The absent Edwardian father

If my earlier posts have failed to convince you to pick up Slightly Foxed's paperback of Diana Holman-Hunt's memoir My Grandmothers and I, well, there's probably little more I can do. You clearly aren't into Edwardian eccentricity, which is a way of approaching life that makes me shudder to contemplate. Next you'll tell me you're not amused by Lord Byron's keeping a tame bear while at college, in protest at the rules against dogs!

Nonetheless, in hopes that it may convince you to mend your ways, I'm drawing on the book one last time today. This time, it's the character of Holman-Hunt's father, a sportsman and man-about-town in India at the time, who provides the entertainment. Early in the book, young Diana receives a letter from her father, which her more staid grandmother reads aloud to her:

"'My dearest Diana,

'I am posting this letter a month before your birthday to make sure it arrives in time.'" She looked at the date on the post mark.

"Well, get on with it, Mamie!" My grandfather crossed his feet on his stick.

"'Under separate cover I am sending you the skin of a young leopard I shot in the jungle. It will make a good rug for your room, if you get it properly mounted and lined.'" She cleared her throat. "'Some people make the claws into broaches . . . ' How extraordinary, do let me see."

"For God's sake get on with the letter! You're not a savage! Brooches indeed!"

She read on: "'I enclose some snapshots of me and my--'" she hesitated and spelled out a word, "it looks like 'CHIPRARSIES.' I wonder if they can be orchids?"

"Of course not," he grunted.

"'Also of me and my new polo ponies. Their names are Hasty-Hussy, Hot House'--and something I cannot decipher." She peered into the envelope. "There are no photographs as far as I can see."

"Perhaps they were in the parcel." He poked at the paper with his stick.

"Here's one," I said, "of a very big man on a very small horse, wearing a white hat."

"I presume the very big man is wearing the white hat," he said.

It goes on like that, the letter slowed and filtered by the grandmother, huffed over by the grandfather, and impatiently awaited by Diana, until finally the end is reached:

"'I wish you many happy returns and I am your affectionate father. Postscript. It is time you knew it is all rot about fairies and Father Christmas.'"

Happy birthday, indeed!

It is perhaps no surprise that when Diana's father does eventually turn up, he's rackety and fast and unreliable, spending most of his time either hungover or getting that way, while introducing his daughter to ladies of questionable virtue. But all that pales beside his one great accomplishment: fulfilling every unhappy boarding school child's dream, he arrives unexpectedly at the school and, with a dramatic flair that leaves the headmaster fuming, up and removes Diana from the school for good. For a father of that period, I think that probably leaves his performance well to the good, on balance.

The evil Edwardian

One of the bits that most amused me in Diana Holman-Hunt's charming memoir of her Edwardian girlhood, My Grandmothers and I (1960)--about which I've written here and there over the past couple of weeks--was a passing mention by a friend of Holman-Hunt's bohemian grandmother of one of her neighbors. The young Diana relates it in conversation:

"Out of the window we saw a black dog. Mrs Swynnerton said it belonged to her neighbour--she called him Mr Creepy Crawley--she said the dog was possessed by an evil spirit and that this Mr Crawley was a black magician."

Though Holman-Hunt doesn't gloss the passage at all, the conclusion is obvious: Mrs. Swynnerton's neighbor was Aleister Crowley. And of course his more upright neighbors called him "Creepy Crawley"!



Any time I encounter Crowley in a book, I'm reminded of Anthony Powell's account of his mother's sole meeting with him, found in the first volume of his memoirs, Infants of the Spring. It happened when she was on her way to a lunch party on the outskirts of London:

At the station my mother noticed getting into one of the compartments a man whose appearance made her feel a sudden sense of extreme repulsion. At her destination, this man reappeared on the platform. She found herself almost praying that he would not be her fellow-guest at luncheon. Needless to say he was. It was the magician, Aleister Crowley--to use his own preferred style--The Beast 666. Asked what he talked about at lunch, my mother simply replied, "Horrors."

Which leads me to share my own Crowley story--not one of a meeting, of course, nor, to be perfectly honest, much of a story at all. But it amuses me and may do the same for you. My first encounter with Crowley was, of all places, in a Dynamite magazine article about Andy Gibb that I read when I was probably six or seven years old. Gibb, if I recall correctly, told of working a session at a Ouija board when planchette spelled out "ALEISTER CROWLEY." Gibb, not unreasonably within the deliberately unskeptical context, assumed that he was communing with the spirit of the long-dead black magician. I don't remember what Crowley said, or what lesson Gibb drew from it, but that name, and the fact that there had at one time existed a man who identified himself as an evil magician, stayed with me over the twenty or so years between that moment and my first encounter, in books, with the historical Crowley in his full Edwardian context.

Like I said, not much of a story, but I like to think that Powell, a fan of planchette, would have at least appreciated the tenacity of Crowley's spirit as it made its way, with impressive inappropriateness, into the pages of a children's fan magazine.

