: The Puppet Show of Memory by Baring Maurice - Authors English 20th century Biography; Baring Maurice 1874-1945; Travel writers Great Britain Biography; War correspondents Great Britain Biography

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SARAH BERNHARDT IN THE 'EIGHTIES 229

THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY

THE NURSERY

When people sit down to write their recollections they exclaim with regret, "If only I had kept a diary, what a rich store of material I should now have at my disposal!" I remember one of the masters at Eton telling me, when I was a boy, that if I wished to make a fortune when I was grown up, I had only to keep a detailed diary of every day of my life at Eton. He said the same thing to all the boys he knew, but I do not remember any boy of my generation taking his wise advice.

On the other hand, for the writer who wishes to recall past memories, the absence of diaries and notebooks has its compensations. Memory, as someone has said, is the greatest of artists. It eliminates the unessential, and chooses with careless skill the sights and the sounds and the episodes that are best worth remembering and recording. The first thing I can remember is a Christmas tree which I think celebrated the Christmas of 1876. It was at Shoreham in Kent, at a house belonging to Mr. H. B. Mildmay, who married one of my mother's sisters. I was two years old, and I remember my Christmas present, a large bird with yellow and red plumage, which for a long time afterwards lived at the top of the nursery wardrobe. It was neither a bird of Paradise nor a pheasant; possibly only a somewhat flamboyant hen; but I loved it dearly, and it irradiated the nursery to me for at least two years.

The curtain then falls and rises again on the nursery of 37 Charles Street, Berkeley Square, London. The nursery epoch, which lasted till promotion to the schoolroom and lessons began, seems to children as long as a lifetime, just as houses and places seem to them infinitely large. The nursery was on the third floor of the house, and looked out on to the street. There was a small night-nursery next door to it, which had coloured pictures of St. Petersburg on the wall.

I can remember the peculiar roar of London in those days; the four-wheelers and hansoms rattling on the macadam pavement through the fog, except when there was straw down in the street for some sick person; and the various denizens of the streets, the lamplighter and the muffin-man; often a barrel-organ, constantly in summer a band, and sometimes a Punch and Judy. During the war, when the streets began to be darkened, but before the final complete darkness set in in 1917, London looked at night very much as it was in my childhood. But the strange rumbling noise had gone for ever. Sometimes on one of the houses opposite there used to be an heraldic hatchment. The nursery was inhabited by my brother Hugo and myself, our nurse, Hilly, and two nurserymaids, Grace 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.

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