Authors: Michael Holroyd
Though nothing appeared to have altered, the acquisition of Alderney marked the beginning of a new pattern in the lives of Augustus and Dorelia. They moved in during August, though he kept on his studio at the Chenil Gallery. ‘We have left Church Street for this place which does well for the kids,’ he announced to Quinn (16 August 1911). ‘…My studio here is still unfinished and this has lost me a lot of work. My missus is well and gay but I very much fear she is in for something rather unnecessary.’
Augustus could not help responding optimistically to everything that was new. But to Henry Lamb the future seemed black: ‘One of the chief temptations,’ he confessed, ‘[is] to succumb to the general pressure of the news that Dorelia is enceinte again, which means she may die at any minute.’
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‘Moral sentiment corrupts the young. Children are the first to lose their innocence, artists the second: idiots never.’
Augustus John,
Chiaroscuro
THE YEARS OF EXPERIENCE
‘I saw in Augustus and Dorelia two of that rare sort of people, suggestive of ancient or primitive themes, whose point lay rather in what they were than in what they said or did. I felt that they would have been more at home drinking wine under an olive tree or sitting in a smoky mountain cave than planted in this tepid English scene. But at least they were bohemians and kept up with style and lavish hospitality the old tradition of artistic life that had come down from William Morris or Rossetti. This I thought was important… ’
Gerald Brenan,
A Life of One’s Own
That summer of 1911 was oppressively hot. The heathlands of the Wimborne Estate were turning brown, and from time to time fires would break out sending columns of smoke far up into the blue skies.
The carts and wagons, with their wildly singing children, rattled past in the sun. Then, swerving off the narrow road, they entered a drive lined, like a green tunnel, with rhododendrons tall as trees. They turned left; and there, before them, lay a curious low pink building, a bungalow with Gothic windows and a fantastic castellated parapet: Alderney Manor.
It looked like a cardboard castle in some Hans Andersen story – a fragile fortress, square, strangely misplaced, from which an army of toy soldiers might suddenly emerge, or a puff of wind might knock flat. The smooth stucco surface, once a proud red, had faded leaving patches here and there of the cardboard colour. With its single row of windows pointing loftily nowhere, the house seemed embarrassed by its own absurdity. ‘But its poetry even outdid its absurdity… There was something fantastic and stunning about it.’
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Alderney was to be the Johns’ home for the next sixteen years. Like Fryern Court, into which they moved afterwards, it became Dorelia’s creation and an eloquent expression of her personality. The rich colours – yellows, browns and mauves – the arrangements of flowers everywhere
lighting up the rooms, the delicious meals – huge soups, stews and casseroles with rough red wine, fish with saffron and Provençal salads with plenty of garlic, tomatoes and olive oil – the wood fires filling the air with their fragrance, contributed to its happy disorder. For they were not tidy places, these houses. Lord David Cecil remembers leaving his hat on the floor one evening, and returning six weeks later to find it undisturbed. Nor were the manners formal: guests were seldom introduced to one another and might be confronted on arrival by an animal silence from the whole John pack. Sometimes visitors would find no one in the house at all, though all doors and windows lay open as if everyone had suddenly vanished through them. When the Spencer brothers, Gilbert and Stanley, came to stay
‘we found the children frightening. At bed time everyone seemed to fade away but no one attempted to “show us to our bedrooms” until we decided that you slept as you fell but took the precaution of falling on odd pieces of furniture which made things easier… Requiring a lavatory I decided to seek one unaided. Having no luck I opened the front door very quietly and crept out into the darkness. Dorelia went into another room and noticing a bowl of dead flowers, opened a window and flung them out smack into my lap.’
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Yet there was a quality to the house. ‘It was like a royal household in the heroic age,’ wrote Romilly John, ‘at once grand and simple.’
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For many it became a place to run away to, a place where someone, calling for tea, might hang on a week, a month, even a year. These visitors perpetually filled Alderney, overflowing into the blue-and-yellow caravans and the ‘cottage’ – a red-brick building, actually larger than the ‘Manor’, standing invisible a hundred yards off behind a range of rhododendrons. ‘This intervening vegetation made comings and goings difficult on wintry nights,’ Romilly recalled: ‘those unfamiliar with the route would bid a cheerful good night to the house-dwellers, launch out into the dark, and presently find themselves struggling amid a wilderness of snaky boughs.’
