Edith Sitwell Read online

  Sir George cut a strange figure as he created his views. Edith and her brothers had only to look up to see their father perched like a stylite on one of the wooden platforms he placed about the estate. Shaded from the sun by a floppy hat or an umbrella, with a lunch of cold roast chicken beside him, he sat on these platforms for hours, confronting his huge canvas through a telescope. Over many years, he planted hedges and lines of trees, created a garden, raised and lowered hills. He installed a pair of marble fountains and various statues, and he turned a ruined aviary into a Gothic temple. He placed a lake in the middle of the property and, nearer the house, two formal ponds.22

  The family’s annual journeys to the continent, usually in the spring, allowed him to study the gardens of France and, especially, of Italy, a project that bore fruit in a remarkable book, On the Making of Gardens (1909). In it he said that he had visited two hundred Italian gardens – this allows us a glimpse of how the Sitwell children spent some of their time abroad. Sir George at work on his landscape was Edith’s first experience of an artist consumed with his craft. His gardens were not companionable places: ‘The garden, in every language, speaks of seclusion … No sound of the outer world should break the enchantment; no turret-clock should toll the passing hours; nor, could one silence it, should there vibrate through the garden the menacing voice of the church bell, with its muttered curse on nature and on man, lest it beat down the petals of the pagan roses.’23 His taste was in some ways Pre-Raphaelite, but it was also the expression of an aloof personality. He created spaces for solitude; the grounds at Renishaw are marked with his sense of separateness.

  There were, nonetheless, simple pleasures to be had in the grounds of Renishaw and in the surrounding countryside. Edith Sitwell could remember picking mushrooms as a child, and Sacheverell described encounters with miners’ children on blackberrying expeditions. The three Sitwells, being very tall and thin, could reach the highest berries, while the miners’ children had to lift one another to grasp the same branches.24 Osbert recalled donkey rides with Edith to a disused canal. Some afternoons they sailed on the lake with their nurse, Eliza Davis, in a wide flat-bottomed boat, while Sir George took out a canoe. On the heels of a footman carrying a hamper, Lady Ida and her friends would, if they remembered, come down for a picnic.25

  One of the attractions of Renishaw was the animals. Sitwell’s early years fairly swarmed with pets, and rarely in her life was she without at least a cat. She said that when she was about five she became enraptured with a peacock at Renishaw. ‘Peaky’ would greet her in the mornings with a shriek from the leads outside her mother’s bedroom (adjoining her own), and then fly down to the gardens: ‘We walked round these, with my arm round his lovely neck that shone like tears in a dark forest.’ Asked by her nurse why she loved Peaky so much, she gave the Blakean answer, ‘Because he is beautiful and wears a Heavenly Crown.’ When Sir George bought Peaky a mate, Edith found herself discarded. The bird now spent his time teaching his offspring to unfurl their tails. ‘I do not think it was the injury to my pride at being jilted by a peacock that I minded. It was the injury to my affection. It was my first experience of faithlessness.’26

  3

  SERVANTS AND SURGEONS

  ‘Most English gentlemen at this time believed that they had a particular aptitude for endearing themselves to the lower classes.’ So wrote Evelyn Waugh in Men at Arms.1 The Sitwells fit the description even more closely than do the officers in the regiment of Halberdiers. Osbert wrote: ‘I have never experienced that sensation of being separate from the working classes, in the way in which the city-bred, middle-class poets of the proletarian movement continually proclaim themselves to feel cut off.’2 The Sitwells believed that, unlike the despised middle classes, labouring people had a bond with old aristocrats and at the level of instinct understood them; the permanently poor, in their view, had a soft spot for the permanently rich. Perhaps they weren’t entirely wrong – as the manorial connections were still strong enough in 1969 for one of the tenants at Renishaw to give a warm address at Osbert’s memorial service, praising him as a good landlord.3 The claims of being at home with the lower classes now seem naive, but the Sitwell children did have a bond with one group of working people – the servants.

