Sylvia Townsend Warner Read online

  Looking round the flourishing house and garden on a beautiful day when Sylvia was absent, Nora said to George that Little Zeal was to her ‘like a dream of her childhood come true’.66 Hard work and long effort were beginning to be rewarded; the Foreign Office job alleviated Nora’s thwarted ambition for George to become a headmaster (something he never wanted himself), and she, disburdened of a daughter, was free to throw her violent energies into building up their future home. Aged fifty, Nora was as attractive to George as she had ever been and a constantly amusing companion. They shared countless small, weak private jokes; for instance, everything at Little Zeal had a name, from the morning ritual of George stalking marauding rabbits – Bunfire – to all parts of the garden – entrances called Ma’gate, Rams-gate and Moor-gate and beds called Accursed Spot and the Apple Pie Bed. Nora was also, unintentionally, a source of entertainment. Sylvia described to her father Nora’s method of having a good tidy-up in the store cupboard: ‘All the things on the left she moved to the right. All the things on the right she moved to the left. In the middle there was a sort of neutral zone where she just took things up and put them down again.’67 Towards the end of Sylvia’s stay, George noted a fragment of conversation:

  G. It’s always irregular.

  S. I wonder if that’s sense … I think it’s impossible.

  G. Well, if always irregular isn’t possible, then never regular is impossible too.

  N. (crushingly) Never regular happens so often that it’s always possible.68

  Sylvia had spent part of the spring in Edinburgh at a musical function, probably with Percy Buck. George was amused to learn that she had been ‘quite a little lioness’ there. Father and daughter corresponded regularly when apart and Sylvia was in the habit of sending him small presents through the post. At Little Zeal, in the summer, Sylvia was working on a story referred to by George as ‘the “Monolith” ’, which he admired and suggested she should send to the Cornhill Magazine. He was writing poems, another Blackwood’s article and was also collecting characters (one was an old soldier called Major Hellebore) for the novel he hoped to write one day and which he and Sylvia often talked over in a leisured way.

  Though everyone kept an eye on Pooloo, who was considered to be faint-hearted and like to die on the slightest gradient, it was George who slipped in the river, who had renewed attacks of ‘waistcoatitis’ and felt enervated all day. The strains of ‘a tumultuous day’ in London in mid-August – hastily summoned by the Foreign Office – were exacerbated by lack of sleep due to stomach pain. On 19 September George and Nora began to pack for Harrow. In some respects it had been a disappointing holiday; fishing had been hampered by the bad weather which had also rotted the harvest, alarms, excursions and two telegrams had disturbed their peace and most of all George felt his low spirits to have been a nuisance.

  [19th] I slept very badly and disturbed N: both weary in the morning. We had the usual clearing up to do and N did almost all of it. I was a damn dispirited body […] Better night, praise be, and so on next day 20.

  (Weds) we were rather fitter for the journey, though N seemed to have got my complaint: must be some common cause.

  Excellent time here, but the catastrophe of the last three days was regrettable.

  They got back to Harrow at about six o’clock, but an hour and a half later George was taken ill and was in acute pain. Two and a half days later he was dead, having refused morphia to the last. He wanted to retain consciousness as long as possible.

  VI

  News of Mr Warner’s death travelled swiftly down the High Street. School was going in to chapel at the time: it was the first Saturday of term and the new boys’ first service. The news was passed along, whether by a ‘fez’ or a ‘blood’, surprised and subdued by it, or a new boy, privily wondering what was ‘G.T.W.’. The air of shock had dissipated by the following day when the Headmaster, having quoted the first verse of ‘You?’ as a conclusion to his address to the new pupils, continued his sermon, ‘And it is of him who wrote those feeling lines that I would speak tonight, one to whom every stone of Harrow was dear, every link with the past sacred, every adventure for the future brave and full of hope.’69 George had passed irrevocably into history. At The Times’s printing-works his obituary was set up in type, waiting for Monday’s edition.

