Authors: Virginia Nicholson
Elizabeth had learnt to write passably, but that didn’t seem to offer prospects of earning a living. Nursing? It turned out that she had a heart complaint and the arduous training would kill her. ‘So we had to think again.’ Ida
now decided to have her daughter trained as a handicrafts teacher, but
though she attempted for a while to instruct children in embroidery and
leatherwork, Elizabeth found she missed home. As an invalid, Ida was living
a confined life with one devoted servant on the Hampshire coast, her
beloved husband joining her whenever he could be released from his work
as Professor of Divinity in Oxford. And it was here at Barton-on-Sea that
Elizabeth found herself as a writer. ‘My handicraft training was not now
providing me with what I wanted, a home-based career so that I could be
with my mother as much as possible . . .’ she recalled.
Island Magic
was written in a corner of her mother’s bedroom at Barton. The novel was acclaimed and her career as a writer blossomed, but at that period little else in her life proved fertile. At Barton her mother continued to be racked with pain and illness. Operations succeeded each other; after each one she
nearly died. Elizabeth herself now fell into a pit of depression in which she doubted her faith and ultimately her own identity. This was followed by a terrifying nervous breakdown. Then in her father died. ‘Between my
father and my mother the closeness had been lifelong. They had been
almost one person. What the parting meant to her she allowed no one to
know.’
Ida and Elizabeth now clung to each other like shipwrecked passengers;
on their raft they were joined by the family nanny. The three of them
moved to Devon. Here through the air raids of the s mother and
daughter shared a bed – ‘determined to be together whatever happened’.
Singled Out
With the night-time bombers booming over nearby Plymouth, each super—
stitiously clutched the object most precious to her: Ida, her jewel-case, and Elizabeth, the manuscript of what was to become her best-seller,
Green
Dolphin Country
. After its publication in financial anxiety was at an end.
For six devoted years after the war Elizabeth nursed her mother: a long,
hard struggle, made worse by Ida’s mental collapse. She died at last in .
And now Elizabeth, in her fifties, was finally alone.
*
But not quite alone. The index of Elizabeth Goudge’s autobiography
includes an entry under ‘Dogs’. It lists the following: Brownie, Coach,
Froda, Max, Randa, Swankie and Tiki – in total twenty-two pages cover
a lifetime of fox terriers, half-breeds, spaniels, chows and Dandie-Dinmonts.
Here, undoubtedly, Elizabeth found love. Brownie had a noble forehead
and paced beside her with dignity on their walks. A ‘perfect being . . .’, he ‘. . . had no faults . . . [and] he loved deeply’. What human being could measure up to Brownie?
Not quite so anthropomorphised, the three Dandies – Tiki, Randa and
Froda – became known as the Hobbits. Like Tolkien’s sub-humans, they
had ‘the art of disappearing swiftly and silently’, ‘and like the Hobbits
they have large furry feet’. Each was loved in its own special way. Tiki,
like a witch’s familiar, had special perceptions, and could always tell in
advance when her mistress was coming home. Randa was ‘a beautiful film—
star . . . a fine lady who liked to pose on silken cushions’. Froda was ‘a fairy creature who . . . [appears and disappears] like a gleam of sunshine, aloof and mysterious in her fantasy world’.
[I believe] that the love we have for our animals insures their immortality for as long as the love lasts . . .
wrote Elizabeth.
This was perhaps the kind of thing that the psychologists were warning
against. Maude Royden, the feminist and preacher, felt compassionate pity
for the countless maiden ladies whose sentimental attachments to their pets
inspired ridicule. ‘I think of the imbecilities in which the repressed instinct has sought its pitiful baffled release, of the adulation lavished on a parrot, a cat, a lap-dog . . .’ And Laura Hutton, in her appraisal of single solitude,
The Single Woman and Her Emotional Problems
(), also remarked on how frequently the middle-aged and lonely found outlets for their emotional
Caring, Sharing . . .
life in exaggerated and doting affection for animals: ‘. . . a love which is so often made fun of, but is so real to the lover . . .’
