on no account to move.

  ‘Good morning, Mr. Caddick,’ called Tom as Caddick hurried by, but he got no answer.

  After a while even Grandfather stopped rescuing his posses sions, and we all sat together and watched the house burn down to the ground. Some marines who saw the blaze from their ship came ashore and tried to help, but it was too late; they found the cellar undamaged, and drank Grandfather’s wine instead. The balconies were made of wood in a criss-cross pattern; they looked like a set piece in a firework display as they flared and glowed against the dark sky before crashing down. I watched in a dream—then suddenly: Teddy! I had left him in my cot. ‘Teddy, Teddy,’ I shrieked, ‘save him! I must get Teddy! Somebody! Get Teddy!’ But it was too late, nobody could get to the night nursery now. I minded his loss terribly. That the house was burnt meant nothing, but I thought I should never, ever sleep again without him.

  At dawn we were taken to Eaglehurst, the next house along the coast, for a seemingly endless day. Tom and I had sometimes been to tea there with the Marconi children, but at the time of the fire the inventor and his family were away. I was put to bed on a sofa in Muv’s room; no Teddy and no Nanny. Misery engulfed me.

  Next day we went back to Victoria Road. Farve had come home unexpectedly on leave; he was told by the cook that Bournhill Cottage was burnt down, but she had no idea whether we were all alive, she said. At that moment we appeared, bulging out of a cab, with our buckets and spades but without our indoor toys. I heard Muv say: ‘Yes, everyone is safe, and the dogs, such luck, it was Nancy and Pam who woke up, their room was full of smoke.’

  Nancy and Pam had a bedroom over the boiler room. When she was put to bed Pam said she smelt burning. ‘Don’t be silly,’ said the nursery-maid. Now she was proved right, and it was the nursery-maid who was silly. Pam was often right but seldom listened to. They got me another bear, but it was a hideous yellow plush, nothing like Teddy’s worn brown velvet body.

  Until he went off to the war Farve worked in an office in London as manager of a woman’s weekly paper belonging to my grandfather called The Lady. Grandfather was not in the least interested in The Lady except financially; he had a magazine called The Candid Quarterly in which he criticized the government and all his energy went into that. When my parents married they had not one penny between them, so Farve was given this extremely unsuitable job and my mother an allowance. The job was unsuitable because Farve hated London, loathed being indoors and abominated the printed word; however, he did his best, and as a substitute for outdoor sport he got a mongoose and hunted the rats in The Lady office with it.

  In the summer Victoria Road was let and we lived at a cottage near High Wycombe, in what was then almost the country. Farve had a bloodhound he used to hunt us children with, and a brown and white mongrel smooth-haired terrier which I called Luncheon Tom and loved more than anything else in the world except Nanny. At Old Mill Cottage we had a horse, and a cart called ‘the float’. Muv used to drive us all over the place, but we had to get out and walk up hills because we were so heavy. The float had enormous thin wheels which crunched on the road as we bowled along.

  With Nanny and Ida we went for walks; they only took the upright pram and often Pam was in it because she had infantile paralysis, so I had to trudge, and very hot and tired I used to get. Tom and I generally went hand in hand, and he never stopped talking. I loved to listen to him; he was the cleverest person I knew except Nancy, and she did lessons with a governess and was too grand to bother with us. There were two walks; one was in a vast field called the Rye, the other along the valley to the Hoop and Spade Factory. This was a long low building from which came the shriek of many saws and the smell of sawdust. Hundreds of hoops and spades were stacked in view of the road. We liked to stop and listen to the saws, but I dared not go inside, though Tom did. The sound of the saws was frightening; I was timid and unadventurous.

  On my birthday they made me a wreath of pinks; it was always a hot day and we had tea in the garden. I hardly ever remember my birthday not being fine; all the same I regretted being born in June. If only I could have had my birthday a couple of months sooner, when Edward VII was alivel ‘You’ve only lived in one reign. We’ve all lived in two reigns,’ the others used to remind me. ‘Baby! Only one reign.’ It seemed so unfair that a few weeks could have made this enormous difference.