  His long body was lying at 162 Grove Hill, where he had been removed during his illness. His face was wearing ‘a queer secret look’ in Sylvia’s eyes. ‘“Behold, I will show you a mystery”, those unmoving lips seem to say.’70 The two days of George’s illness had been ravelled up in fear and vain solicitude. The rapidly changing demeanour of the doctor and nurses, the presence of a black oxygen cylinder at George’s bedside – which he waved away – his unremitting pain, were steps to a conclusion neither Sylvia nor her mother could face. There was no time for leave-taking, no time to give or receive comfort. Sylvia may not even have been at home when her parents arrived back from Little Zeal that evening, may only have seen him dying.

  The cause of death was entered on the death certificate as chronic gastritis, acute dilatation of the stomach and heart failure. The symptoms seem rather like those of a burst stomach ulcer. Sylvia used to say that her father had died of ‘so-called Nervous Indigestion’, ‘the sickness that destroys people who have constant worries’,71 and that he ‘broke his heart’72 in the war. Her father’s death was, to Sylvia, a total calamity, exacerbated by deep shock, the effects of which hung over the next fourteen years of her life as palpably as any veil, for if the blow to her hopeful outlook on life was great, the damage done to her heart was much greater, and she began to build up layers of caution around it as any deeply wounded person will. She hardly ever wrote or spoke of his death or the miserable year which followed it. What statements exist are stark ones: ‘My father died when I was twenty-two, and I was mutilated.’ ‘It was as though I had been crippled and at the same moment realised that I must make my journey alone.’73

  Nora made it all much worse. She felt not only abandoned but cheated, and looked around for someone to blame. Very soon after the death, Sylvia sat mutely by a washstand while Nora poured out a torrent of reproaches, regrets, woes. Sylvia remembered her wailing ‘Now you are all I’ve got left,’74 the accent probably on the second word. It was ‘a cry of angry desolation’. If Nora had howled for her mother-in-law, one imagines her grief for George must have been blood-curdling. Sylvia had no respite from it even at night, for Nora took it for granted that Sylvia would sleep with her. This was a misery, not least because Sylvia had to take her father’s side of the old four-poster.

  The funeral took place in the school chapel on 26 September and George was buried down the hill at Pinner Road Cemetery, in a plot Nora had bought to fit them both, appending explicit instructions to its use: ‘I do not wish any other member of my husband’s family or mine to be buried in this grave.’75 Tributes, obituaries and letters of condolence came pouring in, many from young men at the front who would be dead themselves within a year or two. ‘Extraordinarily brilliant’, ‘an inspirer’, ‘an exceptionally good teacher’, ‘for ever a deep part of many lives’,76 came the voices from the other side of the study door. This multiplicity of chief mourners and Nora’s lack of feeling forced Sylvia’s grief underground. Sylvia’s loss was as private as the sympathy between her father and herself had been, ‘true minds’, as much their shared secret as the rides on the rocking-horse years before.

  High Street had to be vacated for the new housemaster and his family, and Sylvia and Nora stayed at Grove Hill until they had arranged where to live permanently. The prospect of living together, the widow and her spinster daughter, down at Little Zeal, was repulsive to them both, but seemingly unavoidable. George’s estate, though healthily endowed with savings and share-holdings, had been set up in such a way that his family got more trouble from it than money. In his will George left Nora a legacy of a thousand pounds, all his chattels and a life interest in the rest of the estate, which was to be man
aged by two trustees, Robert Townsend Warner and a friend called Henry Byng. On Nora’s death, all the income from the estate (which the trustees were asked to invest and pay out at their discretion) would be payable to his children, i.e. to Sylvia, but until then she was dependent on her mother. This invidious situation aggravated the bad feeling already rife at Grove Hill and the complex nature of George’s estate made it difficult to administer. Nora’s income was fluctuating and irregular. Sylvia’s income amounted to an allowance of £100 a year.

