The country gentleman will always be the backbone of England; the backbone, and also the speedometer; the backbone, because the speedometer.—Lord Hopedale.

It was only my illness that interrupted what had for some time been a cherished ambition with me,—to find a house for myself and my parents which, without being too far from London, would be more comfortable and more convenient to our needs. There was still one side of the great city which had never been affected by the growth of suburban railway facilities in the twenties and thirties—the little stretch of Hertfordshire that used to lie between the “Great Northern” and the “Great Eastern” systems. It was a fortunate choice that directed me to Greylands, a country property small for those days (though it seems large enough now!) in the neighbourhood of West Mill. The proximity of the Buntingford ’drome would make it easy to land near by even in bad weather, there was water on the estate, and I counted—alas! unnecessarily, as it proved—on the new golf links at Ardeley to satisfy my father’s active tastes.

It was actually while we were engaged in moving into the new house that my poor father had a stroke, the precursor of no very distant end. He lingered during the remainder of that year (1941), and was sometimes well enough to be wheeled down to the links in a bath-scooter; but early in the new year he had a fresh stroke, and died that February. In him I seemed to lose another link with the old, vigorous generation that had seen the turn of the century. He rests in the churchyard at West Mill: his epitaph, written in the style of a past day, runs as follows:

The acquisition of a moderate income could not induce me to give myself up to idleness and self-indulgence. I determined that I would take up the reins of management where my father had dropped them and make his business into the success it deserved to be. For this purpose I decided to go right through, starting at the very bottom as an inferior clerk, and working my way up. This was by no means an uncommon thing in those days for the junior partner of a business firm to do, and I have always felt that it gave us a great advantage, which many modern young men are unfortunate enough to miss. It meant that we got to know our employÉs, and to earn their confidence by working side by side with them. It meant that we had a practical, first-hand knowledge of every department of the work, instead of depending on information supplied to us by others. It meant that we had the opportunity of winning our spurs, by showing in a humble sphere the capacity which alone would qualify us for a superior position. I have known a Gosport, a Macpherson, and a Schenkenberg serve their apprenticeship in this way, and express gratitude afterwards for the salutary discipline it entailed. For myself, I could not well leave my mother, who depended very much on me since our bereavement, but I had been careful to have the teledictaphone installed at Greylands as soon as we took it over, and it was thus possible for me, without ever actually going to the office, to take my orders every morning like a simple clerk, and to execute them to the satisfaction of my employers. In rather less than a year I had gained such a thorough grasp of the business and given such evidence of financial ability that I allowed myself to be advanced to the position of a partner in the firm. Not that, in doing so, I had any intention of giving myself an easy time or doing less than my share in the actual direction of the firm: from ten to one every morning and from three to five in the afternoon, unless any serious rival claims distracted my attention, the teledictaphone was always at my side and the affairs of the office engrossed me.

Meanwhile, it must be understood that it was rather a small world we lived in. It has been my good fortune to move in various kinds of society, and I will freely confess that it was not till a much later period than this that the important people, the people who will have left their names inscribed on the scroll of history, were the guests of my roof or the habituÉs of my boudoir. Yet the simple life of the country-side had its charm in those days, a charm not easily recaptured now, when ease of intercommunication has made neighbours strangers, and thrown us into the society of cronies three counties off. I had, of course, my private helico, and had recently learned to drive it myself; and already one thought nothing of driving over to Cambridge for an afternoon call, or up to London for a dinner. But it needed a comfortable income to do this, and they were not days of comfortable incomes. The county squires still kept up the tradition of big nurseries; a family of four or five was by no means unusual even among Protestants. The professional classes were still heavily burdened by the income tax, which was nearly a shilling in the pound, and it was only in very rare cases that they could keep anything more than motors. Our old doctor, though a bachelor, only drove a Rolls-Royce till the day of his death. So we were all herded together within the narrow confines of “the county,” and found, as people no doubt find when they are shipwrecked together on a desert island, that the little handful of acquaintances necessity makes for you are well worth studying; have their own foibles, their own angles, their own little traits of lovableness; that to keep up your own position, and at the same time to keep the peace, among your immediate neighbours demands as much in the way of social tact as holding a salon in Hampstead or entertaining Royalty in Mayfair.

