Sylvia Townsend Warner Read online

  ‘Art thou whirly, Hilly Warner, art thou sore detest?’ was Sylvia’s childish rendering of the hymn ‘Art thou weary, art thou languid, art thou sore distrest?’ and another revised version, ‘Fawny was the clown, and he said –’ for ‘Thorny was the crown on His head’ remained obscure to her parents for so long that George made her a book about Fawny the Clown and added periodically to his adventures, thinking it was ‘Sylvie’s’ invention. The first hymn she knew by heart was ‘The spacious firmament on high’, which she loved, as she did the words ‘When in the sultry glebe I faint’ from the paraphrase of a psalm. She was ‘an impressionable small child’12 and used to scream at the Oxo posters of the day which showed a bull rising out of a teacup, though her favourite toys were an ill-favoured family of dolls, Mr and Mrs Marks and their daughter Kitty, carved for her by her father, who recorded their low-life adventures in an endless poem, ‘The Marksiad’.

  At about the age of six Sylvia was sent to a local kindergarten, but only stayed one term. She was a mimic, unwittingly disrupting the children and irritating the teachers so much that her parents withdrew her. Her report at the end of term was very unsatisfactory, ‘only one kind word in it, and that was Sylvia always sings in tune’.13 Subsequently, it was Nora who gave Sylvia her early lessons. In the small yellow-painted attic room which Nora used for her needlework and painting, Sylvia sat down to Reading Without Tears. Without reading, too, for she had a phenomenal memory and ‘was thought a promising scholar till the day when I maintained that NAG spelled “horse”, or at least “pony” ’.14 Nora took up the Bible next and by the age of seven, Sylvia was reading from it and making its vocabulary her own: ‘So when our old fat spaniel trotted into the butcher’s shop and scavenged a gobbet out of the scrap bucket, it was with a clear conscience and a sense of saying the right thing that I exclaimed, as I dragged him away, “Friday! Thou shalt not commit adultery!” Yet it was all wrong, somehow. […] When I was asked to explain myself, I took my stand, rather aggrievedly, on reason. Had I not asked my mother what adultery meant? Had she not explained that it was the sins of the flesh? I could not understand why there should be all this fuss.’15

  The lessons in the attic proceeded from the Bible to geography, history, French and Shakespeare. Some arithmetic was attempted, but informed innumeracy was a family failing, and Nora not the best teacher of this subject. Most educative of all to the young girl were Nora’s stories of her distant girlhood in Madras. The Hudlestons, an old and distinguished Cumberland family with a seat near Penrith called Hutton John, had a history of service in the East India Company – the seventh Andrew Hudleston retired from it in 1830, and his forebear John had been Director in the late eighteenth century. When Nora’s father Colonel Josiah Hudleston and his wife Fanny were living in Madras they were well-respected (Josiah’s cousin William had been sometime Governor) and prosperous, and Nora recalled those days vividly:

  She began to unpack this astonishing storehouse, full of scents and terrors, flowers, tempests, monkeys, beggars winding worms out of their feet, a couple of inches a day, not more, or the worm broke and you had to begin again, undislodgable holy men who came and sat in the garden, the water carrier’s song – and as she talked as much for her own pleasure as mine, and made no attempts to be instructive or consecutive, I never tired of listening. […] My mother’s recollections of her childhood in India were so vivid to her that they became inseparably part of my own childhood, like the arabesques of a wallpaper showing through a coating of distemper.16

  Sylvia was never ‘read down to’ either by Nora and George or by her grandmother Flora, another gifted story-teller and frequent visitor to Radnor Lodge, who would take the child on her knee and read from The Song of Roland or Sir Gawain. Before anything else, Sylvia learned to be a superlative listener. The three most important adults in her early life each pleased her by pleasing themselves. She was treated as a rational being, and though this set her apart from others – ‘I was […] solitary and agnostic as a little cat, and mistrusting other children to a pitch of abhorrence’17 – it preserved in her a capacity for delight and a freshness of response few people are lucky enough to escape childhood with.

