'Monica Vincent (nee Pease)'
'Monica Vincent (nee Pease)'
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Monica wrote an "informal" autobiography consisting of 14 short chapters. Many thanks to Vanessa Kenyon (nee Vincent) who has kindly given permission for including those that are relevant to Joan Hudleston, and two chapters on Monica's aunts which I enjoyed reading.
After the separation of Joan's parents, Winifred Pease (nee Hudleston), assisted with Joan's upbringing.
AN INFORMAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY
I have used the word "informal" because this is not going to be a straight piece of narrative in chronological order. It will be that in the main, but where it seems suitable I shall jump forwards or backwards over several decades; this is in order to keep to one subject, rather than moving strictly forward in time. It is easier to write in this way, and I hope the result will be easier to read. I began writing these reminiscences in 1948 or 1949, and have added to them at long intervals, and in 1977 1 typed them out. Afterwards I went on adding to them because of subsequent events.
Beginnings
When I was two we moved to 36, Downshire Hill, a short distance away from The Priors. It was quite an inexpensive and unfashionable road at the time, though now it is much sought-after. We rented the house at first, and then bought it after a few years for a very small sum. Downshire Hill was - and is - a road of Regency houses, most of them small arid detached and standing in small mature gardens. Ours did not have a veranda, as did some of the others near the top of the hill, but it did have a lovely long garden at the back, with three huge pear trees, which were supposed to have belonged once upon a time to a farm. It was a tall thin house, with two rooms on each floor, and four floors: not an easy house for the maids, who slept at the top and worked in a rather dark and dismal basement kitchen. But it was a pleasant house for the family, who did little or no domestic work in it. My sister Purefoy and I slept in a room looking out over the garden. The wallpaper had a design of peacocks on it; the paint was pale green, and the curtains were a bright soft pink. There was always a nurse to look after us. Hester was one of the first; she was followed by Lavender, Nellie, Gertrude and many others. At one time there was a French girl called Leontine, but I don't think she succeeded in teaching us any French, As well as the nurse, there were always a cook and a housemaid. My mother must have had a great deal of leisure, but it was the norma1 thing in those days for wives of professional men - my father was a barrister - and she never seemed to be at a loss for an occupation.
Gerald Pease
Later then this my father sold "the wild" and some houses were built on it, but he bought another piece of land which lay downhill and to the left of our original garden, and he kept enough of the wild to make a passage down to this large new piece, which was roughly square. So finally the garden was shaped something like this: It was a remarkably large garden for a town one, and my father made good use of it, growing all kinds of fruit and flowers. He did not go in for vegetables much, but he grew some kinds. Vegetables were cheap to buy in those days, so there was no great advantage in growing them.
My father's interests were on the whole scientific rather than artistic. He knew a lot about natural history and something about astronomy; he was good at finding wild flowers and naming them, and he was fond of birds and wild animals. Domestic animals, though, he hated. We had a succession of cats, all of whom he disliked and treated coldly, and we never had a dog at all while he was alive because of his aversion to them. He never read novels and was not much interested in literature as such, but he used to read books of travel, books about voyages, and Conrad's sea stories; he also used to read Darwin's Origin of Species; the Bible, and The Pilgrim's Progress (which word he pronounced with a short 'o'). He used to read The Pilgrim's Progress aloud to the family at one time, but I was too young to make much of it. He was a man of strong likes and dislikes. Gramophones and motor-cars, as record-players and cars were then called, were two of the things he hated. I don't think he carried his prejudices into the realm of human relationships. He had a great number of friends and acquaintances, and always showed himself genial, good-tempered and ready to talk. I never saw him lose his temper, and he never even seemed depressed or cross - except on the dreadful occasion when Peggy Johnson and I took some of his bamboo stakes and broke them into shorter pieces to make a fence around our water-tank. Even then he did not scold us, or say very much, and that made it all the worse. He simply said, "Look what you've done to my bamboos," in a tone of reproach, but the feeling of guilt and remorse has stayed with me to this day. He was a mine of information, I suppose most children believe that their fathers know everything, but mine certainly knew more than most ordinary men. His only fault in this respect was that sometimes he would answer our question far more meticulously and at far greater length than you really wanted. I remember my first sight of the starry night sky, when he held me up to see it, at Cote Bank. He had a great love of nature and of the sea and the Country. He was on the whole serious-minded, and perhaps a little austere. He did not go to theatres (except to see Shakespeare) and never went to the cinema, and seldom to any other kind of public entertainment, He would have hated radio and television, His pleasures were simple ones, usually of the open air kind. He liked sea-bathing, though he was a slow and cumbrous swimmer; he bad a cold bath every morning nearly up to the end of his life. He might have been rather alarming to children, but I did not find him so, because I knew him well and liked doing the same things as he did.