To begin with, there was our vicar, Mr. Rowlands. A mild man, hampered by shyness and unconscious of the power of local gossip, he had made a grave mistake in marrying his curate. Mrs. Rowlands, who had been ordained a deaconess at the early age of 24, was a woman of strong, masterful character who had come into the parish with the almost expressed intention of “making things hum.” She was of the most violent Relativist school, and rumour said that she always omitted the Creed when she was conducting the service herself, and sat down, sometimes even whistling to herself, when Mr. Rowlands said it. Mr. Rowlands was of the old-fashioned evangelical school, and the village had grown accustomed to his ways: churchgoing was not common, but his slim figure in its plain cassock and penwipery sort of cap, bound for morning or evening service in church, was a familiar sight to all, and he was universally respected. The deaconess, Miss Anderson as she then was, became the subject of a local taboo; and a memorial, signed by twenty-eight communicants, was sent to the Bishop to uphold Mr. Rowlands against the misbehaviour of his impetuous colleague. It was while this document still lay—it is to be feared, unread—on the Bishop’s study table, that the unlooked-for Concordat between vicar and curate suddenly altered the whole situation; Mr. Rowlands, instead of laying a complaint against Miss Anderson, had determined to lead her to the altar.

I do not know how they got on after that with the church services, for I was not pratiquant as far as the village was concerned. It will have become obvious by now that my religious convictions at the time were not of the deepest, and my church attendance was confined to an occasional visit to Evensong in King’s Chapel, where the services were at that time adorably rendered. But in the life of our little community Mr. and Mrs. Rowlands counted for a good deal. He was of the eternal type produced by an established Christianity: you could picture him, with a few alterations of outward manner and expression, as a benign Caroline clergyman, happily married, writing love-poems to wholly imaginary young ladies with classical names, or as an old-fashioned High Churchman of the early Tractarian period receiving his “Tracts for the Times” regularly, and not knowing whether he stood on his head or his heels as he read them. He was obsessed with the consciousness that we lived in changeful times, and desperately convinced that “the Church” must have “an attitude” to take up about it all. Often he would deplore the fact that the Bishops did not “give him a lead”: for himself he never got nearer to an attitude than a profound conviction that “while on the one hand ... yet on the other hand...,” a turn of phrase which was so frequent in his sermons that Juliet Savage, who sat under him exasperated whenever she came to stay with me, said he was the only Christian she had ever met whose left-hand never knew what his right hand did. Another fixed principle of his was that all these movements of our time would work themselves out right in the long run: whatever was best, he used to say, would remain, while everything else would disappear. The only occasion on which this conviction is known to have deserted him was one night when his house was broken into by burglars.

His was a marriage of opposites. Mrs. Rowlands seemed to worship innovation for its own sake, and she seemed to read the papers for no other purpose than to learn what new discoveries or inventions were announced, principally from America, and retail them afterwards, with a purr of admiration, to anyone who had not had the good fortune to see them first. I was easy game for her, since I used to keep abreast of the day’s news by means of the tape machine in the front hall, and was never properly prepared for her onslaughts. “Do you hear this, Miss Winterhead,” she would say, “about the utilization of atomic force? They tell me” (“they” always meant the Daily Mail) “that we shall soon be able to travel to Spitzbergen without spending a penny!” Then I would maintain that they would have to pay me pretty heavily before I would go there (Mrs. Rowlands always made me frivolous), and she would retaliate by informing me that it was now proved, from a skull discovered near Letchworth, that man had existed three hundred million years before Adam; it was no good my suggesting that Eve’s appearance must in that case have been welcomed with relief; she would be off on a fresh tangent before I had finished my sentence. I never know which class inspires more horror in me, the people who tell you things you did know or the people who tell you things you didn’t. The former insult one’s intelligence, the latter one’s lack of it.

