Editorial note: In May 1965 Warner dictated these notes on her childhood to Valentine Ackland, who sent them to William Maxwell on 21 August 1966: ‘Here at last are the Notes about Sylvia’s childhood: I hope, if I dare hope anything, to take her to the tip of Scotland in October and it should be possible to write down more, which I will then send you.’ The Warner and Ackland Archive at the Dorset History Centre does not include the projected second instalment.
Sylvia Townsend Warner: Notes about Her Childhood
(Notes, mainly taken down from dictation, & all amended by S. T. W.)
BORN. December 6th, 1893. At about 6 a.m. (She was born in a caul, which the midwife claimed & probably sold to a sailor – it being a magical protection against death by drowning.)
Her mother fell in labour to the sound of a knell. A Harrow School Governor had just died; the bell was always rung for them.
HOUSE 1. Dame Armstrong’s House: Georgian building, now pulled down. Sylvia’s father, George Townsend Warner, shared this with E.M. Butler, who was a bachelor & was Sylvia’s godfather. She thinks he was a son of the then-Master of Trinity.
The house was built on the side of such a steep slope that the ground-floor windows in front & on one side of it were second-floor windows at the other side. This house was directly opposite the place where Ashley-Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury, ‘saw with horror & indignation –’ the pauper’s burial.1
Dame Armstrong’s House was taken down to make room for the Memorial to the Dead of the First World War (the memorial building was used as an air-raid shelter in the Second World War).
HOUSE 2. After about 11/2 years, the family moved to Radnor Lodge; this was a tall, thin, semi-detached house, looking West. They were there until Sylvia was about 9 or 10 years old. Downstairs was G.T.W’s workshop, which had a rocking-horse in it (see ‘A Spirit Rises’). (When Sylvia & I lived together in the flat above the garage, at my family’s house in Winterton, Norfolk, my nursery rocking-horse stood in the large studio-room of that flat, & Arthur Machen and his wife, Purefoy, who was Sylvia’s aunt on her mother’s side, stayed with us there: Arthur used to sit on the rocking-horse and declaim, while Purefoy and I played billiards on a miniature table.)
There were three steps to the front-door of Radnor Lodge, & at the top of the steps a space on which a rocking-chair would be put. G.T.W. sat there on summer evenings, with Friday the spaniel and Mr Dive, Sylvia’s black cat. Sylvia would sit on his knee, or on the step, while he read aloud to her. Stories from Grimm, or The Chronicle of the Drum, or from Thackeray: ‘Immortal Smith O’Brien / Was roaring like a lion –’.2
Radnor Lodge had front & back gardens. Sylvia had a garden of her own with a sweet-briar in it. There she made her sloe gin, from the damaged sloes her mother had thrown out; this she corked up with water & left for a long time, forgetting about it. And one day it exploded. There also she had a dairy and made milk from water and chalk.
At the very top of the house was Nora’s (her mother’s) workshop, or workroom, where Sylvia had her first lessons. She remembers writing ‘J’ai un chat noir’ & drawing a picture of her cat, Mr Dive. He was named after the husband of the woman who kept their seaside lodgings at Camber, in Kent. Sylvia pined for the place when they returned from their first holiday there, & G.T.W. brought her the kitten, in a lidded wicker basket. Dive had a very short stump of tail (he had been born that way: he was not a Manx cat). The family also had a black, large spaniel called Friday: for a time they gave lodging to a friend’s bulldog, when Sylvia could only just walk & used to pull herself upright by his soft, flat muzzle.
In the winter Sylvia had lessons in the dining-room because there was a fire there. Lessons were always given by Nora. She began reading in Reading Without Tears.3 She had a phenomenal memory, for pictures & for spoken words, & betrayed that she still could not read by one day saying ‘Horse’, and then ‘Pony’, looking at a picture of a little horse: the word below it was ‘Nag’.
At about seven years old she read from the Bible; and at that time Friday the spaniel went into the butcher’s shop, intent to find a gobbet, & Sylvia rushed in to drag him away, saying severely ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’
At about this age of seven she was sent to a kindergarten, for one term only. They asked for her removal because she was such a good mimic and, without any malicious intention, imitated the mistresses & disrupted discipline. Her one report was dreadful on all subjects, but at the end a grudging admission: ‘Sylvia always sings in tune.’
Earlier, still at Radnor Lodge, when she was a very small child, asleep in bed, an oil-lamp smoked and she was nearly stifled. She was very ill for some time afterwards – so ill that she had to learn to walk all over again, when at last she was allowed to get up. It affected her bronchial tubes for many years after. She remembers, when she was still very small, being at tea, sometime in June. There was a sudden, fearful storm & the hailstones, of great size, shattered the window glass, which fell across the table. G.T.W. rushed in, swathed her in an eiderdown & carried her to safety.