  When we were in London Pam, Tom and I went to Miss Vacani’s dancing class once a
week. We were always put in the second row, where the less talented pupils struggled along as best they could to keep up with the stars in front. The most brilliant of the latter was Cela Keppel, who not only danced perfectly but looked beautiful; her hair was yellow, not tow coloured like ours. Miss Vacani called her out in front to face us. ‘Now, Cecilia, show the class how it should be done.’ I was very content to watch Cela, and quite dreaded: ‘Now! All together again, one, two, three,’ but Tom took his lessons more seriously. ‘Miss Vacani, Miss Vacani,’ he called in his loud, insistent voice. ‘Miss Vacani! Look! Am I doing it right?’

  Once when Farve was on leave in Paris Muv visited him there, and she came back with yards and yards of the pale blue cloth from which French officers’ uniforms were made. Nancy, Pam and I had winter coats made out of it. These coats—first my own, then Pam’s and Nancy’s handed down—lasted me six winters from when I was five to when I was ten. I knew we were poor; there was no help for it.

  The war had made us poorer. Farve’s army pay was less than he had earned at the office, and Grandfather wrote to Muv and said that owing to increased taxation he was finding things rather difficult, and had decided to economize by reducing her allowance. I know this because she thought it funny and told us about it long after; at the time it must have seemed far from comic, for she had five children. She let both Old Mill Cottage and Victoria Road and we went to live at Malcolm House, a square box near the church at Batsford belonging to Grandfather Redesdale.

  3.

  BATSFORD

  Muv hated Malcolm House, but we loved it. For the first time we were living in the real country. One day during that summer I saw a vision. At least I said I had seen one, and the others believed me and made me describe it so often that I hardly know now whether it was a dream or whether I saw it with my mind’s eye. It was the conventional sort of vision where heaven opens and angels appear in a golden light. Nancy, Pam and Tom flew to Muv to complain, ‘Oh Muv, it’s so unfair, Diana’s seen a vision.’ They were in despair about it.

  My sixth birthday was spent at Malcolm House, and not long afterwards Grandmother, meeting Pam and me in the garden at Batsford said: ‘Come, I will take you to visit Grand father.’ We knew Grandfather had been ill for some weeks; he was supposed to have caught a chill while fishing at Swin brook. He was seventy-nine, a soigné old gentleman with silvery hair and moustache and brilliant blue eyes. We were not in the least prepared for what we were to see.

  Grandmother took us upstairs and along a corridor, and opening a door gently she pushed us before her into a vast bedroom. The blinds were down, and in the dim light, sitting bolt upright in bed, was a terrifying apparition. Could it be Grandfather? A thin, bright yellow face; a shock of white hair standing on end? I do not remember what he said to us; I could not take my eyes off his face. The visit was soon over but it filled my mind for many days.

  He died in August. Pam, Tom and I crept into the church yard and looked into the newly-dug grave. The gardeners had lined it with flowers, so that one saw only a sort of vast box of blossom and not a scrap of earth. I had never before seen a grave, and as I always believed that everything that happened to us was the unvarying norm, for years when I heard of a death I pictured a grave lined with flowers. We each had two new cotton dresses, a mauve and a grey, as mourning for Grandfather, and on the day of his funeral the bell tolled in our very ears because the garden of Malcolm House was next to the churchyard.

  A couple of months later we moved into Batsford, and my grandmother went away to live at Redesdale. Because of the war, and our poverty, we only used a few rooms; the rest of the house was in dust sheets.

  A family of children came to live with us there to get away from wartime London; they were neighbours in Victoria Road, the Normans. Sibell and Mark and Pam and Tom and I were all bosom friends; we seldom quarrelled. There was also a smaller girl, Mary, and a baby boy. Sibell was always in tearing spirits; she was much bolder than we were, and we loved dashing about in and out of the unused rooms, and the feeling of being far away from the grown-ups.

  When I was seven another child, Jessica, was born. Nanny was busy, and I had started lessons in the schoolroom. Our governess, Miss Mirams, used to say: ‘Now, Diana, try and remember that you are the least important person in the room.’

  Sibell and Mark’s parents came down to see them quite often. They amazed me in several ways. One day after luncheon they were drinking coffee with Muv on the terrace when Mary went up to her mother and deliberately knocked the cup out of her hand. I held my breath but Lady Florence only said: ‘Oh darling, was that an accident?’

