'Chapter 3 - The Aunts at Harts'

• Aunt May
• Aunt Rosa
• Aunt Dora
• Harts Revisited

Aunt May and Aunt Rosa did not make much impression on me at Cote Bank. There were too many other people there for me to get know the Aunts well, and I was too young, and they were too old. They were between fifty and sixty, and they must have been nearly sixty when Grannie died. But they were not too old to uproot themselves, and start a new life in a new home with new interests and neighbours.

They were lucky to find Harts, which was a much smaller house than Cote Bank, but not unlike it in character, It was not very far from Cote Bank, though far enough to make it unnecessary for the Aunts ever to pass the site of the old house. Harts lies about eight miles to the North of Bristol, whereas Cote Bank was much nearer town and on the West side of it. All the relations took to visiting Harts as they had visited Cote Bank, and were made very welcome there, although living was on a much less lavish scale, and there were never more than four or five guests at a time.

There was also a much smaller domestic staff. A pony-trap took the place of the carriage, and Long the farm-hand settled in as ponykeeper and gardener and odd-job man. Aunt May used to drive the pony-trap with great verve, flicking the end of the whip quite unconsciously, across the faces of her passengers. As I grew up I got to know the Aunts much better, on my fairly frequent visits to Harts, and came to love, respect and admire both of them. Aunt Dora, too, was often there after her husband died, and the three of them, each very different, made an interesting and entertaining trio.

The Aunts are still alive when I write this (1949), but I shall write of them in the past tense, because the period I am writing about is from 1918 to about 1928, especially the earlier years. Both Aunt May and Aunt Rosa had had long and useful careers of public service by the time they left Cote Bank, and when I knew them at Harts Aunt Rosa was a J.P. and Aunt May used to work at the University Settlement in Bristol, and was Treasurer to the W. A. They gave up their work only when old age made it impossible for them to continue. Aunt Dora had had some sort of career before her marriage: teaching, I think, but by the time I came to know her well she was a widow, more or less crippled by arthritis, and her daughter Daphne was nearly grown up.

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They all had many friends and admirers, each a separate circle, and Aunt May in particular had so many that it used to take her a good hour to open all her cards and letters on Christmas Day. She was like a grandmother to the many nephews and nieces, and to the next generation too when that came along. She was one of the most loving, unselfish, kind and sweet-tempered people I have ever known. She had been very deaf since the age of about twenty: I asked her once how long she had been deaf, and the startling reply was: "Ever since I had smallpox in Los Angeles." But deafness did not depress her or cause her to withdraw into a private world, though it did tend to make conversation with her rather one- sided.

She used various devices to aid her deafness, but she was so rough with them that they often used to go wrong. At one time she used a trumpet. Aunt Rosa said of it: "Children love shouting into it. It is really one of May's attractions." Very often her "machine" would not work at all, but this did not deter her from talking. She used to hold forth, inevitably, but it was always interesting. She had an amazing memory, not only for things that had happened to her, but for facts and dates and things she had read.

In the later days, when we used to go over to Harts by bus from Bristol, she would often get launched on a discourse of this sort just when we were trying to get away to catch our bus, and many a time we had to break away rudely and hurry up the drive without having time to say goodbye properly. The Aunts were very generous with garden produce, and always loaded us with fruit or flowers on these occasions.

Aunt May was very vigorous and energetic. She did not really begin to behave like an old lady until she was nearly ninety. In the early years at Harts she used to stride over the countryside, stick in hand, talking all the time, often going too far and too fast for my mother, who was much younger. Her cold, damp and uncomfortable picnics were a by-word in our branch of the family. But her interests were primarily intellectual. She used to read the "Hibbert Journal" and "Mind", and books on philosophy. Wordsworth was her favourite poet; she also loved Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal.

Art did not interest her much, and she was totally unmusical in her youth before she became deaf, so that deafness did not deprive her of that pleasure. She went regularly to Quaker Meeting and was a staunch Quaker - the only one of the three who took any interest in Quakerism, although they were all brought up in that faith.

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Aunt Rosa was more artistic than Aunt May. She it was who arranged the pictures and furniture - mostly from Cote Bank - in the rooms at Harts, and her taste in these matters was good. It was also much more luxurious than Aunt May's, as one could see from the contrast between their bedrooms. Aunt Rosa chose one of the two best bedrooms in the house, large and light and sunny, with elegant furniture in it, and on the wall by the window were photographs of numerous men who had been her friends and admirers.

But Aunt May's room was small, plain and humble, and she certainly had no photographs of men friends in it. Aunt May was ascetic and nun-like; Aunt Rosa enjoyed travel, the opera, and the society of men. Aunt May was always dressed sensibly in tweeds, but Aunt Rosa was fond of necklaces and brooches arid flamboyant colours. One of her contemporaries said: "Rosa doesn't dress; she dresses up." Perhaps Aunt May followed in the tradition of her Quaker upbringing, while Aunt Rosa reacted against it.