  Nora made it plain that an uncongenial, unmarried daughter was no comfort to her, but gratefully accepted the support of any male visitor. What Sylvia later identified as Nora’s ‘devouring femaleness’ and her iron will were almost overpowering and Sylvia lived in fear of them. Nora’s despair had a vindictive edge to it and impressed on her daughter ‘that helpless bruise of being unavailing and a nuisance’.77 One day Nora declared that she wanted ‘only anchovy toast, and for the rest I could manage the housekeeping, adding that it was high time I did something useful.’78 Sylvia was tossed this responsibility at a time when food shortages were acute and money was short. There were no potatoes in 1917 and the nation was urged to eat carrots instead. Interesting though it was to have a patriotic reason for not eating carrots, the two women and their Cockney cook had to eat something, and Sylvia conscientiously scanned the papers’ helpful hints on cooking in wartime. A letter in The Times suggested boiled rhubarb leaves as an alternative to boiled spinach, but when Nora saw the resultant mess she refused to eat it. Sylvia ate it, out of pride, and became very ill. A correction in next day’s paper pointed out that rhubarb leaves contain high levels of oxalic acid and are inedible. ‘This discouraged my housekeeping,’ Sylvia wrote. ‘We gave our meat ration to the cook and to the poodle, both of whom led active lives and needed it, and subsisted on home-grown lettuces and water-biscuits.’79

  What happened next was so timely and fortunate for Sylvia that it is hard to believe that Percy Buck did not engineer it, seeing, as he would have done, the strain under which Sylvia was living with Nora. At the Royal College of Music it was well-known that American money was available almost for the asking if a worthy project was put forward, the Carnegie (U.K.) Trust’s charter stipulating simply that it should ‘benefit music’ – a wide brief. Sir Charles Stanford, who was then Professor of Composition at the College, had work published by the Trust and R.R. Terry, the Director of Music at Westminster Cathedral, was considering applying to it to fund an ambitious and important project, the collection, editing and publication of the great wealth of Elizabethan and Henrician church music which until then existed only in hand-written form in cathedral part-books. When the Carnegie Trust gave the project its blessing and its dollars, and a committee was formed of Terry, E.H. Fellowes, the Reverend Arthur Ramsbotham and Percy Buck (although early music was not his speciality), Sylvia was asked to join them. Sylvia said later that it was owing to good luck and ‘the discerning worldly-wisdom’80 of the eminent musician Sir W.H. Hadow that she was chosen above a number of other possible editors, including Cecil Stainer, ‘all with as good or better qualifications’. She could be relied on ‘not to fall out with Terry – indeed to get on very well with him’,81 but that was the least of her credentials. Buck once said that the ideal musicologist ‘combines historical aptitude with a love of music’, and Sylvia possessed both these attributes. Though her colleagues may have thought her a surprising, even unsuitable, choice as co-editor – she was ‘unknown’, young and female – she turned out to be an excellent one.

  By the autumn of 1917 the memorial tablet to George was in place in the Old Harrovians transept of the school chapel. It read, ‘To the dear memory of/George Townsend Warner/Faithful Friend/Beloved Companion/To Young and Old/Wise in Counsel/ Incomparable Teacher’. Nora was preparing to move down to Little Zeal permanently, with a number of distracting projects in mind, for she was still completely overset by George’s death and quite unbearable. On the anniversary of 23 September she had just steeled herself to look at George’s personal papers for the first time and was plunged back into a state of helpless turmoil, which manifested itself in renewed and bitter outbursts against her daughter. But Sylvia did not now have to go down to Devon with Nora. The Tudor Church Music project ensured her a salary of three pounds a week, little enough to live on, but enough to escape with, and she was negotiating for a flat in London in Queen’s Road, Bayswater. A few months later she was lying awake there, alone, apprehensive and vastly relieved, surveying her few belongings by street-light and listening to the milk lorries crashing down the road outside.

  2

  1918–1930

  I

  On Armistice Day, 11 November 1918, Sylvia was in Norwich on Tudor Church Music business. On the train back to London, which was packed with soldiers, she sat thinking about the news. The war which had destroyed old Europe and in which ten million young men had died was over. But it seemed hard to celebrate anything – even peace.