  Even more abnormal, I went into Farve’s business room with Sibell one evening before dinner to say goodnight, and there was Mr. Norman sitting in an armchair, reading. He put down his book and talked to us for a few minutes. As we went up to bed I said to Sibell: ‘Does your father often read?’ ‘Oh yes,’ she replied.

  ‘I’ve never heard of a man reading,’ I said.

  ‘Oh haven’t you,’ said Sibell. ‘Lots of Fa’s friends read.’ Until that moment I had always imagined reading was for women and children only, though I knew that men wrote. Even my grandfathers had published several books apiece, and at that very time there were vague murmurings, which reached us, among the uncles and aunts and Farve about Sir Edmund Gosse, who had written an ‘insolent’ (so they said) preface to Grandfather Redesdale’s third volume of memoirs; Gosse was getting this book ready to be published posthumously. The insolence consisted in a hint that Grandfather found no intellectual companionship within his numerous family, which was of course perfectly true.

  Muv’s brother, Uncle George, pleased Farve with an epitaph supposed to be suitable for this literary enemy:

  Here lies Gosse,

  No great loss.

  Uncle George made this couplet rhyme, while Farve pro nounced loss to rhyme with horse, as we all did, which rather spoilt the joke.]

  Farve was now back from ‘the front’; he was Assistant Provost Marshal at Oxford, and lived in rooms at Christ Church. We used to visit him there; he had installed a pianola; Muv laughed but we thought it made the most heavenly sounds. Farve put some rainbow trout in Mercury, and generally made himself at home in Tom Quad.

  When he came to Batsford we played hide and seek all over the house. All the lights were put out except in the library where Muv sat with the youngest children. There were five staircases up and down which we thundered, but during the silent moments I nearly died of fright, straining my ears to hear a creaking board, somebody creeping quite near. Then there came the sound of footsteps thumping down the corridor, a distant scuffle and scream and Farve’s triumphant roar when he caught someone.

  Meals in the dining-room were an ordeal when he was at home and had it not been for prestige reasons I would have preferred to stay upstairs with Nanny. However quietly one sat, however far away from him, he saw in an instant if a drop or a crumb was spilt. He thought spilling a disgusting and unnecessary fault, and did not realize how difficult big knives and forks can be for small hands to manage. When, despite one’s efforts, something was spilt he roared with rage. At the end of his life, forty years after the days I am describing, he was still the same. Once we were lunching at a London hotel in a vast restaurant; he was nearly blind; yet several tables away he spied a little boy: ‘Look at that degraded child throwing its food over the good table cloth,’ said Farve.

  A rather brutal saying of our elders was: ‘Those who ask don’t get; those who don’t ask don’t want.’ We wanted nearly everything; the question was how to get it if one might not ask. Tom thought of a way round; he called it ‘my artful scheme of happiness’. He looked long and lovingly at the desired object, and when this had been noticed he began to speak. ‘Oh, what a lovely box; I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a lovely little box in all my life. Oh how I wish I could find one like it! Do you think I ever could? Oh (to the owner) you are lucky!’ He made his voice positively sag with desire. It nearly
always ended in his being given whatever it might be he craved. Tom was seven when he invented his artful scheme of happiness.

  Miss Mirams thought our way of talking sounded affected. ‘He mustn’t talk like that when he’s at school,’ she told Muv. ‘What mustn’t he say?’ asked Muv. ‘Well, for instance, “how amusing”. Boys never say “how amusing”,’ said Miss Mirams.

  There was a nursery rule, made by Muv, that we were not to be forced to eat what we did not like or want. I was intensely thankful for this; I was seldom hungry and many nursery foods stuck in my gullet I disliked them so much. Pam and I were both ‘fussy’, but Nancy and Tom had good appetites and often ate our food as well as their own. They were more than welcome to it.

  ‘Isn’t Pam wonderful,’ Tom said once when, after the long journey up to Redesdale, the exhausted Pam could not swallow anything, ‘the way she refuses food.’

  One day Muv came into the schoolroom and said: ‘Children, Mrs. Hammersley is coming to stay, she will arrive tonight. While she is here you are not to practise.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because she is very musical.’

  I was pleased to be let off my scales, and puzzled by the reason for it. How could somebody be so musical that she could not bear to hear the piano played?