Aunt Rosa not only made the rooms look attractive; she was also a keen gardener until she became too rheumatic to do it any more; and in her younger days she had painted quite well. Her water-colours were much better than my father's, and she did an oil painting of trees at Cote Bank which I liked very much.

Aunt Rosa was a more lively conversationalist than Aunt May, though not necessarily more interesting. She had a biting wit, and could tell a funny story well. She frequently used to score off the other two; indeed she sometimes carried it too far with Aunt Dora, and was quite unkind to her, though Aunt Dora did not seem to mind, Aunt Rosa was not so intellectual as Aunt May . She usually read new books of biography and travel, and sometimes novels. The only novelist that Aunt May read, I think, was Virginia Woolf.

Aunt May was the elder of the two and they owned the house jointly, but Aunt Rosa was the real boss. When they first went to Harts she stuck little notices all over the house, saying Do this or Don't do that. For instance, one of these remained in the lavatory for many years, which said: "Pull the plug very gently, hold down a few seconds and then let it go. My mother wrote a satirical verse about Aunt Rosa and her notices. I wish I could remember it all. It was called "The Queen of Harts". Part of it went like this:

All the rooms, when the Aunts first went to Harts, had labels on the doors, in R.E.P's handwriting: The East Room, The Swallow Room, The Parlour, The Library, and so on. But nobody ever used these names. She never gave up this habit altogether, and as late as 1949 1 was amused to see a new notice in the bathroom, over the wash-basin, warning all corners not to let their rings or the "precious soap" go down the inadequately covered drain.

Aunt Rosa was by way of being musical, and bad a fine collection of classical music on gramophone records. These records were my first introduction to Beethoven's Symphonies, his Kreutzer Sonata, Mozart's G.Minor Quartet and his Clarinet Quintet, and much of Schubert. I have loved most of these masterpieces ever since. She was also fond of Wagner; and used to amuse us by speaking of Chopin's "Preeludes".

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Aunt Dora was the most tender-hearted and affectionate of the three. She used to worry inordinately about famines in China and homeless children in Central Europe, and gave a great deal of money to charities or this sort. She used to knit numerous garments for suffering humanity, with large clumsy stitches in unattractive. She explained once to a visitor that it was part of her international work, and Aunt Rosa commented acidly: "I daresay it doesn' t improve international feeling."

Aunt Dora was very well off, even wea1thy perhaps, but she preferred to give away most of her money to good causes and spend nothing on her own clothes. In the days when she used to hobble about with two sticks, before her arthritis got really bad, she was often mistaken for a tramp. She used to tell stories aburt this sort of thing, against herself, with great good humour. One of these unfortunates said to her, "Are you on the road too, Ma?" - to which she replied "Not yet." Another time she gave some coppers to a beggar, who refused them, saying, "I couldn't take it from a poor cripple like you." She wore the same hats for years and years.

She admitted once that she had a pair of combinations so full of holes that she was almost ashamed for anybody to see it. What she did with it, she explained, was to wear two pairs, so that one covered up the holes in the other. One of her hats was an old felt one of her husband's, trimmed with the remains of a lace evening scarf. She asked me once if I thought one of these hats still looked all right. I said, hedging, that 1 didn' t remember the one she meant. She replied,"Oh well, if you haven't noticed it, that shows that it isn't egregiously ... ". But of course it was.

She had curious miserly habits about cigarettes - before they became scarce during the second world war - and candles and scraps of bread, before these commodities too became scarce. She used to keep half-smoked cigarettes in her bag, and she saved crusts of bread from meals to eat in her bedroom. She carried candle-ends about in her bag, but she told me once that she used a night-light to undress by, because "candles are so extravagant". The aunts, by the way, never had the house wired for electricity, so little oil-lamps were put by the maids into all the bedrooms for people to undress by. (To this day I love paraffin lamps). These, of course, were much too extravagant for Aunt Dora, even though she didn't have to pay for the oil.

Aunt Dora was nothing if not eccentric. Her miserly ways were not very attractive, but her candour and impulsiveness sometimes were. She came to see us once at Hampstead, after my father's death. My mother had bought a dog soon after he died, having always wanted one. It was a large black smelly dog, which Purefoy and I loathed. As soon as Aunt Dora set eyes on it, she exclaimed, "Oh What a horrible dogl" Purefoy and I were delighted. Another time she came to see us at Hampstead in hot summer weather, when Purefoy had acquired a deep sun-tan. "Why, Buvvie," said Aunt Dora, "you look more like a negress than eve."

Once in the early days of her marriage, my mother used to relate, Aunt Dora arrived at Cote Bank for Christmas without Uncle Charlie, who had to stay in town to finish some work. After supper when the family were sitting round the fire, she suddenly screamed: "Oh I've locked Charlie into the flat" So he spent a very dull Christmas. However, Aunt Dora told me in 1951 that this story is apocryphal. But it has gone down to posterity, because it illustrates so well the kind of person she was - and she admitted to having once locked herself and a tea-party of ladies out of the flat.