Reading the teacups

One of the most entertaining aspects of Diana Holman-Hunt's My Grandmothers and I, which I wrote about briefly on Wednesday, is each grandmother's endless attempts to set herself up as better, more socially prominent, and more important than the other. The desire for recognition of their social prominence extends to all comers, but it takes on particular force when the opposite number is involved.

My favorite example thus far comes when the Holman-Hunt grandmother--widow of the Pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman-Hunt--is about to have a tea party. The food at her shabby bohemian home is generally unpalatable in its stinginess. Young Diana is mostly fed eggs stamped "foreign" that are, at best, about to go off; one night, her grandmother marvels at the "excellent" turnip she's brought home to boil for three for dinner. But for the tea party, Grand does at least break out the good china:

Each cup had a tag tied to its handle: so-and-so drank from this cup: Lear, Dickens, Burne-Jones, Carlyle, Thackeray, Madox Brown, Meredith, Gladstone, Millais, Patmore . . . There were twenty-four altogether.

"Our tea set at home [with the other grandmother] is quite different," I said, blowing off the dust. The cups and saucers I like best are white and gold, with little views painted on in grey."

"Apart from a few Spanish and Italian things, our china is all oriental. Holman held the strongest views on the design of domestic utensils, maintaining that the whole surface should be covered with symmetrical pattern. Mr Gladstone owned a lot of rubbishy Dresden and Sevres, and yet was most interested to hear Holman's opinions, and in principle William Morris agreed; he and William de Morgan were, in fact, inspired by the idea."

The labelled tea service was a swindle because all these people hadn't come together. She didn't know that any particular cup was really Millais'. "We never tie labels on our cups at home. Arthur [the manservant] wouldn't like it."

"It is rather wearisome, my pet, to be so frequently regaled with Fowler's and Arthur's taboos." She sighed, and then, summoning her patience, went on brightly: "Not everyone has been privileged, as I have , to receive such a galaxy of stars, at one time or another."

So deliciously horrible, no?

The denouement of the tea party scene is fun, too. Diana is talking with one of the guests, who look at her cup:

"What a thrill!" She crooked her little finger. "My cup is labelled Browning!"

"I'm afraid Browning's rather chipped."

"What an At Home it must have been--what a party!"

"They came at different times. It's Grand's idea. It helps people think of conversation . . . " I didn't add that the mistress must have her little fancies.

"You wicked child! Don't spoil it," she pleaded. "I like to think of them all, drinking tea in this wonderful room; the wallpaper and everything is perfect. I can't wait to tell my folks at home. Would it be all right if I wrote my name on the other side of this label? Claire van der Groot?"

"Please do, if you've got a pencil." No one was looking and I could always rub it out.

I love the idea of the nametags as conversation starters: "This reminds me of the time I met the Inimitable Dickens . . . "

Grandmothers

Only time today for two things, but I think they're both worth it:

1 Recommending you read Diana Holman-Hunt's My Grandmothers and I (1960), which is available in paperback from Slightly Foxed Editions. It's yet another in their series of minor English memoirs of childhood, and it's as full of entertaining oddity as any of them. Hunt's grandmothers, as Linda Leatherbarrow puts it in her introduction, were

ferociously egocentric and shockingly indifferent to their granddaughter's welfare. They come prancing off the page, every line of their dialogue ringing horribly true, every word evoking the manners and prejudices of the period between the two World Wars.

One is rigidly just-post-Victorian, one late Pre-Raphaelite Bohemian, and neither can see anything but her own needs. Yet Holman-Hunt tells the story with such winning detail, such an understanding of the inexplicable combination of sensitivity and blindness that is childhood, that we laugh over and over again.

2 Telling you about the part that's made me laugh the hardest thus far, which is one of the most absurdly Edwardian bits: when Diana's grandfather is eating--or, more properly, being fed by his servant, Arthur:

I knew I mustn't watch Arthur poking food into grandfather's mouth, but out of the corner of my eye, across the silver bowl of roses or carnations, I could see a spoonful of meat or pudding poised under his nose. He talked a great deal and when he finished a sentence, he would open his mouth like a baby bird and Arthur would be ready, like the mother bird with a worm.

Horrid, yet funny, no? It goes on, and descends into pure silliness:

If he were in a good mood, when asked if he would like another helping, he would answer in a solemn voice: "No thank you, I am not hungry, but if pressed, I might manage," and then he would burst into song:

Some mulligatawny soup, a mackerel and a sole,
A Banbury and a Bath bun and a tuppenny sausage roll,
A little drop of sherry and a little drop of cham,
Some roly-poly pudding and some jam, jam, JAM.

Magnificent, isn't it? When you read it, you can't help but put a tune to it; if you're me, you can't help but actually sing it aloud to your wife. Who, because she is kind and to some extent knew what she was signing up for, opts for a smile rather than a grimace.