  The Carnegie U.K. Trust allowed for first-class travel expenses, but the flat Sylvia got home to, above the furrier’s at 125, Queen’s Road, was not in the same category. It was small, draughty, separated from its bathroom by a flight of stairs and a common landing, and it was not cheap. With £150 from Carnegie and her allowance of £100, Sylvia’s annual income amounted to £160 after the rent had been paid. Her great-aunt Mary died in 1918, leaving Sylvia a small annuity, but prices were rising steeply all the time and were 125 per cent higher than in 1914. Food was still rationed and hard to get and Sylvia had to exercise even more ingenuity than she had done as Nora’s housekeeper. ‘From time to time I felt hungry, and in winter I often felt cold. But I never felt poor.’1

  Living in London delighted Sylvia. She loved Kensington Gardens and adored Cockneys, so there was seldom lack of entertainment. The British Museum provided warmth during the day and the Westbourne Grove Public Library did the same service in the evenings: ‘If I wished to feel ennobled, I had the Wren Orangery at hand. If I needed amusement, London is rich in public statuary, and if the weather wasn’t suitable for that, I could sit indoors reading Tom Jones. […] Every little advantage I filched from circumstances, every penny I stretched into three halfpence, every profitable abstention, every exercise of forethought, every stratagem and purloined opportunity made me feel as gay as Macheath.’2 But thrift did not always suffice. In 1918 Sylvia was summoned to her bank at Harrow one day to discuss the matter of £19 os 3d by which her account was overdrawn. The bank manager was concerned, having known George Warner and his balance for many years. Sylvia, feeling powerless to help, but not wanting to let the man down, wrote him out a cheque.

  When the Church Music project began it was expected to last for five years or so and Terry had originally thought he could do all the work alone. In the event it took five people twelve years to complete. Gathering the material was extremely time-consuming; every major library, cathedral and minster archive had to be searched for manuscripts. Then the long business of editing began: misprints and mistakes in the copying of the music were identified and removed, parts had to be traced, scored and collated, variants weighed and argued over, the whole brought together in a publishable and, most importantly, a singable form. Hard work and high standards of meticulousness were necessary – and a good deal of patience too, as the committee’s work resolved itself into a series of conjectural readings. ‘There we sat round a table, saying But if; or with a gleam of hope, But why not? And the tugs on the river hooted, clearer & clearer, as the traffic quieted, till the Almoner’s house in the Charterhouse (where we sat) became almost as hushed as when it was part of the real Charterhouse, in the clayey Moorish fields.’3 The composers whose work was finally represented in the ten volumes of Tudor Church Music were John Taverner, William Byrd, Orlando Gibbons, Robert White, Thomas Tallis, Thomas Tomkins and three less prolific composers, Hugh Aston, John Marbeck and Osbert Parsley, though the committee were still arguing about inclusions and exclusions a
s late as 1928.

  Dr Terry’s health was poor and a few years after his project got under way a collapse forced him to all but abandon it. He disappeared from the list of editors in 1925, long after he had actually ceased to participate in the editing. The driving force behind the committee which remained was Buck, whose powers of organisation and faultless manners held the group together far more effectively than had Terry. The Reverend Arthur Ramsbotham, known as ‘Ram’, was a gentle and scholarly man with a sense of humour ideally suited to appreciate Sylvia’s wit. There was not the same rapport with Edmund Fellowes, although Sylvia had the highest respect for his work as promulgator and promoter of the English Madrigal School. In committee she could find him ‘sleepy’ or ‘absurd’, probably because he did not devote the same amount of time to church music as did she, Ram and Buck.

  If anyone thought that Sylvia was going to assume a lowly position on the committee, acting as a sort of secretary-cumdogsbody, they were soon disabused of the notion. She put all her youthful energy and tenacity into the work, knew the material better than any of them and always insisted on her status as co-editor. If this required nerve to begin with, it paid off, and when Sylvia took more work home than did the others it was because she saw how much there was left to do. She always attacked a chore head-on.