Angela du Maurier was under no illusion about the fact that her adulation
of dogs was a replacement for other loves. At twenty-two Angela had met
‘a god-like individual’ while on holiday on the Riviera. ‘This was IT at
last . . . for two months life was at its most blissful.’ For that brief span she indulged her fantasies to the full; there were to be blue delphiniums as she walked up the aisle; her best friends would all be there . . . and then he jilted her. Nursing a broken heart, Angela walked into Selfridges . . .
. . . and there found the person who was my one true love for fourteen years. She cost me six guineas only, and she was Chinese. I called her Wendy. Wendy Pansy Posy Lollypop Stone-Martin . . . She was a
tiny Pekinese
. Just three months old.
But she would not concede that the Pekinese was limited by her animal
nature. ‘Wendy . . . was a Person.’ She was astoundingly intelligent, wilful, musical (‘she would roll over in ecstasy when she heard the Fire Music of the
Walku¨re
’); she was also an intrepid traveller, talented rat-catcher, and all-round terrific sport. For Angela, there was ‘something fundamentally lacking in the type of person who does not believe that animals have souls’: If you have a dog you need never feel alone. Their companionship is one of the most precious things in life . . . Their very silence can show affection, and the expression in a dog’s eyes will give its heart away. I have cried with them and blasphemed in their company, and they have quietly looked up, and perhaps licked one’s hand, or even put their paws on one’s lap. The dog that loves its owner and who is loved in turn always knows when something is amiss.
Maude Royden and Laura Hutton were both understanding of the need
to be needed by small powerless creatures; they could see how strong was
the impulse which drove such women to discharge their emotional energies
on an animal. The energies were normal. It was all a question of finding
balance, self-knowledge and adjustment to the ‘rich resources of life in our present age’. Each woman had her own personal contribution to make, married or unmarried.
Cicely Hamilton lived with a cat called Peterkin, and she was clear-sighted about Peterkin’s role in her life. She herself contributed greatly over the years. As a writer, campaigner for women’s rights, teacher and journalist, she was a committed and lifelong feminist. Early on she had come to recognise that frittering her life away trying to be attractive to the opposite
Singled Out
sex was a waste of her valuable time, and that her ambitions would be
unachievable with a husband in tow. Choosing not to marry was for her a
cool-headed decision. Cicely was emphatically not uncomfortable about
living alone, ‘. . . like the traditional spinster, with a cat for company’. In her sixties, after a busy life, she found solitude brought contentment. But the cat helped. Cicely was as absorbed by the qualities of her beloved
Peterkin, with whom she poses on the frontispiece of her autobiography
(
Life Errant
, ), as Elizabeth Goudge and Angela du Maurier were by their dogs. Cats, Cicely claimed, made better companions in a solitary household than dogs. Dogs were too apt to give ‘persistent, uncritical
worship . . .’, whereas cats did not suffer fools. With a cat around, you
didn’t need a human companion to tell you your faults. Though fond of
her, Peterkin was, like all his species, selfish and lazy, and Cicely felt that his presence was a salutary rebuke to her own tendencies to moral turpitude.
With a cat there is no need of the human antidote; the cat is not given to worship.
It is affectionate – that I can testify – but without any element of fawning; rather is it balefully authoritative. However humble its immediate ancestry, it remembers its divine descent; born in the gutter it will enter a drawing-room and take the best chair for itself !
In truth, such pets were the babies these women never had; little, needy
and lovable, they drew out the caring, protective nature of their owners.
But many childless women found careers looking after real babies. For them
the deep emotions of motherhood could in some measure be echoed, if
not replicated, in the intimacy between a nursemaid or nanny and her
charges.
Pretty Nell Naylor was a typical case, a labourer’s daughter from Lincolnshire who met her fiance´ when she was fresh out of nanny training college in . Nursemaiding might have seen her through till their marriage, but
the young man was killed, and Nell never got her own babies to look after.