  ‘The Chief’ retired from Newton College in 1895 and moved to the living of Alfold on the Surrey-Sussex border. The rectory of St Nicholas Church, a twelfth-century foundation restored in the 1840s, was a comfortable and congenial house to visit and the Warners went there frequently. Flora was energetic in Alfold, battling against draughts in the church, installing a new organ, even causing a telegraph office to be established in the village, following a series of misadventures which befell Sissy returning from India. Her influence was pervasive, if sometimes arcane: ‘My grandmother, a theologically inclined unbeliever, wrote all my grandfather’s sermons. He got quite a name as a preacher, and afterwards people used to say that it was difficult to reconcile the Mr Warner they met in society with the Mr Warner they heard in the pulpit.’18 Townsend is still remembered in the parish as the rector who was interested in cricket, though the memorial window to him steers clear of the subject.

  Flora was a natural writer. Apart from enormous correspondences with her children, her sermon-writing and volumes of memoirs, she was a collector of anecdotes and ‘true stories’, which she retold with effortless clarity. ‘I loved her next to my father,’ wrote Sylvia, ‘and she loved me next to him. And her father loved her beyond all others.’19 Her father was George Moir of Charlotte Square, Edinburgh, a short, ugly, highly cultured man, ‘a German scholar like all the fashionable intellectuals of his date’20 (the 1820s and 1830s), whose translation of Goethe’s Wallenstein was at the printers when Moir heard that Coleridge was engaged on the same task, and so withdrew. Carlyle called him ‘kind, lively, very ingenious’ – they were neighbours in Edinburgh – ‘with whom I am growing very intimate’;21 and Moir also knew the painter Constable, who was married to his cousin. Flora Moir was a charming and quick-witted young woman with a ‘quiet dignity’22 of which even her father-in-law approved. At the end of a dinner party Matthew Arnold once said to her ‘I see that good taste means a great deal to you, and morality very little.’23 Her grand-daughter admired and adopted the same standards and loved her visits to Alfold, where she and Flora would sit together on the bank of white violets in the paddock, or in the snuffy, comfortable sitting-room where one day, quite suddenly and unexplained, Flora threw Sylvia to the floor and began to play rough-and-tumble ‘with reckless, burning abandon’.24 A moment later she was sitting down, brushing back a piece of hair with her hand and perfectly composed before Nora came into the room.

  Flora’s younger sister Anne was married to Ponsonby Moore (later Earl of Drogheda) and lived at Moore Abbey, County Kildare, a large gloomy, castellated building with more gothic about it than simply the shape of its windows. ‘Aunt Tenny’ wore massive rings, drank – water – from a jewelled chalice and was a friend of Lady Augusta Gregory and the Abbey Theatre group. Sylvia visited Moore Abbey with her parents in the summer of 1900, seeing this rather extraordinary branch of her family for the first time. The Warners were met at Monasterivan by a barouche landau, complete with coachman, footman and a separate vehicle for the luggage. Sylvia found a great deal to enjoy at Moore; a royal suite, a Georgian dolls’ house, gardeners in traditional Irish dress and chimney-pot hats and a mildewed sedan chair in the hall which became her special retreat. There were also elaborate meals, which absorbed Sylvia’s full attention, inducing her father to write the following verse, ‘Moore ’abbiness’:

  You must not spear each Individual Pea,

  Altho’, my Child, your fork may be four-pronged,

  Because if you attempt this feat, you see

  Your parents’ dinner will be too prolonged.25

  But the house was plagued by ghosts, the noise at night being sometimes insupportable. Nora, who had heard bare-footed people in the dressing-room and what sounded like a sighing horse over her bed, vowed on the boat back to Holyhead never to stay
there again.

  Other holidays were more modest and comfortable. For several summers the family stayed at Camber, Kent, in lodgings run by a Mrs Dive. Sylvia loved the marshes and the sea, and pined so much on her return to Harrow that her father bought a black kitten, her first, as a consolation. He had a very short stumpy tail, and Sylvia named him Mister Dive, causing a misunderstanding the following year at Camber when the landlady thought she overheard Miss Warner praying fervently for her husband. Feline Dive was sent prawns in matchboxes through the post and Sylvia used to put her ear to telegraph poles to hear him purring distantly, until someone commented on this, and she stopped doing it.

