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Louisa Young
A Great Task of
Happiness
THE LIFE OF KATHLEEN SCOTT
For her descendants
Wayland and Peter; Easter, Emily, Mopsa, Thoby and Zoe;
Nicola, Falcon and Dafila; Alice and Remel, Louis and Theo; Arthur; Joe, Lily
and Tom; Maud, Archie and Tolly; Emily, Dan, Lucy-Kate and Ben;
Freddie and Helena; Lucy; Peter and Amber;
and my Isabel.
And unto the next generation...
‘If I have faltered more or less
In my great task of happiness...’
From The Celestial Surgeon by Robert Louis Stevenson
Contents
One Motherless Daughter, Victorian Child
Three A Badly Dressed Virginal Anglaise in Paris
Seven Frighteningly in Love with Captain Scott
Eight Darling I Will be Good When We’re Married
Eleven At Opposite Ends of the Earth
Seventeen Second Husband, Second Son
Nineteen The Second War and the End
In the course of my parents’ fortieth wedding anniversary party in 1988, I was sitting on the old green velvet sofa at their house in Bayswater with my ancient cousin Verily, who was hooting with laughter. She told me that a good sixty years ago she’d been sitting on that same sofa in that same room with my grandmother Kathleen, her aunt, and that I was saying exactly the same thing that Kathleen had been saying. I think it was something about how lovely it is to sleep out of doors. Kathleen always slept out of doors, given half the chance. In Bayswater she slept on the balcony.
Kathleen was my father’s mother. She was born in 1878 and died in 1947 so I never knew her, but statues she had made were all over the house and garden, and sometimes my father would point one out in a public place: Adam Lindsay Gordon in Westminster Abbey; Lloyd George in the Imperial War Museum, and The Man Who Wasn’t My Grandfather on Waterloo Place. I knew he wasn’t my grandfather because my grandfather had only one arm and wasn’t all bundled up. Gradually I realised who he was: Con, Captain Robert Falcon Scott, her first