From the age of twenty-four she appears to have given up hope of love. ‘She
never bothered with that sort of thing from then on . . .’ her great-niece
remembered. While the war lasted she helped nurse injured soldiers, from
a sense, perhaps, that further needless deaths could be prevented. After the war was over she joined the exodus to the Dominions, finding a job nannying in Canada. In she returned to England. For the rest of her
life she nurtured, loved and cared for a succession of fortunate upper-
Caring, Sharing . . .
middle-class boys and girls. ‘We adored her; she was in every sense a
member of the family . . .’ one of these remembered.
The children’s nurse Miss Olive Wakeham was another; ‘I loved those
children – all of them!’ Her babies were as well looked after by her, as
cuddled and cared for as they were by their own mothers, and perhaps
better. Lady’s maid Rose Harrison’s relationship with young Michael
Cranborne is another instance of mutually adoring companions. It would
not be hard to produce more cases where lower-class nannies were indeed
far more loved, trusted and confided in by the children of the often remote
and uncaring upper classes. The children, when they grew up and wrote
their memoirs, were eloquent about these carers, who soothed their fears,
kept their secrets, protected and loved them; from Winston Churchill to
Edward Sackville-West, Frances Partridge to the Marquis of Bath, they
paid them ample tribute.
But the nannies themselves rarely committed their emotions to paper. It
is hard to find accounts that illustrate how the abundant love felt by
these working-class women for their privileged charges to some extent
compensated for its shortfall in their own lives. One can only conjecture.
But that the children’s love was reciprocated is beyond doubt.
Nanny Robertson joined the Eyre family in when she was forty,
and stayed twenty years. She was smiley and plain, with wild hair that she
liked to brush into buoyant and uncontrolled coiffures. Completely calm,
simple, and somehow heroic, she dedicated herself to her surrogate family
of seven children. Their lives were hers. For eight years she never took a
day off; her generosity was boundless. Peter, the second boy, recalled: ‘She was very demonstrative. She hugged us all a lot. She never got angry . . .
Her own life and concerns did not seem to interest her . . .’ (perhaps she
had none?) and ‘. . . she was always bringing us presents’. Peter once asked Nanny Robertson whether she had ever had a boyfriend, but she wasn’t forthcoming. ‘ ‘‘I knew a young man who tried to be cheeky to me on a
bridge. I gave him a good hiding.’’ The feeling was that she had had a
hairbrush handy.’
Nanny Robertson left when Peter was fifteen. She settled in the south
of England with her sisters, wrote to the Eyres all the time, and continued
to send them presents on any excuse. They would visit her, and there was
always a huge nursery tea, with masses of cake. Peter bought her a dog.
‘She died when I was abroad. I cried for days. Her life seemed somehow
so pathetic in retrospect, devoted to us.’
That sense of pathos is most piquantly captured in A. P. Herbert’s
ballad, ‘Other People’s Babies – A Song of Kensington Gardens’:
Singled Out
Babies? It’s a gift, my dear; and I should say I know,
For I’ve been pushing prams about for forty years or so;
Thirty-seven babies – or is it thirty-nine?
No, I’m wrong; it’s thirty-six – but none of them was mine.
Other people’s babies
That’s my life!
Mother to dozens
And nobody’s wife.
But then, it isn’t everyone can say
They used to bath the Honourable Hay,
Lord James Montague, Sir Richard Twistle-Thynnes,
Captain Cartlet and the Ramrod twins.
Other people’s babies,
Other people’s prams,
Such little terrors,
Such little lambs!
Sixty-one today,
And ought to be a granny;
Sixty-one today
And nothing but a Nanny!
There, ducky, there,
Did the lady stare?
Don’t cry! Oh, my!
Other people’s babies!
In the absence of first-hand evidence from the nannies themselves, A. P.