  When Sylvia was very young, it had occurred to Nora that they ought to attend more closely to the Christian year. She told Sylvia the story of the three kings; the star standing over the stable, the kings entering and seeing the ox, the ass, the woman and the baby. Sylvia, captivated by the narrative, interrupted ‘and did they KILL it?’26 Children, she maintained later, are born humanists, and check all moral assertions against what they observe in the adult world. Her parents were not given to moral assertions but Florence, the nurse, was. Florence had devised a punitive bogey who, she claimed, looked out of the nursery chimney-place when the sinful Sylvia’s back was turned. The child, thinking the goblin’s way of going about things odd, declared that she didn’t believe it. ‘As I slept in my nursery, this entailed an anxious night, since I had of course been assured that if I didn’t believe in him, he would soon pop out and show me I was wrong. But by the morning he hadn’t done so, and I got up an agnostic.’27 This was more of a definition than a decision, as she had never had a great deal of Christianity thrust upon her, though she had had, in the usual course of things, a great deal of Church. All her life she deplored the idea that fear, guilt and self-abnegation can be in any way a means to salvation and thought back gratefully on Florence’s goblin – ‘what infinite blessings have been emptied out on us from what were certainly intended as vials of wrath’.28

  Soon after this incident, Florence was replaced by a young woman of Westmoreland stock called Grace, a benign creature who introduced Sylvia to mushroom picking and taught her one Wordsworth sonnet and one page of Bewick’s Birds each week. Sylvia, at the age of ten, needed all the companionship she could get. She had grown very lanky and thin. Her black hair was long and rather messy, her knees were always dirty and her face was changing from its sweet childish oval to what threatened to be a Hudleston jaw. She was about to be a terrible disappointment to her mother.

  III

  Looking back on the falling-off of her mother’s love for her, Sylvia, then aged seventy-seven, wrote in a letter, ‘for the first seven years of my life I interested her heart; and I was an amusing engaging child and she enjoyed her efficiency in rearing me. But nothing compensated for my sex.’29 Nora’s ill-feeling was many-faceted; Sylvia was not a son, she was not going to be a beautiful daughter, she was rather off-puttingly clever and rapidly becoming the apple of her father’s eye. Also, as can be seen in many later pastimes, Nora did not persist in anything she had lost interest in or been thwarted by. Child-rearing and childbirth presumably came under this heading, for it was often intimated to Sylvia that her mother had suffered much.

  Sylvia admired her mother for much the same reasons as did George, who loved his wife steadfastly, though sometimes with an ironic detachment which Nora failed to perceive. She was an exciting but intimidating woman, ‘brilliantly witty, autocratic, mocking, with several areas of her heart as hard as a stone. I wrote cold, and amended it to hard. Nothing about her was cold. She was intensely savagely loyal, very hard-working and with a hand that could turn to anything.’30 Nora was also vain and impervious to the giggles of schoolboys as she launched down Harrow High Street in her latest creation in mauve and black. Indeed, Nora caught every fashion so newly off the pages of the papers that she always appeared eccentrically dressed. She had few women friends, but many men found her intriguing and she knew how to use her charm to maximum effect. Flirtations, though, were undertaken in a spirit of conspicuous waste, for she was devoted to George. He on his part was neither intimidated nor embarrassed by his wife. He was a single-minded man. What may have appeared to others as volatility, eccentricity or downright bitchiness was to him high-spirited individualism, and unflawedly admirable.

  Following the death of ‘the Chief’ in November 1902, Flora moved to London, to a house on Eaton Square near her younger son Robert, who had gone from the Middle Temple to a job on the legal side of the Board of Education. In 1903 George was appointed Master of the Modern Side at Harrow and the Warner family moved from Radnor Lodge to 1, Grove Hill, an even taller and steeper house in red brick with a garden which fell away downhill at an alarming angle. Sylvia, being almost ten years old, had outgrown a nursery and had a bedroom on the first floor and schoolroom at the top of the house. But Nora barely had time to turn the drawing-room over to rose-patterned chintzes before they were on the move again, for George had been made housemaster of ‘High Street’, the house now called Bradby’s.

