Authors: Virginia Nicholson
Herbert’s Nanny offers a voice from the past – but one that is, perhaps,
rather a construction than a reality. Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy wrote a book
about nannies,* and although he agrees that there was ‘a tragic side to a
Nanny’s life . . . a melancholy note of renounced happiness . . .’, he also
suggests a more complex state of affairs. According to him, some of these
women were in truth relieved that the children were not their own, and
feared being burdened with the deeper level of responsibility carried by a
mother. ‘They instinctively knew that they could never marry and have
children because of their fear and dislike of sex and their reluctance to
assume the burdens of family life.’ Did women take up nannying because
they didn’t want husbands, or couldn’t get them, or did nannying make
*
The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny
, Hodder & Stoughton, .
Caring, Sharing . . .
them unmarriageable? Whatever the case, the single nanny generally remained single. And if she did not find that bathing the Honourable Hay satisfied the profound instincts of womanhood, there were compensations.
Every summer afternoon throughout the mid-century she might have
revelled in the joys of human contact to be discovered amid the baby—
carriages and balloons bobbing across the lawns of Hyde Park as upon a
vast sea. Gathorne-Hardy pictured the scene:
For many, the richest moments of their lives passed there. Nannies were going to it before the First World War, but it was during the s and ’s that it seems to have reached the zenith of its popularity . . . What a sight! A vast concourse of Nannies, thronging, drifting, sitting, rocking, more numerous than the buffalo upon the plain, more talkative than starlings at a moot. Here the gossip seethed and flowed . . .
As an image of the two million Surplus Women, set those happy Hyde
Park afternoons against the popular representation of the barren British
spinster. Here were babies, ducks, hoops and balls, bruised knees and
daisy-chains, boasts and memories, joy and drama, kissing and consoling.
This was a family.
Lady Astor’s personal maid Rose Harrison was one of the few unmarried
servants of that generation to publish a memoir, and in all probability many of her kind – nannies as much as anyone – would have felt as she did towards the end of her life:
. . . The family were still there and have been to this day. ‘You will never want for anything, Rose,’ her ladyship often said to me. The children have seen to it that their mother’s word has been honoured. I was given a pension and instructed to ask for help if ever I wanted it . . . There is something else they have given me which has made my retirement the richer: their continued affection and interest. I visit them, they visit me. I am still one of the tribe.
*
For nannies to seek outlets for their love among their charges is no more
surprising than that their charges should find the nannies themselves replacing mother, husband, lover or dependant. Elizabeth Goudge’s nanny was so devoted to the family that ‘she would never have got married however many men had asked her’, or so Elizabeth claimed. Ida Goudge was utterly
reliant on her; as an infant Elizabeth was with her far more than she was
with her own mother, and loved her more. Nanny never deserted them,
Singled Out
and when she was killed in a Second World War air raid the little family
felt broken by her loss.
A nanny might be friend, companion and mother all in one. When war
left disappointment in its wake, these steadfast women had soothing words
to comfort, cradling arms to caress. They loved with generosity and compassion, and often with far greater wholeheartedness than the parents they substituted for.
A stock character throughout Noe¨l Streatfeild’s children’s books,
the orphaned Fossil girls’ nanny in
Ballet Shoes
was reliably large, strict and comforting Joan Evans’s parents didn’t really want her. Her father, Sir John Evans,
was seventy when she was born; her mother was his third wife, and was in
her late thirties. Both were scholars and intellectuals, and Joan’s arrival in was an unwelcome distraction from her mother’s elevated interests.
The baby was nothing but a nuisance, and soon after the birth Lady Evans
went on holiday for six weeks without her. When Joan was nearly a year
old, nanny Caroline Hancock was employed to look after her – and stayed
for the next sixty-seven years. On her arrival, Lady Evans asked her as a
matter of form whether she would promise to love her infant daughter, to
which Nannie Hancock responded that she really couldn’t make such a
commitment until she had got to know the child. Nobody, however, could
have been more committed.
Caring, Sharing . . .
Without her love, Joan’s childhood in an imposing Hertfordshire residence would have been sad and solitary indeed. Sir John and Lady Evans were often away from home and, though rich, grudged money for toys and
amusements. Plasticine, for example, was prohibited, and drawing presented
difficulties ‘. . . for I was not allowed an india-rubber, for fear crumbs should fall on the carpet’. Friendships were discouraged. One day her mother unluckily discovered that Joan had saved for months to buy Nannie a
modest present, and gave her a most serious scolding. Her elderly father,
though often absent, was more benign: scholarly yet playful. He wrote
Latin verses to her puppy, taught her whist and showed her how to label
his collection of rare coins. But when she was fifteen he died. All Joan’s
stifled passions as she grew up were poured into Nannie’s welcoming
embrace: ‘[She] was so much part of my life that I cannot easily write of her.
Neat of figure, nimble of movement, fresh of colour, dark of hair, with a soft face that never hurt when she kissed one, and beautiful hands that could soothe or caress, she was a woman that many men found lovable.’ Nevertheless, she stayed. For Joan, Nannie’s kindness, sincerity and liberality were a firm foundation, and they were always together – for even when Nannie took her yearly holiday at her parents’ rural cottage in Buckinghamshire, Joan
went too. ‘My mother . . . was not willing to undertake any responsibility
for me while Nannie was away.’ It was here, rather than in her parents’
home, nurtured by the warm, thrifty and old-fashioned way of life of the
Hancock family, that Joan put down deep and stable roots.