Alderney had eight rooms. At one end was the dining-room with its long oak table and benches, and a row of windows through which, at mealtimes, the horses would poke their heads, and doze. At the other end, looking on to beech trees, towards the orchard and the walk to the sandpit, was the kitchen. In between lay the bedrooms, and below them capacious cellars.
The kitchen, noisy with helpers, was ruled over by Dorelia’s sister Edie. She was small, with black-brown hair and large brooding eyes, their upper lids curiously straight giving them a strange rectangular shape. Her
mouth was rather prominent, curving downwards, and her expression sardonic yet vulnerable – an index of her life to come. Into her care were given the youngest children and some of the cooking until a local woman, Mrs Cake, was engaged.
By helping to run things inside the house, Edie enabled Dorelia to give more time to the gardens. Her first venture was, appropriately, with an Alderney cow which provided colossal quantities of cream so rich it had the taste of caramel. This cow was soon followed by ‘a large black beast called Gipsy, an adept in the art of opening gates and leading off the increasing herd to unimagined spots in the remote distance’,
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where a team of children would be sent off to shepherd them home. The children were also trained to help Dorelia milk the herd, to skim the milk and make butter. ‘We’d skim the cream out of shallow metal vats,’ Caspar remembered. ‘…Then we poured the cream into an eccentric hand-rotated churn… We then took the lump [of solidified cream] into the kitchen and squeezed out all the buttermilk with rolling pins and patted the butter into rounds or cubes.’
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To the cows, at one time or another, were added, less successfully, a dovecote of pigeons (which all flew away); and, briefly, a ‘biteful’ monkey; then an entire breeding herd of pedigree saddleback pigs; various donkeys, New Forest ponies and carthorses, all with names; miscellaneous dogs, including a fat dachshund called Sonny which looked like a sack of potatoes on wheels; and, among the teacups, endless cats – Siamese, white, tabby and black – which bore unheard-of relationships to one another. Finally came twelve hives of dangerous bees that stung everyone abominably.
‘People who were staying at Alderney would come and watch the operations from a distance, whereupon a detachment of bees made a bee-line for them, alighting on their noses and cheeks and in their hair, which would cause them to rush round and round the field beating their heads like madmen. The next day everybody would present an extraordinary and uncharacteristic appearance. People who had usually long solemn faces would appear with perfectly round ones, and a perpetual clownish smile. Eyes would vanish altogether, and once or twice the victims retired to bed with swollen tongues, convinced… they would be choked to death… At last we resorted to a couple of old tennis racquets… Anybody at a little distance might have imagined that we were playing some very intricate kind of tennis, with special rules and invisible balls.’
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In all things Dorelia seemed to rely on instinct rather than planning. She invented as she went along, ignoring the occasional disasters. ‘With
an air of complete ease and leisure, without hurrying or raising her voice, her long Pre-Raphaelite robes trailing behind her as she moved, she ran this lively house, cooked for this large family and their visitors, yet always appeared to have time on her hands,’ wrote Gerald Brenan. ‘…I remember her best as she sat at the head of the long dining-table, resting her large, expressive eyes with their clear whites on the children and visitors and bringing an order and beauty into the scene.’
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Through these surroundings she moved with an effortlessness compared with which others appeared bustling and vociferous. The windows at Alderney stood open, and into the house flowed the produce of Dorelia’s ‘home farm’ – piles of fresh vegetables from the kitchen gardens; blue and brown jugs of milk and cream; jars of home-made mead tasting like a light white wine; the honey and the butter; lavender in the coarse linen – and everywhere a profusion of flowers.
Almost every kind of tree and shrub flourished at Alderney: ilex and pine, apple and cherry and chestnut, pink and white clematis. The circular walled-in garden, with its crescent-shaped flowerbeds over which simmered the bees and butterflies, became an enchanted place. ‘The peculiar charm of that garden was its half-wild appearance,’ wrote Romilly John.
