avoided the ceremony. Her form mistress at St George’s School in Edinburgh reported her as having original ideas, but tending to keep them to herself. A contemporary, a Miss Baily, remembered her as: ‘a sturdy, indomitable little figure … bright blue eyes, a mane of thick brown hair and a clear cut classical profile and … a certain attractive exuberance of temperament. Sharing a desk with her in the Upper IIIrd Remove of 1891–2 was anything but dull. Merriment reigned in her neighbourhood.’ At some point when she was quite young, Kathleen decided to be happy, no matter what.
In 1892 Great-Uncle William died. The house in Edinburgh was sold and the proceeds divided among his fifty-four nephews and nieces. Each of the Bruce children got an allowance: Kathleen’s was £72 per annum, to pay for everything: education, clothes et al. Douglas, now twenty-five, took over as nominal head of the family, and Kathleen went to live with Elma and her husband Canon Keating (who wore pincenez). Cousin Willie described their household after a visit in 1892:
Found them pretty gloomy … the gas was not turned on at the main so they borrowed a lamp from the Theological Hall, but like the Biblical virgins’ it hadn’t got no oil so ‘they sat in solemn silence in a dull dark etc.’, cussing inwardly at each other. It was too dark for either of them to reach the poker otherwise there might have been ‘another ’orrible murder’. They’re a rum couple …
After a year of this Kathleen went to boarding school. It is hard not to surmise that she was ‘packed off’. Podge had already been (in her own words) ‘sent away’. Kathleen’s first boarding school was ‘a cheap convent’, as she called it, where she had to bathe in a chemise; ‘I was carefully initiated into the tricky art of changing from a wet chemise into a dry nightgown without one dangerous moment of seeing my own person.’ There was chapel three times a day and five times on Sunday, and the girls were given to having visions due to religious over-excitement. A popular one was for Christ the man to come down from the cross; for Kathleen, Christ the baby clambered from his mother’s arms and lay in hers. She loved it, and was late for dinner. She and Podge had had baby friends in the Botans and at Pettycar, where they went on holiday. ‘Babies were our chief amusement and interest,’ wrote Podge, who went on to be one of the first Norland Nannies, and to run a children’s home. There was Mary Ann Frew, for example, aged eight months, who they shared between them in hourly shifts, and a two-year-old named Arthur to whom Kathleen had given a toy horse. He had a very grand nanny, and the next day the horse was sent back because Arthur was not allowed to accept presents from people his mother did not know. Religion was important to the Bruces—three of the four brothers took the cloth (Wilfrid alone didn’t, he became a sailor); two of the sisters married churchmen and one, Gwennie, lived her whole life with her twin brother Lloyd as his housekeeper—but for Kathleen the miracle was not so much God as babies.
Though Douglas was now her guardian Kathleen had, in effect, no one to look after her. She was reunited with Podge at a second boarding school, St Michael’s, at Bognor, when Podge was called to look at her little sister’s vests. There were nine, and they were all in rags. ‘Absolute rags,’ wrote Podge, ‘in fact no underclothes fit to be seen, and Mrs. Sparks had spread them all on the bed for inspection.’ This doesn’t seem to have made Kathleen sorry for herself—no one to look after her also meant no one to tell her what to do. Podge wrote to Presh about ‘naughty little Kathleen’. She was ‘always in hot water’ at school, so Podge said, but she knew (because she’d been told, after Smith’s Classical Dictionary and a book on Christian Science were found under her mattress) that she wouldn’t be expelled, because she was an orphan. Her siblings were largely grown-up, and she was beginning to think that so was she. Douglas would send her patronizing letters about how he had arranged for an aunt to be so good as to take her for the holidays—this was how she saw it, at least. At sixteen she wrote back saying, in effect, no thank you, I shall go and stay with my friends, who want me. One such was Milly, who had been on holiday to Italy, where a musician had kissed her. She wasn’t certain that she might not be going to have a baby; Kathleen rather hoped she would, but thought it unlikely.
