Figure 1.--.

These memories were written by Lucy Boston (Woods). Details on her family and images are availabe: the Woods.

Strange to say, I remember nothing of the actual prayers, impromptu of course. Later on I had plenty of experience of very embarrassing prayers. Presumably Father's were short and in Biblical language. After Prayers we followed Father into his study on the first floor where we each received a small biscuit with a twirl of pink sugar on top, and were dismissed to the nursery. Very occasionally Father and Mother would come up to see us before we went to bed when we were larking around on the top landing. They laughed as if at a play, but only stayed a minute and never played with us. On Sundays of course there was Chapel, and after that we all, on our best manners, came down for Sunday dinner, always roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, followed by red and yellow jellies. Before the meal we all sang 'Praise God from whom all blessings flow', and after it 'We thank thee Lord for this our food'. In between these two verses we ate and absorbed the good words before our eyes on the frieze.

This was all that as small children we normally saw of our parents.

The nursery as I have said was very big, the size of three main rooms under it. Surprisingly it had no texts. Nurse evidently did not count. Of course she was not being brought up. The kitchen also was without, not even 'Blessed are the poor', but over the range in large letters, tersely, 'Waste not, want not'. I do not think that the texts were for ostentation, but rather that Father just felt happy among them.

In the nursery there was of course the old rocking horse, which after travelling round the family nurseries is now with me again. Father had ideas ahead of his time. He had had made a movable, detached flight of stairs as part of the nursery furniture. They were hollow underneath and easily housed all our toys, and provided a useful series of levels for many games. I chiefly remember sitting on the top step with a toy harp being an angel, a game with no holding power. The small wooden harps, with strings so loose they made no sound, were totally unpleasing: I wonder what misguided relative chose them for us. We had special toys for Sunday such as bricks that would only build chapels and Noah's arks. It was a limited range. We might have enjoyed missionaries and cannibals as a change from soldiers, but no one had thought of that. Sunday books were either uplifting or depressingthe New Testament illustrated in colour, very nightgowny, Pilgrim's Progress also illustrated, in which Apollyon, and even more Giant Despair, terrified me, and Foxe's Book of Martyrs with every kind of martyrdom vigorously depicted. On Sundays too we went down after tea to the crusaders' drawing room where we played 'Onward Christian Soldiers marching as to war' in and out of the small inlaid tables, singing as we went. The Persian carpet trodden by those infant feet is under my feet now. It gave one a shock after writing those words to look up and see it. Five pairs of those feet are gone.

The house was lit by gas which I remember most clearly in the bedrooms where we were after dark. There was a simple jet, unshaded, which gave a flat square flame, blue at the source and yellow at the top. What can possibly have lit that drawing room? I have an uncomfortable hazy feeling of pale blue fluted and flounced glass shades, ludicrous in that setting. Fairly early on a change was made to electric light, an exciting innovation; when I went to boarding school ten years later, they had still not caught up with it. The workmen were in the house a long time. We always enjoyed workmen who are generally so understanding with children. We were, I am sorry to say, provided with sheets of paper printed with texts in a particular lettering made up of broken bamboo

Jamie had a white lupin which I thought a wonder from heaven. My father had made an attempt at laying out the small back garden which had high walls all round and no sun. It had sycamores, laurel and privet and one small rose, probably the old Monthly Rose as I do not remember any scent. This was the only rose of my childhood and I treasured it. It was set among rockery stone of some soft white substance like half- consolidated marble with crystal granulations. With a penknife one could scratch out caves in them and with the sand trickling round their bases they made a thrilling terrain for the mounted toy soldiers of the Boer War. We were Boer War children. We wore on our lapels buttons printed with the face of our preferred General- 'Bob', Lord Roberts, being the most popular. We all knew and sang both the words and tunes of the war songs of the moment-'The AbsentMinded Beggar' and 'Oh! Listen to the Band'. One may wonder how, without radio or gramophone, a whole nation came to know them; I suppose individually, each from the other like bees in a hive.

The sterility of this garden affected me from a very early age, and until I bought the Manor at Hemingford Grey forty odd years later my most recurrent dream was trying to reform that sixteenth of an acre of disappointment.

We had the run of the garden belonging to the Aunts. They kept two old gardeners and a gardener's boy. The Aunts were invalided indoors behind their bedroom curtains and as far as we could tell never looked out. The garden was kept severely decent.

