joyous novelty all this was for us. But best of all was the lovely home life of Sul Monte. The long talks in the library or the sun-parlour, the discussions as we drove out to Perch Lake to see some builder about alterations to the house. Tea and cinnamon toast on the way back. Taking Fagin for walks and suddenly realizing we were in the country of Queechy and The Wide, Wide World, and finding to our amazement that the extraordinary types still persisted. It was wonderful.
Alas, this too had to come to an end. But this time, when we said goodbye, we were cheered by the fact that they were both coming to England on a concert tour the following year. To our lasting regret, Lita had already retired from the operatic stage. But at least we could always congratulate ourselves for our persistence in managing to hear some of her operatic performances.
When we returned to England, I was fired afresh at the prospect of writing a profitable article or two about our experiences. And as Mabs Fashions was now running a series of holiday articles, I wrote and submitted an article on my holiday in the Catskill Mountains.
Once again I was lucky. The article was accepted. More important, the editor wrote, saying that she liked my style, and asking if I had any other interesting holiday experiences I could write up.
Apart from the American journeys, a very short trip to Brussels was the full extent of our foreign travels. But I said, “Yes, certainly,” bought a series of guidebooks and set to work. Over a period of some months, I wrote various articles for her.
Meanwhile, operatically speaking, the wheel had turned full circle again. The preliminary notices for the opera season were out; this time, the most interesting newcomer to Covent Garden was Ezio Pinza.
From our vantage point in the gallery queue, it did not take any of us long to discover that, behind all that face fungus, which is the hallmark of so many operatic bass roles, there was a fascinating person with a charming, lively small daughter—Claudia. I suppose Claudia was about five when we first knew her. She used to smile shyly at the queue and made childish dabs at the chairs as she went along the street, clutching her father’s hand.
To Claudia, we owe the beginning of our collection of star snapshots, a hobby that was to acquire considerable significance later. Many in the queue were, of course, ardent autograph hunters, but I thought it would be more fun to have snaps of the stars instead. Nowadays, dozens of people do this, but it was something of a novelty when I first produced my ten-shilling Brownie box camera, which was about my mental level, photographically speaking.
I never photographed an artist without asking permission first, so I started by asking Pinza if I might photograph Claudia one morning as he came from rehearsal. Not only was permission given, but Pinza insisted on being in the photograph as well, and made me take two pictures to make sure.
The result was one of the best snaps I ever took, and I sent an enlargement of it to Claudia’s parents. A few days later, the little girl was brought along the queue during lunch time, and she thanked me in carefully rehearsed English. She was a charming child!
During that first season, the snap collection grew rapidly, though it was not until the following year that I plucked up enough courage to ask Ponselle herself. As I told her long afterwards, I used to follow her through Embankment Gardens, near the Savoy Hotel where she stayed, trying to summon enough courage to ask if I might photograph her. She was very much amused, but a good deal mystified as to why anyone should ever have been in awe of her. But in those days, our stars were gods and goddesses to us, and I must say that their remoteness and mystique added greatly to their charm and glamour.
On the night of what was to be Ponselle’s final appearance, she was unwell and Pacetti sang instead. I remember when Louise and I arrived at the queue that evening, Ray announced with a sort of malicious relish for the drama of the moment, “Ponselle has sung her last performance.”
Thinking she must have walked under a bus or something, we gave gratifying shrieks of horror. Then Ray saw fit to explain. He was referring only to that season and that there had been a cancellation. But he spoke more truly than he knew. She never returned to Covent Garden to sing again. The following season was an entirely German one, and in later years, the management changed, and of course Ponselle made other connections. She had indeed sung her last performance at Covent Garden. Fortunately, we were unaware of it then and went on hoping for some years longer.
The next day, Louise and I received some compensation for that final cancellation: one of the very few personal letters written by Ponselle at that period. She was never a great letter-writer and, in the busiest days of her career, she scarcely ever put pen to paper. But, in return for the snap I had sent her, she sent a wonderful photograph of herself in the third act of Traviata with a note saying that if we came to New York again—which we had mentioned as a possibility one day—we were to come around backstage at the Met to see her.
Something else occurred about this time that tended to take my mind off any disappointment. I had continued to write the occasional article for Mabs Fashions, and I received a letter from the editor saying that she would like to meet me. Would I come to see her one afternoon?
I obtained permission to leave my Law Courts’ office early one afternoon and went to Fleetway House to see Miss Taft—the woman to whom I owe all my training and all my early chances. I had never entered a publishing office before, much less been interviewed by an editor. But she soon put me at my ease and made that most flattering of all requests: to talk about myself.
I did so. At great length, I am sure.
“But did you never think of becoming a journalist?” Miss Taft asked.
“Oh, no!” I assured her, rather shocked. I was a permanent civil servant with a pension at sixty. Safe until I was nailed down in my coffin, in fact.
She was unimpressed and merely said, “Well, think about it now. I am going to start a new weekly in the autumn, and I should like you for my fiction sub.”
I didn’t really know what a fiction sub was, but I was flattered that anyone wanted me as anything. However, it still sounded terribly unsafe in comparison with my civil service job. This all sounds quite extraordinary now, I have no doubt, but in those days there were three people waiting for every job. So I continued to shake my head doubtfully.
“Well, go away,” said Miss Taft, smiling, “and think it over. If you do want the job, it is yours.”
I went away and not only thought about it, but being very loquacious by nature, I talked about it too. Several people said, “But it’s a great chance! Don’t just throw it away. People are walking about ready to give their eye-teeth for that sort of chance.”
When I thought about it again, the pension at sixty didn’t seem quite so attractive, after all. In the end, I gave up my lovely safe job and the pension and went into Fleet Street as a fiction sub-editor at four pounds four shillings a week—one pound and four shillings more than I was getting as a government shorthand-typist.
And there, for the first several months at any rate, I was a complete failure.
I suppose it was inevitable. Most girls who go into that world do so at a much earlier age and learn the general jargon and rudiments of the profession as juniors. I hardly knew what people were talking about, much less what I should be doing, and I must have been a phenomenally slow learner.
When they gave me short articles to write up, I was fairly happy, but in periodical make-up I was an infant in arms, and not a very intelligent one, at that.
As fiction sub, one of my most horrible tasks was to arrange the proportional size of illustrations and copy. The original illustrations that come in are perhaps twenty by thirty inches. By a system of simple mathematical calculation, which to this day I have never grasped, a measurement along one side must indicate what the general size of the finished “pull” should be. Mine was the wildest guesswork. The pulls either came up like postage stamps or like recruiting posters, and I suppose I must have wasted a good deal of the firm’s money in useless “blocks.”
Also, I was not at all good at estimating the space that the “copy,” or printed matter,