Also, ‘absolutely timeless but very early, because I was still rolling’, she remembers rolling down a green & daisied slope, in absolute ecstasy. They were there, she & Nora, when the School was in Chapel. They used to wait there until they heard from the Chapel what Sylvia called ‘the Law-Law-Laws’ (‘Lord have mercy upon us, & incline our hearts to keep Thy law –’). After that came a hymn, & then people began to come out. (Here, Sylvia recalled the pleasure of watching the boys’ top-hats being handed down along the pew ranks, at the end of every service; carefully smoothed around the tall crown & then passed swiftly from hand to hand.)
They were still living at Radnor Lodge when Sylvia found Vanity Fair & began to read it. She did, in fact, read about half the book.
SMALL HOUSE. Here G.T.W was the House Master. Sylvia was about nine or ten years old. On the steep side of the hill, not far off, was a Nursery Garden of flowering shrubs. She remembers her ecstasy, running through the scent of the shrubs – laburnum, lilac, syringa . . . She could not there be followed by her nurse, they grew so close & so low to the ground.
Nasty Florence – nice Grace. ‘Florence made me an agnostic by threatening me with a bogey who came down the chimney & watched me whenever I wasn’t looking that way. I said “I don’t believe there is one –” and she said, “You wait – you’ll find out!” And it seems to me now that I lay awake all night, waiting for the bogey to come down the chimney – and he didn’t.’
On her walks with her nurse she loved the rubbish she saw in the ditches: blue enamel saucepans, kettles, single boots – ‘I used to long to take them home –’.
The then-Headmaster of Harrow (Weldon) had a nephew whom he adored, who was called Alexander. He had a summer party every year, known as Alexander’s Feast. It was held in a hayfield & they had masses of strawberries and cream. Every child on the Staff went to this.
HARROW. ‘It was very curious, growing up in two societies, School and Town. My father living by the School rhythm – up by bell at 6.45. I remember the noise of bat & ball from the cricket fields below, on hot summer evenings. And on winter afternoons the very melancholy mooing of the crowd watching a football match. It went with the melancholy of winter evenings.’
IRELAND. Aged about eight. Dreadful crossing & she was fearfully sick. Holyhead to Kingstown; train to Westland Row, Dublin. Bleak & dirty. Breakfast, & then she was taken to see Mountjoy Square & the slums around Dominic Street, the great Georgian houses.
By train to Monasterivan, county Kildare: met by the barouche. Lined with fine, dark-blue cloth: a coachman & footman: the luggage taken separately in another vehicle. Seated in the splendid barouche, Sylvia remarked happily, ‘What a lovely cab!’
G.T.W’s aunt Anne – called ‘Tenny’ – married Ponsonby Moore when she was about 27. He was known as Old Pun. He became Earl of Drogheda. They lived at Moore Abbey, which was a heavily haunted house (& fairly recently it was burned out by action of poltergeists). They had two children, Bea & Henry (who now, in 1965, is Speaker of the House of Lords).
Moore Abbey had splendid avenues of Irish Yews: the gardeners still wore Irish dress, & chimney-pot hats. There was a sedan-chair in the hall: Sylvia spent hours in it. She vividly remembers the arrangement of dessert gooseberries at dinner: green & red layers alternating, in a sharp-pointed pyramid.
There was a wonderful Georgian dolls’ house.
Tenny was seven or ten years younger than G.T.W’s mother, her sister. She had a jewelled chalice, out of which she drank water. She was a friend of Hugh Lane, and of Lady Gregory.
The house had a fearful poltergeist, which was always at its worst in the Royal Suite. It was eventually let, or sold, to Count John McCormack, the singer, who had it exorcised – but for all that it was burnt to the ground.
Ghost Story about Moore Abbey: the house-party was playing at table-turning one day, & a message came through that the sender wanted to be buried in consecrated ground. They got directions as to place, & they all trooped out, & found some broken bones, bits of a skeleton, but no skull. They searched for it but could not find it, & so went in to lunch. But Bea & Henry, the children, went out on their own to see what the grown-ups had been doing. They saw the hole, & a man in a frieze coat sitting on its edge. The man had vanished by the time they got to the place, but there was a skull on the edge of the hole. That night there was a dreadful uproar in the house, so appalling that no one in the place could sleep. Next day a priest was consulted, & the bones & the skull were properly buried. But still the poltergeist hung about – Nora, sleeping there, heard bare-footed people in the next room. It was a very melancholy, frightening place.
HARROW. Among very early memories: standing beside a yellow-painted chest of drawers, which had white enamel knobs to the drawers, hoping that the dress to be taken out would be the yellow Chinese silk one. Nora said she must then have been about two years old.
She wandered about the house, as a little child, singing to herself: ‘Art thou whirly, Hilly Warner, art thou sore detest – –’. This was her rendering of the hymn ‘Art thou weary, art thou languid, art thou sore opprest –’.