I could still make an accurate map of all its paths and corners. It was interlaced with gravel walks which the gardener's boy on his knees weeded with finger and thumb month after month so that never a pebble had a blade of new grass beside it. The main pillared gates were opposite the end of our road, but inside them was a long drive, under a double row of trees, finally coming to a dead end. Probably, before sticks, for some reason special to texts, never seen in any other context. These we coloured with crayons and lovingly presented to the men. They were received with grins but never rejected. The electric wires were hidden under strips of wooden moulding up and down and round the rooms. The odd lengths left over we collected to make marble runs. Jamie was very ingenious at this, starting from the top of our movable flight of steps, with different gradients, angles, drops, tunnels and even see-saws. The various speeds, pauses and reverberations could make pleasing music as the marble obediently ran.

For weekdays we had many and splendid toys, especially Jamie, possibly chosen for the first-born son by an enthusiastic father. They added much to his kudos in my eyes. Phil and I, coming at the end, had nothing to compare with them. Mary and Frances too had superior dolls. Theirs were jointed all over, even their wrists and ankles, their bodies and limbs covered with white doe-skin, soft to touch. Their faces were china, not plastic, smooth to a young finger with a slight egg-shell drag. Their hair was real hair, their clothes handsewn with doll-sized stitches and tiny buttons, all complete, everything we wore. They were Victorian young ladies who did not smirk. Their eyelids closed over their eyes with real lashes. They had dignity and manners.

Every Saturday we were given one penny to spend as we chose. Nurse took us to the penny stall in the Market, where wonders could be bought, such as a gilded state coach two inches high with two horses, wheels that really went round and doors that opened, showing the seat inside, or 'silver' cups, saucers and teapot on a tiny 'silver' tray. The boys bought cannons, whistles or tops, or more often liquorice (tram lines' that hung revoltingly out of their blackened mouths as they consumed them inch by inch. When in season I always bought a pansy root with one velvet flower, thrilled with the whole smell of wet paper, soil, leaf and pansy. As the soil of our garden was grey sand, almost nothing grew, but he sacrificed half his garden to the Chapel, the affluent physician could drive across to a second gateway on the far side. The heavily draped main windows of the house looked over a long lawn in the middle of which stood a pedestalled urn with geraniums. Otherwise there were no flowers. Nobody went into the garden except ourselves. A doctor, of whom I am sure my sea-bathing grandfather would not have approved, was making a good living by persuading all wealthy ladies to take to their beds at the age of forty and remain there for life, seeing him constantly. My Aunts were therefore permanent invalids, only occasionally feeling well enough to take the air in a Bath chair, as I have described. Usually we had the place to ourselves and when we reached the bicycling age must have caused the old gardeners despair by rutting up the perfectly regulated pebbles of the paths. There was an orchard, the trees planted in naked beds with a path between them every six feet. Further away, screened from the gentry by a long artificial bank twelve feet high, was the kitchen garden, each bed hidden from sight by a dense privet hedge as if vegetables were indecent. In the high bank, as I scrambled up, I once saw a primrose and a cowslip. Someone in the far distant past, before the doctor cast his wicked spell, must have enjoyed this bank and planted it. Also once, by mistake, a tiger lily flowered by the old pump, last unvalued descendant of a living garden.

For us every path, every crossing or corner had a name. We cycled madly round, skidding as we turned. No wonder the withered gardeners were soured. Their tidy death of a garden was nevertheless the best thing in our home life. We were without any supervision and the labyrinth of paths was too extensive to be boring. The day before my schooldays were to begin, I wandered by myself in the Aunts' garden on a beautiful evening, looking at the golden sky and the poplars traced against it and lamenting that my life was now over for ever, never to be free again. I was seven. I think it was then that I began to realise that landscape was what moved me most. A few years later I knew it as both my anchorage and my motive force.

At home we met no other children but cousins. Only Wesleyans were fit company for us and unfortunately Methodism was a religion chiefly drawing tradesmen, except for a few leading families such as ours. The Wood family speech and manners were upper class, arrogant and exclusive. The Aunts' bearing was regal, their language was that of the Authorised Version which was their only reading. I cannot speak for my father because he died when I was six. From what I remember of his presence I exonerate him from all littleness, but the Aunts were snobs. Never were female 'companions' worse treated than Aunt Emily's Miss Millington. She might stand for the most miserable unliberated woman of the period. She was at fifty so outcast, so deprived of self-respect, so hopelessly trodden on as to have become in fact an object of contempt.

In all the houses of our relations there were aged retainers, butlers and nurses, excellent devoted servants who were worked unsparingly and, though respected, ignored. Perhaps sometimes they got a word of recognition, but I never heard it from my elders. I presume these old people stayed because they had nowhere else to go. Old age pensions did not exist and in any case they were, in this feudal way, part of the family. Yet they served with pride and the way my uncle's butler opened the door to me as a small girl, with a courtesy and a welcome greater than I got from my relations, stands out as one of my childhood's great pleasures.