But perhaps Kathleen had once again misjudged her relatives. One, a vicar’s wife from Buxted in Surrey, wrote rather sweetly to Presh in March 1895: ‘I hear from Kathleen this morning that prearrangements will prevent her coming to us for her Easter holidays. When she could not come at Christmas we looked upon it as a pleasure postponed … so perhaps she may be able to come to us for a bit in the summer.’ But Kathleen had more exciting invitations than a vicar’s wife in Sussex. She was going to London to stay with wicked Cousin Willie.
She’d been to London before, in passing; she and Podge had had to cross it on their own on their way to Bognor. Podge had cried out, ‘We shall never get across London alone!’; to which Kathleen had replied, ‘Shan’t you? I shall.’ Unlike their Skene ancestors, most of the Bruces did not care for travelling. Podge thought Kathleen tremendously brave and cavalier in her attitude to the metropolis, and this view was confirmed throughout their lives.
It was arranged that she should stay a night or two with Willie’s ‘ramshackle, happy-go-lucky family’ at their house in Addison Gardens, Kensington.
and that we should dine together in a restaurant, and that he should take me to a play. Seventeen, but a pantomime was all I had ever seen, and never at all in all my life had I ever had a meal in a restaurant, not even at a station. First problem—what should I wear? Next—would I know how to behave as though it were not the first time? There were the agonies of cutting down the neck of my prettiest day blouse; and agonies again, lest it be too low. And the dark serge skirt, how clumsy it looked! Well, I must tie a ribbon in my jolly hair and hope no one would look below my nice clean face. Oh, heavens, one must wear a cloak! What could I do? Lucky if the odd two pounds were left over for clothes. A cloak, an evening cloak? Quick, quick! I had an idea. One yard of a coarse, unbleached stuff called workhouse sheeting, costing a few pennies a yard, a square of blue dye, and bottle of gold ink. Secretly I went about the business, dyed the stuff, put it in a cunning circle, and then made a bold, mad design in gold over it. The result would doubtless not be durable, but it looked not unlike a Fortuny cloak, and it would serve.
The evening was a success—Kathleen got the hors d’oeuvres all wrong but it didn’t matter; Willie had chosen the play because ‘the heroine is just like you, and it will do you good to know what you are like.’ Kathleen didn’t think she was like her at all, but rather hoped she was. Back at Addison Gardens there was an exotic brother, Hener, playing the piano ‘with great vigour and grandeur’. He was younger, wilder, stranger and more beautiful than Willie, and Kathleen was delighted with him and his thick black hair and wild gypsy-black eyes (Willie’s hair was red). She asked him to play Bach, the only composer she had ever heard of, but he played Liszt which she found quite delirious and intoxicating. (Their Great-Aunt Carrie had been taught to play the piano by Liszt in Paris: ‘a wild looking long-haired excitable man,’ Great-Aunt Fifi had called him. He liked giving girls one or two lessons so they could say they had been taught by him.)
The next morning Kathleen saw Hener out of the window, swinging a live cat by the tail, hitting its head against the wall, and was less delighted. She poured the water from her jug over him and threw up in her basin. Felix Skene did try to discipline his wayward sons. ‘I have had the hell of a row with my guvnor,’ Willie wrote to Presh. ‘He told me to leave the bally hovel and I said I wouldn’t and threatened to get him expelled from the Athenaeum.’ Willie was always short of money to lose on the horses: at one point he considered blackmailing Aunt Zoe, the Archbishop’s wife, by betrothing himself to a chorus girl.
It was Willie who sowed the seed of art as a living in Kathleen’s brain. She wanted to make up to him for being so taken with his brother when after all it had been Willie who had taken her out, so the next day, after the cat incident, she showed him some ‘very feeble but pretty’ watercolours that she had done, as a gesture of friendliness. At this stage she was meant to be going to be a teacher, like Irene and Presh—it was respectable, and would keep her out of trouble. ‘Why on earth go in for teaching?’ said Willie. ‘Why not go in for art?’ He probably forgot all about the suggestion. In 1900, after his wicked life had resulted in him ‘absquatulating’ to Bombay (where he worked for a bank, lived with an Indian boy in a tent, shot vultures, shocked the memsahibs