The difficulty of fitting in Mrs. Rowlands was not so much her husband, for she had him well in hand, nor the villagers, who to tell the truth were rather apathetic about her innovations. (I remember there was some trouble when she proposed a scheme for the bringing up of all the children of the parish in complete ignorance of who their parents were, but this was averted somehow.) The real difficulty was with Lady Combe, the Squiress of the place, from whom my house was rented before I managed to buy it. Lady Combe, the wife of Sir Richard Combe, an amiable old nonentity, combined a most acidulated manner and a total incapacity for all politeness in conversation with an inexhaustible desire to mother the parish, the county, and the world in general. She was also incurably old-fashioned. Her great speciality was bazaars (which she still pronounced in the old-fashioned way, with the accent on the last syllable), and of these she seldom organized less than three in a twelvemonth. Her preference, she confided to me, would have been for the old style of bazaar when you actually had “stalls” with goods laid out on them after the manner of an ordinary shop, and the neighbours came and bought such goods, at fancy prices, quite regardless of whether they needed them or not. She said she got rid of all the really ugly things in her house that way—I cannot think what they must have been like, considering what was left. As it was, she demanded your presence at the bazaar itself if you were to be awarded your winning numbers. And, unless she were violently discouraged, she would have her lawn (or mine, for that matter) set out with a whole array of skittle-alleys, coco-nut shies, and lucky tubs such as, I suppose, our great-aunts must have revelled in.

Over these bazaars there was a permanent difficulty, because it had been laid down by law (owing to Nonconformist action at the time of the ballot scandals in the early thirties) that no bazaar might be held unless either the local clergyman or his wife were on the committee of management. I shall never forget a luncheon-party at my house at which Lady Combe and I and the Rowlands were present to discuss the latest bazaar-fÊte—I think it was in aid of the Society for Teaching Useful Trades to Out-of-work Chauffeurs—but fell inevitably into general conversation. “Miss Winterhead,” said Mrs. Rowlands, “did you see about that very interesting schism in the Boy Scout Movement since the Congress at Nottingham, in to-day’s Times?” “Yesterday’s, my dear, yesterday’s,” put in the vicar, as if to suggest that the crisis might have had time to blow over by now. It appeared that the Socialist patrol leaders had protested en masse against the rule of saluting the Confederation Jack, and since they could not win their point, had started a schism. In this new “Boy Steward” movement, the practice of saluting was to be entirely abandoned; the names of carnivorous animals such as the lion and the tiger were to disappear from the totem-list, and to be replaced by those of the ant, the bee, the beaver, and other commodity-producing animals, umbrellas might be carried instead of staves, and most important of all, the sleeves might be buttoned at the wrist instead of rolled up to the elbow. Further, instead of doing a good deed every day, the Stewards were under contract to do a bad deed every day; and many old gentlemen were writing to the papers to complain that they had been snowballed, or tripped up with wires, or brought down by margarine-slides, under the influence of the new movement. Of all this, I need hardly say, Mrs. Rowlands was in hearty support. “Independence,” she said, “and self-reliance—that’s what the old movement lacked.”

“Then, I suppose,” suggested Lady Combe icily, “that you would endorse the action of a ‘circle’ of Boy Stewards in Darlington who surrounded a heavily moustached clergyman of the Established Church with cries of ‘Walrus!’ as I read in the paper myself?” Mrs. Rowlands was rather taken aback, and the vicar hastened to interpose “A totem-cry, dear Lady Combe, doubtless a Totem-cry. I myself was surprised for a time after coming into the parish at being greeted with shouts of ‘Rah-rah-rah-rah-kangaroo!’ but I understood afterwards that it was well-meant, thoroughly well-meant.” I said I had never thought of the walrus as a commodity-producing animal. Mrs. Rowlands, recovering herself, said that the reason why these boys were surprised at clergymen wearing moustaches was because the Westernizing party (as the High Churchmen were already beginning to be called) had always made such a point of going about clean-shaven, which gave a handle to the anti-clericals. (I suppressed a wild desire to suggest that they would have given a better handle by wearing moustaches.) My mother said she could remember when it was quite common for laymen to wear moustaches. She could also remember the habit of shouting out “Beaver!” when you met a man with a beard, but she did not think this was connected with the Boy Scout movement. Mr. Rowlands said “Beavers! Ah, exactly,” as if that proved it. Lady Combe said in her days boys used to have a respect for the clergy, whatever their views, and after all the children who called Elisha “bald-pate” were eaten by she-bears. Mrs. Rowlands said it was now proved that this story was merely a false explanation of some old Babylonian sculpture, probably of a ritual origin. Mr. Rowlands said it was quite true the Hebrew word might mean “she-bears,” but it could also just as well mean “whirlwinds.”