The household served by this butler was wealthy. Uncle Holden, parent of our future guardian, lived in style. He was a big, fat man who spoke broad Yorkshire. His bearded kisses always smelled of soup. His beard was very long and as soft as a girl's hair. His eccentricities were our joy. He was deaf, and in order to save himself the trouble of holding his hand behind his ear he had caused to be made for himself a pair of tortoise-shell ears almost big enough for an African elephant, held in place by a spring fitting over the top of his head. These he wore in Chapel with great effect, and they enabled him to shout 'Alleluia' or 'Praise be to God' at suitable (to his idea) moments in the sermon. His wife, having the same doctor as all her sisters, had adopted delicacy. A whole service was too much for her, so just before the sermon Uncle in his grey frockcoat rose and left his pew to meet her alighting from her brougham at the door, and brought her in on his arm with imposing gallantry. This gave style to the service, and as our pew was level with theirs we had a good view of the little drama. Immediately in front of Uncle was an elderly lady who by some accident had her head permanently stuck sideways. To me it always made her hats look funny, as if she put the hat on to face forward though she could not. The fact that she was always in profile to Uncle made her the ideal informant when, in spite of his ears, he did not get the number of the hymn. He had only to tap her elbow and with an easy half turn of her waist she and Uncle were face to face and she could point with a gloved finger to her hymn book. This she did with a peculiarly graceful and sanctimonious half bow that was the delight of the six young Woods. At the end of the service Aunt was supported on her elephantine husband's arm down the aisle to the door, and generally one of us was taken in the brougham back to lunch. The house was spacious and imposing, handsomely furnished and worldly instead of cranky like ours. The food also was like nothing we ever saw or tasted at home. Uncle was a glutton. My sharp nursery eyes must have widened when the butler carried in two large plum puddings, one of which served five people and the other was lifted whole on to Uncle's plate. After lunch he slept and snored with a large handkerchief over his face. We were given toys-not Sunday ones-and told to play quietly. The favourite was something that may have been called a mobiloscope. It consisted of a circular cardboard container like a hat-box without a lid. It spun on a pedestal and its walls were perforated by high narrow slits every two inches. You fitted inside it long strips of what we should now call 'stills' of acrobats or steeplechasers, spun the thing round and looked through the slits. Wonderful! The acrobats somersaulted, the cyclists cycled, the horses leapt. This was many years before the invention of the cinema.it was a liberal house. Even the family portraits could be looked at with long pleasure. Uncle before he aged into gluttony and sleep must have been a lively generous fellow.

To return to our own other-worldly home, Mother was loved by her servants. She was not more generous to them than anybody else-a Christmas present would be an apron-but she was human and helped them in their family troubles. We had a laundry woman to whom I was much attached. I think of her whenever I see a Tintoretto goddess or nymph. She had an Italian type of face, the most beautiful rounded arms and a very soft voice. Her realm, reached down a black hole of winding, underground stairs, consisted of two vast cellars, one for the copper, the wash tub and dolly. Imagine a small wooden stool, or dolly, with four stout legs. Through the seat is set a three foot pole with a cross bar at the top. The stool fits easily into a high tub full of sheets whose folds wrap round the legs of the dolly. It must then be swished about as one holds the cross bar, the weight of the wet linen being quadrupled by the length of the pole. No one who has never used a dolly could guess what cruel work it is. The wash cellar was dark and always awash. It was underneath the eccentric drawing room, but no one there ever thought of it. The ironing cellar was a long tunnel underneath the dining room. It was festooned with clothes lines to take the sheets for twelve people. Rows of flat irons were ranged on the three sloping sides of the stove and a long table stood under the window where a grownup's eyes were on a level with the soil of the back garden. At the far end to which daylight never really reached were racks containing mysterious bales of things once belonging to my father or his father. It was believed by us all that among them was a mummy's hand. From these old bundles came a musty smell that seemed to confirm that belief. However one had only to get In among the hanging sheets for the mummy to be forgotten in the smell of Sunlight soap and dripping linen. Here Mrs Brade tolled alone all the year round. I used to go down, braving the dark stairs and the mummy hand, to have her sweet and gentle company and to iron doll's clothes. Once she surprised me by saying, 'Oh, Miss Lucy! To be here is my idea of Paradise!' I learnt later that she had a drunken husband who beat her frequently and that as a result, though she had had five longed-for babies, they had all been stillborn. When my mother died and the house was closed, she was the most heartbroken mourner.

Our three maid servants shared a large bedroom. They had no bath, but a wash basin and three large conspicuous chamber pots. The nursery suite had only a child-sized bath like a deep porcelain sink. Into this Frank and Phil and I were dumped together to scrub each other's backs pretending we were scrubbing floors. Nurse slept in the night nursery with Phil and me. No bath was provided for her.

Created: June 28, 1998
Last updated: June 28, 1998