  High Street was a large, elegant, early-Victorian house built of yellow brick with a recently-constructed wing for the forty or so boys (of ages fourteen to eighteen) who lived there. The Warners’ side had a very grand entrance hall, large rooms, a spacious, irregular-shaped garden, central heating, a fire-alarm system and a cook. At first their furniture seemed quite inadequate for the increase in space and elegance; they bought, they borrowed and they gradually settled in. Where the rocking-horse lived at this date is not clear; certainly not in George’s study, which was a business-like room on the first floor, looking onto the street and the entrance to The Park. This room formed a physical link between George’s home and school life, a door at one side leading out into the family quarters, at the other into the boys’ wing. He was often in his study. The responsibilities of housemastership brought extra work to a man who was already going at full tilt and who had books to write as well. His time, his drawing-room, even his family holidays were now at the disposal of the boys.

  Warner was, by all accounts, a brilliant teacher, ‘one of the most inspiring […] that the public schools have known’.31 He had not only a remarkable knowledge and understanding of his subject – history – but wit, imagination and intellectual energy, a youthfully eager mind which challenged his pupils to respond and to think for themselves. ‘It may not be well-known’, wrote an ex-pupil, ‘in what high regard he was held at the two universities. The pupils of Warner were no little gratified to find that they went thither as marked men. Behind the scenes, where dons young and ancient discuss the teaching of history, his work at Harrow was recognised as the greatest in the land, his advice sought and opinions accepted without discussion.’32 Strict with the younger boys, he gave considerable latitude to his sixth formers and Head of House, and his history students formed a ‘family’ whose loyalty to and affection for Warner lasted well beyond school years. His influence on these boys was great, but never overpowering, for it was not his desire to impose ideas. ‘I do not know,’ wrote the same pupil, ‘that any of his “school” turned into philosophers; but in most of them there was something of the poet.’

  Clear style was of utmost importance to Warner. His little book On the Writing of English, used in schools for many decades, gives some indication of his teaching method and the pleasure he took in it. Part 2 (paragraph 8), ‘On “Succulent Bivalves” ’, begins:

  This, you remember, is what the Bad Journalist called the Oyster. I use the term to denote the tribe of commonplace phrases, the ‘arm-in-arm’ companions which go about together, and the hackneyed quotations. Luckless creatures these last, torn from their king’s houses and led into captivity; poor degraded slaves, you will find them in the gutters of English – ill-used, pathetic and bedraggled, yet with remnants of their dignity still clinging to them. ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.’ So wrote Keats; but all joy has left that hapless line. ‘On the light fantastic toe’
comes dancing by, but with the steps of the music hall. ‘A ministering angel thou’ … yes, once upon a time. But she and another poor lady lack that repose ‘which stamps the caste of Vere de Vere’. Let these poor things be; they are at every man’s ‘beck and call’. Don’t you drag them, shrinking and ashamed, into the light.

  Warner indulged his aptitude for satire in the criticism of pupils’ essays, but never humiliated a boy on account of bad work. He went through each essay sentence by sentence with its author, exposing all the faults and even the smallest virtues of style. Sometimes a boy would find on his paper a scorecard of how often a favourite adjective had been pressed into service on each page, or he might find a little drawing of a cannon belching smoke at the side of a purple passage, and the words ‘pom-pom!’ in Warner’s small, exceedingly neat handwriting. Another pupil, the novelist L.P. Hartley, recalled how ‘when one made a blunder he forebore for the moment from comment; perhaps he was thinking it out, for it was generally devastating when it came. But in more genial moods he would remark, “If you ever say that again I shall fall on you with my teeth and my umbrella” […] The most irrepressible among my contemporaries held him in awe. Nor was G.T.W. to be trifled with; he was a man of moods, and one could not always please him simply by trying to. But he was a teacher of the first order and he got more out of his pupils than it seemed in their power to give. He was a genius.’33