frequent. We went to the pit stalls always–the pit itself was supposed to be ‘rough’. The pit cost a shilling and the pit stalls, which were two rows of seats in front, behind about ten rows of stalls, were where the Miller family sat, enjoying every kind of theatrical entertainment.
I don’t know whether it was the first play I saw, but certainly among the first was Hearts are Trumps, a roaring melodrama of the worst type. There was a villain in it, the wicked woman was called Lady Winifred, and there was a beautiful girl who had been done out of a fortune. Revolvers were fired, and I clearly remember the last scene, when a young man hanging by a rope from the Alps cut the rope and died heroically to save either the girl he loved or the man whom the girl he loved loved. I remember going through this story point by point. ‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘that the really bad ones were Spades’–father being a great whist player, I was always hearing talk of cards–‘and the ones who weren’t quite so bad were Clubs. I think perhaps Lady Winifred was a Club–because she repented–and so did the man who cut the rope on the mountain. And the diamonds–’ I reflected. ‘Just worldly,’ I said, in my Victorian tone of disapproval.
One of the great yearly events was the Torquay Regatta, which took place on the last Monday and Tuesday in August. I started saving up for it at the beginning of May. When I say I remember the Regatta I do not so much mean the yacht racing as the Fair which accompanied it. Madge, of course, used to go with father to Haldon Pier to watch the sailing, and we usually had a house party staying for the Regatta Ball in the evening. Father, mother and Madge used to go to the Regatta Yacht Club tea in the afternoon, and all the various functions connected with sailing. Madge never did more sailing than she could help, because she was, throughout her life, an incurably bad sailor. However, a passionate interest was taken in our friends’ yacht. There were picnics and parties, but this was the social side of the Regatta in which I was too young to participate.
My looked-forward-to joy in life was the Fair. The merry-go-rounds, where you rode on horses with manes, round and round and round, and a kind of switchback where you tore up and down slopes. Two machines blared music, and as you came round on the horses and the switchback cars, the tunes combined to make a horrible cacophony. Then there were all the shows–the Fat Woman; Madame Arensky, who told the Future; the Human Spider, horrible to look at; the Shooting Gallery, where Madge and Monty spent always a great deal of time and money. And there were coconut shies, from which Monty used to obtain large quantities of coconuts and bring them home to me. I was passionately fond of coconut. I was given a few shies at the coconuts myself, gallantly allowed so far forward by the man in charge that I sometimes actually managed to knock a coconut off. Coconut shies were proper coconut shies then. Nowadays there are still shies, but the coconuts are so arranged in a kind of saucer that nothing but the most stupendous mixture of luck and strength would topple one. Then one had a sporting chance. Out of six shots you usually got one, and Monty once got five.
The hoop-las, the Kewpie dolls, the pointers and all those things had not arrived yet. There were various stalls that sold things. My particular passion was what were known as penny monkeys. They cost a penny, and they were fluffy little representations of monkeys on a long pin which you stuck into your coat. Every year I purchased six to eight of these, and added them to my collection–pink, green, brown, red, yellow. As the years went by it became more difficult to find a different colour or a different pattern.
There was also the famous nougat, which only appeared at the Fair. A man stood behind a table chopping nougat from an enormous pink and white block in front of him. He yelled, shouted, and offered bits for auction. ‘Now, friends, sixpence for a stupendous piece! All right, love, cut it in half. Now then, what about that for fourpence?’ and so on and so on. There were some ready-made packets which you could buy for twopence, but the fun was entering the auction. ‘There, to the little lady there. Yes, twopence halfpenny to you.’
Goldfish did not arrive as a novelty in the Regatta until I was about twelve. It was a great excitement when they did. The whole stall was covered with goldfish bowls, one fish in each, and you threw ping-pong balls for them. If a ball lodged in the mouth of one of the bowls, the goldfish was yours. That, like the coconuts, was fairly easy to begin with. The first Regatta they appeared we got eleven between us, and bore them home in triumph to live in the Tub. But the price had soon advanced from a penny a ball to sixpence a ball.
In the evening there were fireworks. Since we could not see them from our house–or only the very high rockets–we usually spent the evening with some friends who lived just over the harbour. It was a nine o’clock party, with lemonade, ices and biscuits handed round. That was another delight of those days that I miss very much, not being of an alcoholic persuasion–the garden parties.
The garden parties of pre-1914 were something to be remembered. Everyone was dressed up to the nines, high-heeled shoes, muslin frocks with blue sashes, large leghorn hats with drooping roses. There were lovely ices–strawberry, vanilla, pistachio, orange-water and raspberry-water was the usual selection–with every kind of cream cake, of sandwich, of eclair, and peaches, muscat grapes, and nectarines. From this I deduce that garden parties were practically always held in August. I don’t remember any strawberries and cream.
There was a certain pain in getting there, of course. Those who hadn’t got carriages took a hired cab if they were aged or infirm, but all the young people walked a mile and a half to two miles from different parts of Torquay; some might be lucky and live near, but others were always bound to be a good way away, because Torquay is built on seven hills. There is no doubt that walking up hills in high-heeled shoes, holding up one’s long skirt in one’s left hand and one’s parasol in the right, was something of an ordeal. It was worth it, however, to get to the garden party.
My father died when I was eleven. His health had got slowly worse, but his illness seems never to have been precisely diagnosed. There is no doubt that constant financial worry weakened his resistance to illness of any kind.
He had been at Ealing, staying with his stepmother for about a week, and seeing various friends in London who might be able to help him find some kind of job. Finding jobs was not an easy thing to do at that particular date. Either you were a lawyer or a doctor or managed an estate, were in one of the services, or were a barrister, but the great world of business did not provide the livelihood that we expect of it nowadays. There were big financial banking houses, such as Pierpont Morgan’s, and others in which my father had some acquaintances, but everyone was of course a professional–either you belonged to one of the banking houses and had been in it ever since you were a boy, or you did not. My father, like most of his contemporaries, was not trained for anything. He did a great deal of charitable work, and other things that would nowadays provide a paid position, but it was very different then.
His financial position was perplexing to him, and indeed perplexed his executors after his death. It was a question of where the money left by my grandfather had disappeared to. My father had lived well within his supposed income. It was there on paper, but it was never there in fact, and there always seemed to be plausible excuses to explain this and to show that this default would only be temporary–just a matter of special repairs. The estate was no doubt mismanaged by the Trustees and by their successors, but it was too late to remedy that.
He worried, the weather was cold, he caught a bad chill, and double pneumonia developed. My mother was sent for to Ealing, and presently Madge and I followed her there. He was by then very ill. My mother never left him, night or day. We had two hospital nurses in the house. I wandered about, unhappy and frightened, praying earnestly that father might get well again.
One picture remains etched in my mind. It was afternoon. I was standing on the half landing. Suddenly the door of father and mother’s bedroom opened. My mother came out in a kind of rush, her hands held to her head over her eyes. She rushed from there into the adjoining room and shut the door behind her. A hospital nurse came out and spoke to Grannie, who was coming up the stairs. ‘It’s all over,’ she said. I knew then that my father was dead.
They did not take a child to the funeral of course. I wandered about the house in a queer state of turmoil. Something awful had happened, something that I had never envisaged could happen. The blinds of the house were pulled down, the lamps were lit. In the dining-room, in her big chair,