‘…great masses of lavender and other smelling plants sprawled outwards from the concentric beds, until in some places the pathways were almost concealed. Tangled masses of rose and clematis heaved up into the air, or hung droopingly from the wall… [which] was overtopped most of the way by a thick hedge formed by the laurels that grew outside, and a eucalyptus, which had escaped the frosts of several winters, lifted high into the air its graceful and silvery spire.’
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Dorelia’s influence extended far beyond the walls of this garden. For three decades her taste in clothes was followed by students. She ignored the manners and fashions of London and Paris, and the brash styles that succeeded them. Her style was peculiar to herself. ‘She was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen,’ wrote the children’s author Kathleen Hale.
‘…I remember one Christmas at Alderney, when all the decorations were fixed and everything set for the fun and sing-song, the last to arrive was Dorelia. She appeared on the top step of the room in a white woollen gown, her dark hair looped and braided as always, but so different to the arty hair-do’s of the artistic set. Her warm brown skin glowed in the whiteness of her softly gathered white bodice. Translucent green earrings dangled from her ears – they may have been only of glass but no
emerald could have been more beautiful. They were the only colour she wore. She stood quietly surveying us, unaware of the impact she made.’
From cotton velveteen or shantung in bright dyes and shimmering surfaces; from unusual prints, often Indian or Mediterranean in origin, she evolved clothes that followed the movement of the body, like classic draperies. Her flowing dresses that reached the ground, with their high waistline and long sleeves topped by a broad-brimmed straw hat, its sweeping line like those of the French peasants, became a uniform adopted by many girls at art colleges, and a symbol, in their metropolitan surroundings, of an unsevered connection with the country. In the mythology of the young, Dorelia and Augustus were seen as representing the principle of living through your ideas, not merely conveying them to canvas or on paper.
For the boys Dorelia invented a costume which, with its long-belted smock over corduroy trousers, together with their bobbed hair, gave them the appearance of fierce dolls. ‘Our hair was long and golden,’ Romilly remembered, ‘with a fringe in front that came down to our eyebrows; we had little pink pinafores reaching to just below the waist, and leaving our necks bare; brown corduroy knickers, red socks and black boots completed the effect.’
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Later on, Dorelia dressed her daughters in buff-coloured woollen dresses, rather draughty, with thin crisscross lines, saffron-yellow ankle socks and square-toed black slippers. Their hair, also bobbed, was shoulder length, and their frocks, which they learnt to manipulate with dexterity when climbing off floors or clambering into chairs, reached almost down to their feet. It was as if Augustus’s pictures had come alive. Here, in a coach house converted to a studio, he painted ‘Washing Day’,
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‘The Blue Pool’,
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and made innumerable drawings and panels of the children alone or in groups, portraits of the many visitors from Francis Macnamara
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to Roy Campbell,
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and studies for the figures in his large decorative groups ‘Forza e Amore’,
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‘The Mumpers’
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and ‘Lyric Fantasy’.
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Augustus kept himself in the background. His presence, like that of a volcano, was often silent and sometimes menacing. A swiftly moving, dark bearded figure, with a wide-brimmed hat, tweeds and a pipe, he patrolled Alderney, watching everyone, disconcerting them with his stare, his sudden eruptions. No longer was he the wild youth ‘Gus John’; he had flowered into the full magnificence of ‘Augustus John’, soon to be truncated to the moody monosyllabic ‘John’. In the mornings he was morose, merely issuing a rumbling summons ‘Come and sit!’ He would collect some guest, or a bunch of children, take them off and in a couple of hours produce a
panel of one of the boys with a bow and arrow, or Dorelia leaning against a fir tree, or a series of drawings.
As the day wore on his mood lightened. Often he would suggest taking out the pony trap and driving through the country lanes to the White Hart or King’s Arms, small favourite pubs with sawdust on the floors and the reek of shag and cool ale, where he would drink beer and play shove-ha’penny (‘I play myself. Play alone’). The two eldest boys, David and Caspar, who were in charge of the stabling and grooming, would ‘harness the ponies into their traps, ready to drive up to the front door where Augustus and Dodo would be waiting, he for a round of the nearer pubs, she for a round of the shops’, Caspar wrote. ‘We two would sit on the rail boards, ready to feed and water the ponies at each stop, most of which they knew without being reined.’
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