Another time, when she was a student at Newnham, she packed all her shoes in a trunk and sent it off in advance, and had to travel in an old pair of bedroom slippers. On a different occasion when she was travelling by train, she left her seat for a few minutes and put her ticket on it in order to keep her place. When she returned, of course the seat was occupied and the ticket had gone.

Yet another story is told about her lack of common sense. When her bank manager sent her a note politely informing her that her account was overdrawn, she replied with an equally polite note, enclosing a cheque - on that same account - for the amount of the overdraft.

Aunt Dora's oddities were probably irritating to Aunt Rosa, who sometimes used to snub her unmercifully. Once some visitors to Harts passed Aunt Dora without taking any notice of her, where she sat perched on a large oak chest just inside the front door. Aunt Rosa said afterwards, "I expect they thought you were an old cottage person." Another time she said, "Don't look so deplorable, Dora. You look ready to burst into tears." Poor Aunt Dora was probably in pain from her arthritis, but she was so uncomplaining that it was easy for people to forget about it.

It was hard to keep a straight face when the aunts began ticking one another off, but one of the funniest occurrences was when Aunt May and Aunt Rosa started talking simultaneously, and neither would desist - Aunt Rosa out of obstinacy, and Aunt May because, being deaf, she did not know anyone else was talking. Once Aunt Rosa began telling one of her pet anecdotes while Aunt May began discussing the probable reason for a delayed telegram. Aunt Rosa said, "It always happens like this," and continued her story. Aunt May burst out again, drowning Aunt Rosa's voice. "On damn," muttered Aunt Rosa. "Butter please." And she gave up the attempt.

Another time, Aunt Rosa began: "One of the pernicious things - " and Aunt May simultaneously enquired: "Are you going to the Potters' this afternoon?" Aunt May' s voice was louder, so she usually triumphed, and on this occasion we never learnt what the pernicious thing was.

One of Aunt Dora's remarks, too, is unexplained. A visitor stated that a lot of English capital is invested in Argentine beef. Aunt Dora commented :

"Ian' t that disgusting, somehow?" I have often wondered in what way.

Once when she was telling some friends about the house that she and her husband had bought in Chelsea, the friends asked which way the house faced. "It depends where you're standing when you're looking at it ," Aunt Dora answered mysteriously.

But in spite of (or because of ) her eccentricities, she was a lovable character and an interesting talker. She had been one of the earliest generation of students at Newnham, where she had read Moral Sciences, a subject that no one without a good brain could tackle, let alone get a degree in. She had known a great many interesting people in London, where she and Uncle Charlie were on the fringe of the Bloomsbury set - she knew, for instance, Bertrand Russell, Virginia Woolf add E.L. Forster.

Her taste in books was not so austere as Aunt May's and more literary than Aunt Rosa's. She was a very sympathetic person, and intimacy was much easier with her than with either of the others. She was never sarcastic like Aunt Rosa, and never held forth as Aunt May sometimes did. In her later years she was severely crippled by arthritis, and she must have been in pain very often, but she never complained or gave the slightest hint that her lot was a hard one. Talking to her, you could quite forget that she was a semi-invalid. Her interests remained as wide as ever, even when she was confined to one room. She was a shining example of courage in adversity.

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When the Aunts moved to Harts, much of the Cote Bank furniture went with them, and it fitted into the house admirably. The rest was divided among the relations, or sold. Two of the old servants went with the Aunts; some of the others were pensioned off and the Aunts kept in touch with them. Long was a familiar sight in the early years at Harts, tending the pony or working in the garden, and looking just the same as he had always looked; and Emily, one of the elderly maids, remained at Harts for some years.

Then a new generation of faithful retainers took over, though it was a very small one, consisting of Nellie the housemaid and Dinah the cook, who both stayed for twenty years or more. Dinah surrounded herself with chickens and cats and dogs, and was in many ways the real mistress of Harts. The house, like Cote Bank, stood on high sloping ground, and it had an even better view; and glorious sunsets could be seen from other windows than that of the lavatory. It looked over the flat Severn Vale to the Severn itself, and the Welsh hills beyond. It stood in its own rounds like Cote Bank, and although the grounds were much smaller, they contained a pleasant flower garden, a kitchen garden, lawns and a summer-house, two greenhouses, two orchards, a few fields, and a lovely wood.

One of these orchards was let by the Aunts to a neighbouring farmer. A stream ran through the wood and one of the orchards; it was dry, or a mere trickle, in summer, but after heavy winter rains it was most impressive where it fell over a small rocky precipice in a cascade.

At the time of writing it is more than thirty years since the Aunts went to Harts. They have grown gradually older and less active, but there have been few other changes in these years. Buses now run along the high road every half hour, and modern houses and bungalows have sprung up in the neighbourhood; the pony-trap is a thing of the distant past, and Long is dead; but once you have turned off the high road with its roaring traffic, and walked down the stony drive with its overhanging trees and its banks of daffodils, you have entered a magic world where time almost seems to stand still.

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