Winifred Pease (nee Hudleston)
She used to go to church every Sunday, taking us with her. She also used to read us "Sunday Stories" from a sentimental book by Percy Dearmer. These readings took place in the back drawing-room on Sunday mornings, before Church I suppose; the room looked over the garden, and we used to sit on the ottoman in the window. Outside, my father was mowing the lawn, his regular Sunday morning job. The smell of mown grass always brings back this scene to me, together with a feeling of being shut indoors while interesting things were going on outside. My father was by birth a Quaker, so he did not go to church, but he never went to Quaker Meeting either. I don't know what his religious beliefs were, or whether he had any at all. He used to read the Bible, but I am fairly certain that his interest in it was historical. He was greatly interested in the ancient Egyptians and other old civilizations, and on holidays in Brittany he used to search for relics of prehistoric man with tireless energy, however hot the weather. He loved the rooms full of flint arrow-heads at the British Museum. But my mother said museums bored her stiff. One characteristic which they had in common was sociability. They never did much formal entertaining except for Sunday tea-parties, but they used to enjoy these, and had a wide circle of friends who used to be invited in turn. There were also various friends who used to drop in. People found my mother amusing to talk to, because she had a fund of anecdotes which she always used to bring into her conversation, and they always raised a laugh, unless you had beard them too many times, as her daughters had.
Purefoy Pease
Schooling
I started going to this school when I was just six. It was a little dame school kept by a Miss Janet Case, an old friend of my father's. (I learnt later that she had taught Greek to Virginia Woolf.) She took about ten children, boys and girls, and did all the teaching herself, in a semi-basement room in her house with an old-fashioned grate. I remember the grate because it had a hob, a word much in use in reading-books at that time. Miss Case was a good teacher. She taught us the three R's, and other things besides, which I have never forgotten: some of her favourite subjects for lessons were Grace Darling, the Eddystone Lighthouse, George Stevenson and the kettle, and Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Tanglewood Tales", which she used to read aloud to us. There was also a book about two children called Fred and Mary whose teacher demonstrated to them by means of an orange that the world, like an orange, is slightly flattened at top and bottom - or at the Poles. Peggy went to this school and we both stayed there till we were nine, when we outgrew it and started going to a larger one, called Frognal School. This was a small private school which was somewhat snobbish. I was sometimes happy and sometimes unhappy at Frognal School, where I stayed until I was eighteen. Towards the end I became heartily sick of it. There were very few interesting personalities there, but one of the mistresses had a real flair for teaching, and I remember to this day much of what she taught us. She was called Miss Dugard, and was of Hugenot descent, with Scottish blood added. Her subjects were geography, English grammar, and sometimes English literature and essay-writing. I've always been interested in grammar, thanks to her. I 1earnt no maths at all, except arithmetjc and elementary geometry; no physics or chemistry; nothing about architecture, music (except bow to sing) or art (except how to draw in pencil and paint in water-colour). When I compare this education with what my husband received at Bristol Grammar School, I think it must have been pretty poor even by the standards of those distant days. I have been catching up on the history and appreciation of art, architecture and music, and other untaught subjects, ever since I left school. Cambridge of course opened my eyes to a lot, but I am almost totally ignorant or all departments or science. Purefoy and I did have a very interesting introduction to pre-classical music through the Dolmetsch family, who lived at that time in Hampstead. Arnold Dolmetsch, the father of Carl and three other children, used to give lessons in playing on the harpsichord, the spinette and other old instruments, and in singing - solo of course - old English songs, with a few French ones thrown in. We were also taught some ancient dances, with titles such as La Forlana and Les Bouffins. I enjoyed all this very much indeed and thought the family mad, but very attractive. I do not know how long we attended these classes, but it might have been for about a year.