  Most of these people are found only at the edge of the historical records – no more than a name in the census or a comment in Left Hand, Right Hand!4 Yet they were key figures in Edith Sitwell’s life. There was Jones, once Sir George’s scout, who became his butler. Under him, there was old Stephen Pare who went blind after being struck by lightning, and who lit the candles in the evening even though he could not see the flames. His niece, Rose, worked for the Sitwells as a maid around 1900 when she was in her late teens. As an old woman, she wrote to Edith Sitwell about how she had run afoul of her mistress: ‘Lady Ida asked me one day to take Master Sacheverell down the steps to shew him the lakes and coming to the small one at the top he put his foot in the water. Oh dear I did get a scolding from Lady Ida. But Sir George came to the rescue, but I never forgot it.’5 Rose left service when her aunt was sent to a mental hospital. Stephen Pare himself soon died of liver cancer. There were others: Eliza Knowles, the laundress Mrs Westerley, and the coachman, jolly James Broadbent, as well as an array of untraceable maids and footmen. These lives pass like shadows below the stairs.

  But then there was Henry Moat (1871–1940), whose quips and shenanigans Osbert made famous – he now has his own article in the ODNB. Moat worked for the Sitwells, with some long interruptions, over a period of forty-three years, beginning as a footman and succeeding Jones as the butler. Edith described Henry as ‘an enormous purple man like a benevolent hippopotamus’. Born into a family of whalers from Whitby, he had eighteen brothers and one sister, not to mention a tame seal.6 He and Sir George were inseparable, but often separated. Repeatedly, Henry walked out or was sacked and then taken, perhaps cajoled, back. Osbert recalls that his attitude towards his master was a mixture of profound disrespect and veneration. In time, Moat took to calling the red-bearded Sir George ‘Ginger’ behind his back. He had acquired this nickname in a dispute with a taxi driver about his fare: ‘After the war, Ginger, I’ll get even with you!’7 (It was a name that Edith would later use for him herself.) Sir George always referred to Moat as ‘The Great Man’. Pancho to Sir George’s Don Quixote, he exploded his master’s many scientific schemes for domestic improvement, or as Moat called them, ‘his fads’. Osbert writes, ‘“Henry,” he called one day to the great man, “I’ve a new idea! Knifehandles should always be made of condensed milk!” (I must explain that a substance derived from milk, a sort of paste in various colours, had lately made its appearance.) Henry looked particularly disgusted at the idea and very worried at its application. Then, with emphasis, and with an unusual air of correctitude, he countered, “Yes, Sir George … But what if the cat gets at them?”’8

  Edith Sitwell remembered Moat as a protector: ‘I think of him as if at any moment, his living being might come through a door, and say to me, “You’d better run, Miss Edith. Her ladyship is in one of her states and is looking for you.”’ On the night of Henry Moat’s death, Osbert thought he heard his ghost in the pantry at Renishaw. Edith commented, ‘I believe – I like to think – that he was looking for the three children, now two grown men and a grown woman, whom he had befriended through the sad years.’9 Perhaps, Moat’s real gift to the younger Sitwells was a no-nonsense kind of wisdom – a counter-weight to their imaginings. Once Edith found him contemplating the stars, but he remarked, ‘All the same, miss, let’s stick to the eggs and bacon.’10

  In the past, wealthy families usually delegated the love of small children to the servants. The figure of Nanny Hawkins in Brideshead Revisited stands for countless female servants who entered more deeply into the affections of their charges than did their parents. The care of the Sitwell children was entrusted to their nurse Eliza Davis and to the maids who worked under her. Born in 1852,11 she was the daughter of a cobbler f
rom Newbury, Berkshire, and she had once been Lady Ida’s own nursery maid.12

  Osbert remembered Davis typically in a grey alpaca dress, with a look of puzzlement and patience on her face.13 In winter she wore black bonnets, and she could often be seen working at an already outdated sewing machine, attaching ribbons to white lace to make the high caps she wore indoors. A conservative woman, she deplored the changes she saw in the world around her.14 When the children bruised themselves, she applied, from its distinctive green box shaped like a metronome, Butler & Crisp’s Pomade Divine, a compound that had been passing for medicine since the time of Napoleon.15 She was in the habit of taking Edith and Osbert for long walks in Scarborough’s municipal cemetery. Had Sir George, the rationalist, known of this morbid recreation he would have been annoyed,16 but Davis’s taste for such places was shared by most Victorians. Osbert later described similar strolls in his novel Before the Bombardment (1926).17

