The Puppet Show of Memory - Baring Maurice

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Hetherington, and Annie. Grace was annexed by me; Annie by Hugo. Hilly had been nurse to my sisters and, I think, to my elder brothers too. She had the slightly weather-beaten but fresh agelessness of Nannies, and her most violent threat was: “I’ll bring my old shoe to you,” and one of her most frequent exclamations: “Oh, you naughty boy, you very naughty boy!” The nursery had Landseer pictures in gilt frames, and on the chest of drawers between the two windows a mechanical toy of an entrancing description. It was a square box, one side of which was made of glass, and behind this glass curtain, on a small platform, a lady sat dressed in light blue silk at an open spinet; a dancing master, in a red silk doublet with a powdered wig and yellow satin knee-breeches, on one side of it, conducted, and in the foreground a little girl in short skirts of purple gauze covered with spangles stood ready to dance. When you wound up the toy, the lady played, the man conducted elegantly with an open score in one hand and a baton in the other, and the little girl pirouetted. It only played one short, melancholy, tinkling, but extremely refined dance-tune.

      At one of the top windows of the house opposite, a little girl used to appear sometimes. Hugo and I used to exchange signals with her, and we called her Miss Rose. Our mute acquaintance went on for a long time, but we never saw her except across the street and at her window. We did not wish to see more of her. Nearer acquaintance would have marred the perfect romance of the relation.

      There were two forms of light refreshment peculiar to the nursery, and probably to all nurseries: one was Albert biscuits, and the other toast-in-water. Children call for an Albert biscuit as men ask for a whisky-and-soda at a club, not from hunger, but as an adjunct to conversation and a break in monotony. At night, after we had gone to bed, we used often to ask monotonously and insistently for a drink of water. “Hilly, I want a drink of water”; but this meant, not that one was thirsty, but that one was frightened and wanted to see a human being. All my brothers and sisters, I found out afterwards, had done the same thing in the same way, and for the same reason, but the tradition had been handed down quite unconsciously. I can’t remember how the nursery epoch came to an end; it merges in my memory without any line of division, into the schoolroom period; but the first visits in the country certainly belonged to the nursery epoch.

      We used to go in the summer to Coombe Cottage, near Malden, an ivy-covered, red-brick house, with a tower at one end, a cool oak hall and staircase, a drawing-room full of water-colours, a room next to it full of books, with a drawing-table and painting materials ready, and a long dining-room, of which the narrow end was a sitting-room, and had a verandah looking out on to the garden. There was also a kitchen garden, lawns, a dairy, a gardener, Mr. Baker, who made nosegays, a deaf-and-dumb under-gardener who spoke on his fingers, a farmyard, and a duck-pond into which I remember falling.

      Coombe was an enchanted spot for us. My recollection of it is that of a place where it was always summer and where the smell of summer and the sounds of summer evening used to make the night-nursery a fairy place; and sometimes in the morning, red-coated soldiers used to march past playing “The Girl I left behind me,” with a band of drums and fifes. The uniforms of the soldiers were as bright as the poppies in the field, and that particular tune made a lasting impression on me. I never forgot it. I can remember losing my first front tooth at Coombe by tying it on to a thread and slamming the door, and I can remember my sisters singing, “Where are you going to, my pretty Maid?” one of them acting the milkmaid, with a wastepaper basket under her arm for a pail. Best of all, I remember the garden, the roses, the fruit, trying to put salt on a bird’s tail for the first time, and the wonderful games in the hayfields.

      We are probably all of us privileged at least once or twice in our lives to experience the indescribable witchery of a perfect summer night, when time seems to stand still, the world becomes unsubstantial, and Nature is steeped in music and silver light, quivering shadows and mysterious sound, when such a pitch of beauty and glamour and mystery is achieved by the darkness, the landscape, the birds, the insects, the trees and the shadows, and perhaps the moon or even one star, that one would like to say to the fleeting moment what Faust challenged and defied the devil to compel him to cry out: “Verweile, Du bist schön.”