In , when she was sixteen, the widowed Lady Evans decided to take
her daughter to Florence, and while there Joan fell in love. Perhaps to
relieve herself of the tedious duty of entertaining a schoolgirl, Lady Evans permitted Joan to spend time with the eighteen-year-old son of some old Hertfordshire friends who were also visiting Florence and, thrown together,
the two young people soon had eyes only for each other. It was a delicate,
innocent romance. The beauties of the Certosa and San Miniato were
enhanced by the pleasure they took in seeing them together. Yet despite
the mutually unexpressed love that animated every moment of that brief
Italian springtime for them, it wasn’t all solemn. Joan still wore pigtails and a pinafore. Unsophisticated and unpretentious, at Gilli’s they ate their way through no fewer than sixteen little cakes at a sitting. They laughed and were happy. It was more a healthy comradeship than a dreamy yearning.
In her autobiography the young man is not named, so it is hard to tell
whether this was the one and only romance in Joan’s life, or indeed whether
he was even the same man to whom she refers some twenty pages later. By
then five years had passed and the world was opening up for her. Joan had
Singled Out
put her hair up and lengthened her skirts; she boasted a nineteen-inch waist.
A winter in Rome exploring the mosaics and Cosmati work of early
Christian churches had awakened in her a passion for medieval culture and
architecture. But war had broken out. Joan had now escaped from the
meaningless claustrophobia of life with her widowed mother in Hertfordshire, and in October went up to St Hugh’s College, Oxford, to read for a Diploma in Anthropology and Religious History. The trenches had
emptied the colleges of men, and though not officially admitted as members
of the university, the undergraduates to be seen around Oxford at this time
were mostly women students like Joan:
. . . Inevitably we lived in the shadow of war; the telegram we saw upon the hall table when we came in from a lecture was almost certain to mean grievous anxiety or loss for one of our number . . . over everything hung a fog of rumour.
Nannie came to visit. But autumn was a time of sorrow for all, and
Joan was not exempt. Her bereavement, at twenty-one, though referred to
for the first and last time buttressed between more generalised bereavements, must have been acute: The friendliest of my nephews . . . was killed early in the term; a friend whom I might well have married was killed a few days later; and I felt the senseless destruction of Reims as an acute personal loss.
She never mentioned him again.
In Joan mused in her diary on what the future held in store for her.
She was rich, and she could choose what to do. Should she become a critic,
an archaeologist, a writer of some sort, or would she be better suited to a
dilettante life ‘. . . in which I may see beautiful things and have the pleasure of idle days and beautiful surroundings . . .’? She no longer even posed to herself the option of marriage at some unforeseeable time, and it appears
that any hopes she may have had in that direction were now forever buried.
When the Armistice came she and a friend stood at her window to hear
the pealing of the Oxford bells: ‘They seemed to be ringing a dirge for our
youth that was gone with little to show for it but loss.’
Joan Evans became a collector and a scholar, with many publications and
honours to her name. France was her lifelong passion. Her sense of beauty
was communicated through her profound love and knowledge of medieval
French life and art. And she shared it, until that lady died at the great age of ninety-seven, with Caroline Hancock: Nannie.
Caring, Sharing . . .
They lived together, and from Nannie travelled with Joan every
year to France. She developed a taste for Romanesque architecture. While
Joan examined each village church they stopped at in scholarly fashion,
conscientiously photographing details of vaults and ambulatories, Nannie,
in old age not so nimble, was to be seen before the statue of the local
Virgin, those deft beloved hands busily tidying up the banks of candles.
The churches may have been Catholic, but ‘. . . [she] liked to leave them
neater than she found them’. Three years after Nannie’s death, Joan wrote
her autobiography
Prelude and Fugue
() and dedicated it to the memory of the only human being who had, throughout her life, given her trust, belief and unconditional love.
Close friends, loving relatives, intimate carers: who would dispute their
role in giving and returning love and alleviating loneliness? The soft
smoothness of a female kiss that didn’t hurt or rasp, beloved hands that
comforted and soothed . . . The mute adoration of a faithful pet, content
to be fondled and stroked, also allowed single women to express that part
of themselves that sought physical contact; though if we are talking the
language of substitution, Ginger, Peterkin, Brownie and the Hobbits took
the place rather of their mistresses’ children than of their lovers.
In her memoirs, Elizabeth Goudge is voluble about love. She loved
richly and profoundly, whether it was her family, her friends, her dogs or
her Creator. But she never talks about sex. Are we to assume that she felt
no deprivation, that she didn’t have needs in that respect? Were passion
and desire strangers to her? A generation before, a woman’s sexuality would
have been ignored, denied. But Elizabeth Goudge was born in ; can
she, an intelligent, well-read woman, have been entirely oblivious of
Freud, of D. H. Lawrence, of Marie Stopes and the psychologists? One
thing is sure, whatever privations in this respect Miss Goudge may have
learnt to live with, she felt no need to share them with her readers. The
nearest she got to betraying any sense of physical shortfall was in describing the nervous breakdown she suffered when she was in her thirties. This followed on both her parents, and then she herself, undergoing surgery.
Elizabeth endured guilt and misery at her mother’s illnesses, seeing Ida
dealing with terrible pain and knowing how sorely that struggle tested her
faith; but her own faith never wavered until she herself was called upon to
endure:
Singled Out
‘It is when it touches your
own
flesh,’ my mother said once, ‘it is then that you know.’ It did not touch my flesh so badly as it touched my mind for after the little succession of family disasters I fell headlong into what is called a nervous breakdown, a state which as all its victims know can be terrifying.
Depression, fear, confusion and suicidal tendencies engulfed an otherwise
serene and rational woman. Perhaps it is far-fetched to suggest that a series of operations are an inadequate explanation for such a descent into mental illness. Whatever the case, a religious woman like Elizabeth Goudge certainly found it impossible to do anything other than hint at some indefinable blankness in her life. And any attempt to disinter the realities of living without sex in the first half of the twentieth century is liable to meet with the same obliqueness and avoidance.