  Osbert believed that although Davis loved Sachie and himself, the best part of her affection was reserved for Edith, who remembered her as ‘my dear old nurse’. Mysteriously, she saw in Davis an image from Gertrude Stein’s Geography and Plays: ‘a shadow, a white shadow, is a mountain’. However, there was nothing mysterious in the remark, ‘her real name was comfort.’18 Davis disapproved of Sir George’s cleverness as unbecoming a gentleman, and she did not mind criticising him in front of the children. In 1902, she argued ‘violently’ with Sir George, gave in her notice, and, to her surprise, he let her go.19 The children, horrified, kept in touch with her. Indeed, about a decade later Edith took her to see the Dowager Countess of Londesborough, who had been her first employer. By that time Davis was back in Newbury, working for a vicar, her existence made lonely as most of her family had emigrated.20

  One type of servant gets rough treatment at the hands of Edith and Osbert – governesses. Osbert describes how at family gatherings at Christmas, retired governesses would appear and exert their waspish authority over the young women who had succeeded them. This species of dictator is represented by a woman to whom Edith gives the names ‘Mademoiselle Blanchatte’ and ‘Mademoiselle Richarde’ and whom Osbert calls ‘Dickie’. In her prose memoir of the ‘Dukes of Troy’, Edith describes her as crushing Colonel Fantock over his claim to have advised Napoleon III.21 Colonel Fantock was based on Major A. B. Brockwell or ‘Brockie’, a sometime tutor to Osbert and Sacheverell, but essentially a defeated old man whom Sir George helped out. Edith’s poem ‘Colonel Fantock’ depicts him slipping into senility.

  When Edith Sitwell was about eleven years old, her education was handed over to a governess, Lydia King-Church (1868–1963),22 who stayed with the family for five years. Sitwell referred to her as ‘Maum’ and occasionally as ‘Kingie’. When Sachie was five, he offered her sixpence to allow him to use her Christian name and was gently refused.23 Davis waged a proxy war with King-Church, seeing her as the agent of Sir George. Nonetheless, Osbert recalled happy days with the governess, when she read Rider Haggard aloud in the schoolroom and helped them construct a house of twigs; he spoke of her as someone ‘whom we so much loved and revered’.24 Edith herself seems to have enjoyed her company and found her entertaining. She wrote to Sir George on 17 March 1903 (she was fifteen then): ‘Last night, Maum and I had several games of “draughts”; she is a splendid player, and usually sweeps me off the board in less than no time, but what was the matter with her yesterday, I can’t think, for I actually managed to beat her twice! But at the end we were quits, as I was forced to withdraw twice; we are going to play again this evening.’25

  In later years Sitwell recalled the schoolroom where Miss King-Church instructed them as resembling ‘a billiard-room, because of its system of backboards covered with green baize, of rods and poles used for pointing out flat places on a map in which Italy, Greece, China, India, and all the romance of the world was reduced to small pieces of inexpressive paper that you could hold in your hand’.26 She said she was once punished for refusing to memorise ‘The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck’; in her eyes, the boy was ‘the epitome of idiocy, because, as everybody else had left the Burning Deck, and he was doing no conceivable good by remaining there, why in heck didn’t he get off it!’27

  Sitwell believed that the education she received was ‘a devoted, loving, peering, inquisitive, interfering, stultifying, middle-class suffocation, on the chance that I would become “just like everybody else”’.28 Be that as it may, she became well read in English literature and history, functional in French, and had smatterings of German and Italian. She wrote to Sir George on 12 February 1903:

  I have been having some particularly interesting lessons lately; Auntie Floss has very kindly lent me some books, and I have been getting some ideas on Political Economy (which interests me very much) and also upon Greek Literature. While I rest in the afternoon Maum reads me Macauley’s essay on Frederick the Great, and I am studying a great deal of English Literature. Grannie has got some charming music for the Angelus, among which are Tchaikowsky’s ‘Symphonie Pathetique’, and the same composer’s ‘Chant sans Paroles’, one of the daintiest and most fascinating small pieces I have ever heard. The list also includes several of Mme Chaminade’s charming little dances, and various music by Chopin and Liszt. There are also some of Sousa’s Marches, which Sachie loves.29

  The curriculum for a girl at the turn of the century, even Sir George Sitwell’s daughter, had some gaps; she wrote to the poet Demetrios Capetanakis in 1943: ‘I cannot forgive the fact that I wasn’t taught Greek. I know one should start as a child. It is terrible what I have missed.’30 At one point, Sir George thought that she should acquire office skills and prepare for a career in business, but Edith was disinclined and her mother thought the plan too middle class.