      It is the moment that the great poets have sometimes caught and made permanent for us by their prodigious conjury: Shakespeare, in the end of the Merchant of Venice, when Lorenzo and Jessica let the sounds of music creep into their ears, and wonder at patines of bright gold in the floor of heaven; Keats, when he wished to cease upon the midnight with no pain; Musset, in the “Nuit de Mai”; Victor Hugo, when, on their lovely brief and fatal bridal night, Hernani and Doña Sol fancy in the moonlight that sleeping Nature is watching amorously over them; and the musicians speak this magic with an even greater certainty, without the need of words: Beethoven, in his Sonata; Chopin, again and again; Schumann, in his lyrics, especially “Frühlingsnacht”; Schubert, in his “Serenade.”

      I have known many such nights: the dark nights of Central Russia before the harvest ends, when the watchman’s rattle punctuates and intensifies the huge silence, and a far-off stamping dance rhythm and a bleating accordion outdo Shakespeare and Schubert in magic; June nights in Florence, when you couldn’t see the grass for fireflies, and the croaking of frogs made a divine orchestra; or in Venice, on the glassy lagoon, when streaks of red still hung in the west; May nights by the Neckar at Heidelberg, loud with the jubilee of nightingales and aromatic with lilac; a twilight in May at Arundel Park, when large trees, dim lawns, and antlered shapes seemed to be part of a fairy revel; and nights in South Devon, when the full September moon made the garden and the ilex tree as unreal as Prospero’s island.

      But I never in my whole life felt the spell so acutely as in the summer evenings in the night nursery at Coombe Cottage, when we went to bed by daylight and lay in our cots guessing at the pattern on the wall, to wake up later when it was dark, half conscious of the summer scents outside, and of a bird’s song in the darkness. The intense magic of that moment I have never quite recaptured, except when reading Keats’ “Ode to the Nightingale” for the first time, when the door on to the past was opened wide once more and the old vision and the strange sense of awe, unreality, and enchantment returned.

      But to go back to nursery life. Our London life followed the ritual, I suppose, of most nurseries. In the morning after our breakfast we went down, washed and scrubbed and starched, into the dining-room, where breakfast was at nine, and kissed our father before he drove to the city in a phaeton, and played at the end of the dining-room round a pedestalled bust of one of the Popes. Then a walk in the Park, and sometimes as a treat a walk in the streets, and possibly a visit to Cremer’s, the toy-shop in Bond Street. Hugo and I detested the Park, and the only moment of real excitement I remember was when one day Hilly told me not to go near the flower-beds, and I climbed over the little railing and picked a towering hyacinth. Police intervention was immediately threatened, and I think a policeman actually did remonstrate; but although I felt for some hours a pariah and an outcast, there was none the less an aftertaste of triumph in the tears; attrition, perhaps, but no contrition.

      When we got to be a little older … older than what? I don’t know … but there came our moment when we joined our sisters every morning to say our prayers in my mother’s bedroom, every day before breakfast. They were short and simple prayers—the “Our Father” and one other short prayer. Nevertheless, for years the “Our Father” was to me a mysterious and unintelligible formula, all the more so, as I said it entirely by the sound, and not at all by the sense, thinking that “Whichartinheaven” was one word and “Thykingdomcome” another. I never asked what it meant. I think in some dim way I felt that, could I understand it, something of its value as an invocation would be lost or diminished. I also remember learning at a very early age the hymn, “There is a green hill far away,” and finding it puzzling. I took it for granted that most green hills had city walls round them, though this particular one hadn’t. Besides going to Coombe we went at the end of the summer to Devonshire, to Membland, near the villages of Noss Mayo, and Newton, and not far from the river Yealm, an arm of the sea. It was when getting ready for the first of these journeys that I remember, while I was being dressed in the nursery, my father’s servant, Mr. Deacon, came up to the nursery and asked me whether I would like a ticket. He then gave me a beautiful green ticket with a round hole in it. I asked him what one could do with it, and he said, “In return for that ticket you can get Bath buns,

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