Lady Combe said she thought, anyhow, it was a shame to teach innocent children to have no respect for their elders, their country, or their God. Mrs. Rowlands said that, since Larsen’s investigation of juvenile crime, she would have thought it impossible for anyone to talk like that about innocent children. Mr. Rowlands said he hoped great good would come out of the new movement, great good. But he thought it would need a great deal of direction. Lady Combe said she would like to have the directing of it. Mrs. Rowlands said she thought Mr. Gomez (the leader of the new movement) was one of those men who are sent to make the world think. Lady Combe said that if she had Mr. Gumpish at the end of her garden-hose she’d make him think. Mr. Rowlands said he felt, anyhow, there was great promise of good in the Salvation Scouts. Lady Combe said she never had approved of the Salvation Army since they gave up preaching in the streets: “but that came, of course, of their getting endowments; it’s the old story, once you endow a religion you ruin it.” This was a hit at Mrs. Rowlands, who was well-known, in spite of her progressive views, to be hostile to the Disestablishment agitation which was then running through the country. “My own feeling,” she said, “is that our first duty is charity towards others”—this with a venomous look at Lady Combe—and thereupon she took her leave. For a long time after this encounter Lady Combe would never go to the parish church, but ordered out her picturesque old Napier car (she planed, not on a helico but on an old push-plane; only she would not have even this out on Sunday) and drove off importantly to Buntingford.

But I must not give the impression that these bickerings were typical of our little country society. There were brave days, when we would drive out to the meet (this was before the Universal Muzzling Act, which to my mind altered the whole character of foxhunting) at Braughing or Furneaux Pelham, and cheered as the huntsmen rode off: there were still a few old gentlemen in our part who followed the hounds themselves on horseback. Or when Christmas came round, and we would entertain the village children in mediÆval fashion with a huge Christmas tree in the great Hall, and their merry laughter would ring through the house as they daringly plucked the snapdragon from the burning petrol. Or those autumn afternoons when the shooting-season was on, and you would hover with the guns at two or three hundred yards, fascinated to watch the beaters shooing their way through the thick undergrowth far below you. And so you would come back, refreshingly tired, to the ingle-nook by the comfortable stove-side, and tell stories of the day’s sport, while the dusk gathered after the mid-ocean glories of a Hertfordshire sunset. Well, well, the pseudo-Catullus was right—fulsere vere candidi tibi soles.

My dear mother’s health gave me some anxiety at this time, and I did not spend much of my leisure in visiting: but London was, of course, easily accessible, and I went up a good deal to theatres, dinner-parties, and dances. Dancing had become a simpler matter since my school days, and you could go through an evening quite creditably without knowing anything besides the dear old two-step. Balls still did not ordinarily last beyond four in the morning: we were early birds then, and not only the business offices but many even of the larger shops were open by eleven: we had to get some sleep! There was never any difficulty for me in securing partners: the hostesses of the time were all bemoaning the fact that none of the young women seemed to dance nowadays: “My dear,” Mrs. Drake^[4] used to say, “I wish you’d known my dancing-room twenty years ago! Young women used to be really active then, and thought nothing of spending an evening dancing after they’d been motoring or golfing all day. But now they’ve all become bears, my dear, positive bears.” But in truth it was not, as I well knew, merely the pressure of other enjoyments that made us women reluctant to appear in the ball-room. There was already a strong feeling that the old system of “partners” was degrading to our sex, and it was only when the new “catch-as-catch-can” movements were introduced from America that we felt woman had attained her true dignity.