  One door was definitely closed. Upon receiving an honorary degree from Leeds in 1948, Edith Sitwell said in her address:

  It was my strong ambition as a girl, to be sent to a University. But this was not allowed – and for the oddest reason … My father was under the sway of Lord Tennyson’s longer poems … Instead of seeing ‘The Princess’ as a farrago of condescending nonsense, interspersed by some of the most wonderful, the most heavenly, lyrics in the English language, he gained from that poem the impression that for a woman to become an undergraduate in a university would result in her becoming unwomanly. He did not seize the point that Tennyson made – that the segregation of women was a mistake – as indeed it most certainly is – rather, he concentrated on the false assumption that learning makes women unfeminine.31

  Miss King-Church kept a schoolroom diary of the children’s, especially Edith’s, activities, through 1901 and 1902.32 It indicates that while staying at Lancaster Gate in London, Miss King-Church took Edith to museums, galleries, and concerts. For example, in October 1901 they went to the Wallace Collection, the Royal School of Art Needlework, the National Gallery, the Donaldson Museum to see old musical instruments, the Royal College of Music, the British Museum, and the aquarium, also taking in a ‘symphony concert’ as well as two concerts of John Philip Sousa at the Albert Hall. As the family travelled on the continent, Sitwell learnt about European art; she wrote to Tchelitchew in the 1930s: ‘I know the Michael Angelo, da Vinci, Raphael, and Rembrandt drawings at the Uffizi by heart. When I was a girl I used to visit them every day.’33

  Edith Sitwell took art lessons from a Scarborough watercolourist named Ellen Edwards; this ‘tea-addicted elderly maiden’ noticed that the young Sitwells’ favourite game was composing limericks. Sometimes Edwards came to the schoolroom, and sometimes Edith went to her studio at nearby Westborough; a photograph survives of a group of girls at work there, among them Sitwell with her spaniel stretched out on a mat.34 For several years, Edith and Osbert took dancing lessons twice a week, laboriously acquiring the steps of quadrilles, minuets, gavottes, lancers, and waltzes.35

  Miss King-Church was Edith’s main piano teacher; they played duets together and performed Grieg’s ‘Morgenstemning’ from Peer Gynt
at a concert in Scarborough on 24 April 1902 in support of the Primrose League, a large organisation that promoted Tory principles. Miss King-Church’s instruction was supplemented by lessons from leading musicians. Sheffield had a rich musical culture at the time, and at some point Edith received piano lessons at Renishaw from Frederick Dawson (1868–1940). A student of Anton Rubinstein and Edvard Grieg, and highly regarded as a concert pianist in Vienna and Berlin, he continued to live in Yorkshire where he had been born.36 At Sir George’s insistence, she also took lessons on the cello from the Spanish master Agustín Rubio (1856–1940). She made little of the instrument, and her refusal to practise – Sachie remembers her preferring to read and copy out poetry – led to trouble with Sir George.37 It seems she also worked at the harp.

  Part of Miss King-Church’s task was to make sure that Edith followed her doctor’s orders and carefully alternated periods of rest and exercise. The diaries note long walks and games of ping-pong. The governess played hockey on the sands at Scarborough, encouraging Edith and Osbert to take up the game. It did not come naturally to Edith, who wrote to Sir George on 2 February 1903 from Louisa Sitwell’s house at Gosden in Surrey: ‘People round about here seem to be very fond of hockey, and spend as many afternoons in the week as possible hitting about in a field just outside Grannie’s garden, a lot of lovely ladies in mustard coloured blouses and black skirts (they look just like wasps) are playing there now!’

  Miss King-Church became engaged to Osbert’s tutor, Herbert Keigwin, who may be related to the Cornish family, noted, charmingly, in Burke’s Landed Gentry as Keigwin of Mousehole. He appears briefly in the diaries, but not after 6 August 1902, which Miss King-Church records with a hint of sadness: ‘very wet day – HSK left at 11:10 a.m.’ He went on to Rhodesia, with the governess to follow the next spring. Edith was caught up in the excitement of planning for the wedding, writing to Sir George on 2 February 1903: ‘Maum has just heard from Mr. Keigwin, he has changed from the Mines Office, to the Native Commissioner’s Office, which Maum says is a very good thing, and he hopes soon to write to you and tell you all about everything. I believe he is getting on splendidly.’38 In other letters, Edith described the wedding presents: cutlery, prints of famous paintings, and a sun umbrella with an owl dangling from the handle. Miss King-Church left the Sitwells and sailed for Rhodesia on 18 April 1903, where she and Keigwin were married the following month. It is impossible to believe that Edith did not admire and miss her.