Tamara Loris-Melikoff
(Three paragraphs omitted here - David Hyde) Our friendship was interrupted during my Cambridge years, but it was resumed when I came down. I used to go to her flat one evening a week to study German and Italian with her; and at one time we were joined by Jill, my Newnham friend, who, oddly enough got a job at the same small school in Kensington, where T L M. was still teaching. Miss L - M was glad for me when I became engaged to John. Her death did not affect me as much as it might have done, because it occurred, as I have said, at just about the time I got married. She died, but her influence over me lasted all my life. A man to whom I told this story when I was nearly seventy remarked that this was a kind of immortality for her, and I think he was right. |
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My father used to go off to work every day, to his Chambers in the Temple, and he did not arrive home until about half past six. He travelled by tram, which he loved doing. Nearly all his spare time was spent in gardening. He grew roses, Madonna lilies, pansies, delphiniums, sweet williams, hollyhocks, tobacco flower, bergamot, and a lot of other flowers, and they all seemed to flourish. There were bushes of syringa and lilac and guelder-rose, and in the small front garden there were two large pink hawthorn trees. At the back, as well as the flowers, there were the tall pear-trees, and an old Blenheim Orange apple tree propped up by a crutch; and a Morello cherry spread along one of the
high old brick walls.
Some years later he bought a piece of waste land at the
bottom of our garden and made a gap in the fence, and this wild garden was a great delight to us in our schooldays. It was chiefly a wilderness of sycamore and elder trees, and a splendid place to play in. Peggy Johnson and I used to play at gypsies here, and we had a little house in the depths of the wood which was simply an old water-tank standing on its side; but for us, it was a private house of our own, where we could be right away from the grown-ups.
My father's chief passion was gardening, but he was also very fond of sailing whenever he could get the chance. He did not own a boat until quite near the end of his life, when he bought the "Gwell Moor" and kept her in Brittany, but he had several friends who owned boats or yachts, and he used to go sailing with them, especially before his marriage. When he was over fifty he suddenly took to doing water-colour sketches on our holidays. We thought very highly of them, but when I look at them now with a more critical eye, I can see that they are too small and too dry. However, he got a lot of fun out of them, and he used to encourage me and the other children on our holidays to draw and paint. He was totally unmusical, indeed he disliked music, and never went to a concert or an opera. My mother was inclined to be musical, and used to play Mendelssohn on the piano, and she had Purefoy and me taught to play. Purefoy was very soon found to be as unmusical as her father, but I persevered for some years.
My mother was very different, and yet they were perfectly happy together, as far as I know, throughout the twenty-four years of their married life. She was sociable, charming, rather frivolous, not at all high-minded or highbrow. She did not care for gardening or sketching ( for which she had no talent anyway), nor did she read the same sort of books as he did. She read chiefly biographies and novels, and sometimes poetry, which he never read. She loved the Pre-Raphaelites - both painters and poets - and Tennyson and Browning, and adored Ellen Terry, to whom she had a certain physical likeness. She loved theatres, music, shopping in London, clothes, going to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, and also going to the recitals of Jean Sterling Mackinlay. (How bored I got, being taken to see and hear "Jean" year after year) She had been very fond of dancing in her youth, and had a gay time with lots of "admirers". She enjoyed the formal dinner-parties of Edwardian days. As she grew older, she became absorbed in her two children, and it is a wonder they did not grow up thoroughly spoilt. She thought the world of us, and was always having us photographed. She even had oil paintings done of us, and a portrait of each of us done in pastels, The latter survived until at least 1977. My Aunt Don reported to her husband that the walls of our house were "plastered with portraits of Buv and Mon."
My sister Purefoy, or Buv, as we always called her, was only two years and eight months older than I was, but the gap seemed larger, and we were never good playmates. When we did play together, she often made me play at schools, she being the teacher and I the pupil, which I hated. This went on for a long time until my mother found out that I was unhappy about it, and then she stopped it. Buv was a precocious child, and always seemed older than she was. I don't know who she used to play with, but as soon as I went to school I became very friendly with Peggy Johnson. We used to walk to and from school together and sit together in school, and we were always in and out of one another's houses. She was one of a family of six - three boys and three girls - and they were all healthy athletic ordinary children, not clever, but likeable. Purefoy was rather friendly with the eldest boy, Rawdon, and had a sham wedding in which she was married to him. My mother also became friendly with Mrs. Johnson, and they used to do their High Street shopping together. We would hear talk of rations and queues and Cooks' Farm Eggs, for all this was during the 1914 - 1918 war. Peggy was my closest and best beloved friend from the age of six until we were about sixteen, when, sad to relate, we developed along different lines and ceased to have much in common.