The Clarendon was a respectable hotel, and we had no luggage; but the manager was an old acquaintance of mine and discreetly secured us a room.
We sat up late into the night. This, in summary, is what I told her.
My mother’s family, the Mores of Church Langton, were West Country farmers of long standing. Her uncle, Mr Byam More, was land-agent for Sir Robert Fairmile, of Langton Court near Taunton, whose only daughter, Laura, was nearly of an age with my mother. The two little girls grew up together and became the closest of friends, their friendship continuing when Laura married and moved to a Midlands county.
Within a month or so, my mother also married, though hers was a much less grand match than her friend’s. Laura Fairmile had become Lady Tansor, of Evenwood in Northamptonshire, one of the most enchanting houses in England, and the seat of an ancient and distinguished line; my mother became the wife of a wastrel half-pay officer in the Hussars.
My father – always known as ‘the Captain’ – served inconspicuously in the 11th Regiment of Light Dragoons, the celebrated ‘Cherrypickers’, which later became famous, as the 11th Prince Albert’s Own Hussars, under the command of Lord Cardigan, though the Captain was long dead before the regiment’s immortal action in the Russian War. He left the regiment after sustaining injury in the Peninsula, and was promoted to half-pay; but his leisure was productive of nothing except a renewed dedication to a long-held love of strong liquor, which he pursued vigorously, to the exclusion of all other occupations. He spent little time with his wife, could settle at nothing, and, when he was not engaged with his local companions at the Bell and Book in Church Langton, was away visiting old regimental comrades, and partaking of the usual lively debauchery that such occasions afford. The birth of a daughter, it appears, did not encourage him to mend his ways, and on the evening of her untimely death, at only five days old, he was to be found in his usual corner at the Bell and Book. He compounded his iniquity by being absent – I know not where, but I can guess why – on the day of the poor child’s funeral.
My mother and the Captain, on the latter’s insistence, left Church Langton soon afterwards for Sandchurch, in Dorset, where remnants of the Captain’s family resided. The change brought no improvement in his behaviour; he merely exchanged the Bell and Book in Church Langton for the King’s Head in Sandchurch. I have said enough, I hope, to demonstrate the Captain’s execrable character, and his utter contempt for the duties of a husband and father.
In the summer of 1819, my mother accompanied her friend, Laura Tansor, to France, where she stayed for several months. I was born there, in March of the following year, in the Breton city of Rennes. Some weeks later, the two companions travelled together to Dinan, where they took lodgings near the Tour de l’Horloge. Lady Tansor then departed for Paris whilst my mother remained in Dinan for several more days. But just as she was preparing to leave for St-Malo, she received terrible news from England.
The Captain, returning home late one pitch-black night from the King’s Head in an extreme state of inebriation, had wandered off the path, missed his footing, and tumbled over the cliff not twelve yards from his door. Tom Grexby, the village schoolmaster, found him the next morning, his neck quite broken.
The Captain appears to have been perfectly content to let his wife gad off to France with her friend. He found it not in the least inconvenient to have the house to himself, and to be able to spend his leisure unencumbered by even the few domestic duties required of him when his wife was at home. And so he died, a miserable mediocrity.
On a June evening in the year 1820, my mother brought me home to Dorset, tucked up in a plaid blanket and laid on her lap, up the long dusty road that leads from the church to the little white-painted house on the cliff-top. Naturally, she received heartfelt sympathy from her friends and neighbours in Sandchurch. To return husbandless, and with a fatherless child! All about the village, heads could not stop shaking in disbelief at the double calamity. The general commiseration was received by my mother with genuine gratitude, for the sudden death of the Captain had been a severe shock to her, despite his inadequacies as a husband.
All these things I came to know much later, after my mother’s death. I pass now to my own memories of my childhood at Sandchurch.
We lived quietly enough – my mother and I, Beth, and Billick, a grizzled old salt, who chopped wood, tended the garden, and drove the trap. The house faced south across a stretch of soft turf towards the Channel, and from my earliest years the strongest memory I have is of the sound of waves and wind, as I lay in my cradle under the apple-tree in the front garden, or in my room, with its little round window set above the porch.
We had few visitors. Mr Byam More, my mother’s uncle, would come down from Somerset two or three times a year. I also have a clear memory of a pale, sad-eyed lady called Miss Lamb, who sat talking quietly with my mother whilst I played on the rug before the parlour fire, and who reached down to stroke my hair, and ran her fingers across my cheek, in a most gentle and affecting way. I can recall it still.
For a period of my childhood, my mother suffered from severe depression of spirits, which I now know was caused by the death of her childhood friend, Laura, Lady Tansor, whose name was also unknown to me until after my mother’s death. Her Ladyship (as I later learned) had discreetly supported my mother with little gifts of her own money, and other considerations. But when she died, these payments ceased, and things went hard for Mamma, the Captain’s paltry legacy to her having long since been exhausted; but she determined that she would do all in her power to maintain us both, for as long as possible, in the house at Sandchurch.
And so it came about that the publisher, Mr Colburn, received on his desk in New Burlington-street a brown-paper package containing Edith; or, The Last of the Fitzalans, the first work of fiction from the pen of a lady living on the Dorset coast. The covering letter sent Mr Colburn her very best compliments, and requested a professional opinion on the work.
Mr Colburn duly replied to the lady with a courteous two-page critique of its merits and demerits, and concluded by saying that he would be happy to arrange for publication, though on terms that provided for my mother’s contributing towards the costs. This proposal she accepted, using money with which she could ill afford to speculate; but the venture was successful, and Mr Colburn came back gratifyingly quickly with a request for a successor, on much improved terms.
So began my mother’s literary career, which continued uninterruptedly for over ten years, until her death. Though the income derived from her literary efforts kept us safe and secure, the effort involved was prodigious, and the effects on my mother’s constitution were only too apparent to me as I grew older and observed her slight hunched form forever bent over the big square table that served her for a desk. Sometimes, when I entered the room, she would not even look up, but would speak gently to me as she continued to write, her face close to the paper. ‘What is it, Eddie? Tell Mamma quickly, dear.’ And I would say what I wanted, and she would tell me to ask Beth – and off I would go, back to the concerns of my own world, leaving her to scratch away in hers.
At the age of six, or thereabouts, I was put into the pedagogic care of Thomas Grexby. When I joined it, Tom’s little school consisted of himself, a plump, blank-faced boy called Cooper, who appeared to find even the most elementary branches of learning deeply mystifying, and me. Master Cooper was set exercises in basic schooling that required him to pass long hours on his own in strenuous concentration, tongue lolling out with the effort, leaving Tom and me to read and talk together. I made rapid progress, for Tom was an excellent teacher, and I was exceedingly eager to learn.