He, my mother and my grandmother all had a passion for collecting china. When Grannie came to live with us later she brought her collection of Dresden and Capo di Monte with her, and innumerable cupboards were filled with it at Ashfield. In fact, fresh cupboards had to be built to accommodate it. There is no doubt that we were a family of collectors and that I have inherited these attributes. The only sad thing is that if you inherit a good collection of china and furniture it leaves you no excuse for starting a collection of your own. The collector’s passion, however, has to be satisfied, and in my case I have accumulated quite a nice stock of papier-mache furniture and small objects which had not figured in my parents’ collections.
When the day came I was so excited that I felt quite sick and completely silent. When really thrilled by anything, it always seems to deprive me of the powers of speech. My first clear memory of going abroad was when we stepped on to the boat at Folkestone. My mother and Madge took the Channel crossing with the utmost seriousness. They were bad sailors and retired immediately to the ladies’ saloon to lay themselves down, close their eyes and hope to get across the intervening water to France without the worst happening. In spite of my experience in small dinghies I was convinced that I was a good sailor. My father encouraged me in this belief, so I remained on deck with him. It was, I imagine, a perfectly smooth crossing, but I gave the credit not to the sea but to my own power of withstanding its motion. We arrived at Boulogne and I was glad to hear father announce, ‘Agatha’s a perfectly good sailor’.
The next excitement was going to bed in the train. I shared a compartment with my mother and was hoisted up on to the top bunk. My mother always had a passion for fresh air, and the steam heat of the wagon lits carriages was agony to her. All that night it seemed to me I woke up to see mother with the window pushed down and her head out, breathing great gasps of night air.
Early the next morning we arrived at Pau. The Hotel Beausejour bus was waiting so we piled into it, our eighteen pieces of luggage coming separately, and in due course arrived at the hotel. It had a large terrace outside it facing the Pyrenees.
‘There!’ said father. ‘See? There are the Pyrenees. The snow mountains.’
I looked. It was one of the great disillusionments of my life, a disillusionment that I have never forgotten. Where was that soaring height going up, up, up into the sky, far above my head–something beyond contemplation or understanding? Instead, I saw, some distance away on the horizon, what looked like a row of teeth standing up, it seemed, about an inch or two from the plain below. Those? Were those mountains? I said nothing, but even now I can still feel that terrible disappointment.
II
We must have spent about six months at Pau. It was an entirely new life for me. My father and mother and Madge were soon caught up in a whirl of activity. Father had several American friends staying there, he made a lot of hotel acquaintances, and we also had brought letters of introduction to people in various hotels and pensions.
To look after me, mother engaged a kind of daily nursery governess–actually an English girl, but one who had lived in Pau all her life and who spoke French as easily as English, if not, in fact, rather better. The idea was that I should learn French from her. This plan did not turn out as expected. Miss Markham called for me every morning and took me for a walk. In its course she drew my attention to various objects and repeated their names in French. ‘Un chien.’ Une maison.’ ‘Un gendarme.’ ‘Le boulanger.’ I repeated these dutifully, but naturally when I had a question to ask I asked it in English and Miss Markham replied in English. As far as I can remember I was rather bored during my day; interminable walks in the company of Miss Markham, who was nice, kind, conscientious and dull.
My mother soon decided that I should never learn French with Miss Markham, and that I must have regular French lessons from a French-woman who would come every afternoon. The new acquisition was called Mademoiselle Mauhourat. She was large, buxom and dressed in a multiplicity of little capes, brown in colour.
All rooms of that period were overcrowded, of course. There was too much furniture in them, too many ornaments and so on. Mlle Mauhourat was a flouncer. She flounced about the room, jerking her shoulders, gesticulating with her hands and elbows, and sooner or later she invariably knocked an ornament off the table and broke it. It became quite a family joke. Father said, ‘She reminds me of that bird you had, Agatha. Daphne. Always big and awkward and knocking her seed pans over.’
Mlle Mauhourat was particularly full of gush, and gush made me feel shy. I found it increasingly difficult to respond to her little cooing squeals of: ‘Oh, la chère mignonne! Quelle est gentille, cette petite! Oh, la chère mignonne! Nous allons prendre des lefons tres amusantes, n’est ce pas?’ I looked at her politely but with a cold eye. Then, receiving a firm look from my mother, I muttered unconvincingly, ‘Oui, merci’, which was about the limit of my French at that time.
The French lessons went on amiably. I was docile as usual, but apparently bone-headed as well. Mother, who liked quick results, was dissatisfied with my progress.
‘She’s not getting on as she should, Fred,’ she complained to my father. My father, always amiable, said, ‘Oh, give her time, Clara, give her time. The woman’s only been here ten days.’
But my mother was not one to give anybody time. The climax came when I had a slight childish illness. It started, I suppose, with local flu and led to catarrhal trouble. I was feverish, out of sorts, and in this convalescent stage with still a slight temperature I could not stand the sight of Mlle Mauhourat.
‘Please,’ I would beg, ‘please don’t let me have a lesson this afternoon. I don’t want to.’
Mother was always kind enough when there was real cause. She agreed. In due course Mlle Mauhourat, capes and all, arrived. My mother explained that I had a temperature, was staying indoors, and perhaps it would be better not to have a lesson that day. Mlle Mauhourat was off at once, fluttering over me, jerking her elbows, waving her capes, breathing down my neck. ‘Oh, la pauvre mignonne, la pauvre petite mignonne.’ She would read to me, she said. She would tell me stories. She would amuse ‘la pauvre petite’.
I cast the most agonising glances at mother. I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t bear another moment of it! Mlle Mauhourat’s voice went on, high-pitched, squeaky–everything I most disliked in a voice. My eyes implored: ‘Take her away. Please take her away.’ Firmly, my mother drew Mlle Mauhourat towards the door.
‘I think Agatha had better be kept quite quiet this afternoon,’ she said. She ushered Mlle Mauhourat out, then she returned and shook her head at me. ‘It’s all very well,’ she said, ‘but you must not make such terrible faces.’
‘Faces?’ I said.
‘Yes. All that grimacing and looking at me. Mlle Mauhourat could see perfectly that you wanted her to go away.’
I was upset. I had not meant to be impolite.
‘But, Mummy,’ I said, ‘those weren’t French faces that I was making. They were English faces.’
My mother was much amused, and explained to me that making faces was a kind of international language which was understood by people of all countries. However, she told my father that Mlle Mauhourat was not being much of a success and she was going to look elsewhere. My father said it would be just as well if we did not lose too many more china ornaments. He added, ‘If I were in Agatha’s place, I should find that woman insupportable, just as she does.’
Freed from the ministrations of Miss Markham and Mlle Mauhourat, I began to enjoy myself. Staying in the hotel was Mrs Selwyn, the