Drawing-rooms in those days (for we still had “drawing-rooms”) looked very different from our boudoirs, chiefly because it had gone quite out of fashion to have pictures on the walls. Nobody, except a few die-hards, dared to be fin de siÈcle enough to hang the old representation-pictures, which we were taught to regard as only fit for chocolate-boxes: whereas the Futurist pictures—well, one did not want to be Puritan about it, but there were the servants to think of. The stove-place, owing to the necessity of having a chimney, still stood against one wall of the room, a very inconvenient arrangement, since only a few people could warm their hands at the same time. The electrics, though often concealed with shades, were still visible: lighting by radiance did not come in till much later. Meal-times were very early, judged by our standards: luncheon seldom happened after two, or dinner after nine. The craze for bridge and poker had almost died down by the time of which I write: after our strenuous days we felt that intellectual games were out of place, and the reign of “plonk,” “oogle” and other games of chance was already beginning. Out of doors, tennis had nearly come to its own, although only the larger houses at that time had been roofed over for courts, and ordinary folk had often to travel some distance for a game.

The theatre was then, I suppose, at a height of classical perfection it has never quite attained since. Perhaps this is partly due to the nature of the case: it is difficult for us old-fashioned folk not to regret our modern “improvements.” After all, there was something to be said for seeing the actor before you in the flesh, hearing his own words as he uttered them. “Mummy,” a small infant of my acquaintance said when he was taken to the first Cinemaphone performance in London, “I want to see ve words come out of his mouf.” And there are effects of depth and substantialness which, with all the best appliances we have invented, you cannot quite reproduce on a blank wall. Anyhow, in the London of the forties we used to expect to see the actors and actresses appear in person: and if one of them was indisposed we had to put up with an “understudy.” It is, of course, difficult for the modern generation to imagine how repeating the same part in the same theatre for four or five years on end can have failed to induce staleness and listlessness in the cast; yet I can assure my readers it was not so. Douglas Fitzgerald and Leonard Archdale never consented to perform for the screen, so that when I say I have seen them (the former in “What about it?” the latter in “Strike me!”) I can make a boast which few living people share with me. Those other giants and giantesses of the stage, Bruce Holbrook, Denys O’Leary, Vivian Stalbrooke, Olga Labadie and so on, are figures which my readers will say they have all seen: I can only reply, as Aeschines is said to have said of Demosthenes, “Quid, si ipsum audiisses?”

Of the external appearance of London I do not mean to say much, since after all it has not changed in its essentials, except perhaps in the suburbs. Probably the modern reader, if he could be transported back there, would find the most unsightly aspect of it the advertisements which, before sky-writing was properly understood and developed, used to be written up on board and blank walls, as they are now on shop windows. I should like to see him cross the street on the level of the traffic, as we used to have to do in those days! But of course we did not need to cross the street so often, when we were allowed to move in either direction on either pavement: and only a few of the more crowded pavements had been mobilized, so that you could ordinarily look into a shop window while standing still. The shops themselves, before the London Improvement Act, had grown to an enormous size: they used to tell an irreverent story of a very ungodly young gentleman who died while shopping at Selfridge’s, and for quite a long time afterwards could not be persuaded that he had got further than the basement! But I should weary my readers if I prosed on about all the changes I have seen since then: after all, you can see London as it was in the forties in plenty of old prints and history-books.

Those were happy days in my life, though I had not yet found my two great sources of happiness, of which you shall hear later. I suppose I must have had my good looks, for I was filmed among the Society beauties of the day, but only, I think, when they were getting rather hard up for material! My business was prospering, and I had no cause to regret, as I have never since had cause to regret, my purchase of Greylands. And if at times the ambition to write or to come before the world as a public figure visited me in my dreams, it was only to be put on one side. Some women, they say, lose their ambitions with matrimony; for myself, I think it has always been quite otherwise, and it was chiefly the desire to show my husband that I was worthy of his love, and to give him a name and an importance in Society, that later made me look to a political career as the proper sphere for the exercise of my poor capacities.