‘Fawny was a Clown and he said – –’. This she reiterated over & over again. G.T.W. heard her, & made her a rag book about Fawny the Clown (which book is still extant). He did not then realise that the sentence was meant to be ‘Thorny was the crown on His head –’
The first hymn she knew by heart was Addison’s, ‘The spacious firmament on high –’ which she was taught & still remembers. Another she still remembers is part of a paraphrase of a psalm, ‘When in the sultry glebe I faint –’.4
POETRY. Remembers learning by heart two songs from Love’s Labour Lost. Liked especially ‘When icicles hang by the wall –’. And all lyrics from The Tempest. She learned very easily. Nora gave her lessons for 2 hours every morning. She learned the speech before Agincourt, ‘When gentlemen in England now abed –’. She adored Macbeth: & insisted on Emily the cook performing the cauldron scene with her. Flora Warner, her grandmother, taught her ballads (born Flora Moir. She had a beautiful singing voice). Sylvia had a book called The Child’s Golden Treasury & loved a poem about winter, ‘The frosty ways like iron, the branches plumed with snow –’.5 She has never found the book since her childhood: it was pocket-size, in a little blue cover.
MUSIC. Made up a great many tunes (early childhood).
DRAWING. ‘I drew a great deal. I had a long serial about two children called Marmaduke & Josephine: I made pictures & left a small corner blank, writing READING above it – to be supplied by someone else.’
SPELLING. Very bad. ‘Dr Stiven came with his paining stove – ’. This was in a letter she wrote to her absent mother, when she was about eight or nine. She meant to say ‘his painting stuff’ for a sore throat. But a little later she suddenly began to spell quite easily.
RELIGIOUS LIFE. Nora thought that she must at any rate know something about Christianity, so she started to tell her the story of the Three Kings: ‘And at last the star stood still over the stable. They went in, and there was an ox, and an ass, and a woman, and a baby lying in the manger –’. Sylvia, having followed the story with great attention, asked: ‘And did they KILL it?’ (At this time, aged about four or five.)
About five or six, she played one day at being at a dance. Nora asked who was there too? ‘Cinderella.’ ‘And who else?’ Sylvia replied, ‘Cinderella is dancing with Jesus.’
CLOTHES. Nora made them, usually. Sylvia took great interest in them; studied the pictures in French fashion papers. She remembers Nora’s own dresses, especially an evening one ‘made up in layers’: a layer of pink gauze, then a layer of blue, then a layer of white with pink and blue paillettes. Later, an evening dress in Watteau style: a train from the shoulders and a stand-up collar.
SCHOOL CONCERTS. ‘Horribly embarrassing’. A treble singing ‘Who is Silvia?’ And embarrassing too was ‘Forty Years On’ and ‘Auld Lang Syne’. On Speech Day she wore her best clothes: white starched muslin. Her hair was spread out fanwise – but it was short till she was about 6.
HOLIDAYS. Alfold, in Sussex, where her paternal grandfather was Rector. (Both maternal grandparents were dead before she was born – but Fanny, her maternal grandmother, as a ghost visited her cradle.)
At Alfold there was a bank in the paddock, full of white violets & adders. G.T.W. was once very ill there; she remembers that he had Brand’s Essence & she sat on his bed & ate it out of the tin: the tin stood in a saucer of water, like a night-light.
Camber, in Kent. Sylvia used to go out with nice Grace, her nurse, in the early mornings, to pick mushrooms on the golf-links. Viper’s Bugloss and yellow horned poppies grew there. She remembers the little train going to Rye, along the side of the river; & remembers also ‘endlessly eating fish –’.
The second time she was there, having left her cat Dive at Harrow, Sylvia prayed devoutly for him every night; Mrs Dive, the landlady, believed that these were prayers for her husband, who was rather unsatisfactory.
Sylvia loved the place – ‘The only thing that went wrong at Camber was when I got mosquito fever –’.
Cromer in Norfolk: 2 summers after Camber – though in fact she was taken there in the spring, to get over bronchitis. There was a very cold wind. She & her nurse stayed in lodgings with ‘a comfortable woman who had two brothers, large, spherical men in blue jerseys who were known as “The Boys”. One of them fell in love with Grace and used to sing an evangelical hymn, “Grace, ’tis a charming sound –”’.6 In these lodgings there was a wonderful lithograph of the Last Day. Sylvia was thrilled & alarmed by it. And a book called The Dark River,7 about a family who died one by one, and a great deal about Azrael the Angel of Death – an Allegory: ‘I expect it helped to form my style’. At this time she was aged about eight or nine.
Wales: summer holidays. (All described in ‘Wild Wales’.)
Cornwall: before she was ten. A spring holiday in N. Cornwall. She was scared of the great Atlantic breakers; it was a very rough spring. She loved the colours of the place, but was afraid. It was, too, ‘the first time I had seen really grand, first-class gorse.’ She sat in the sun and heard the gorse seed-pods explode.
The family always took the spaniel, Friday, on holidays; but she was sad because the cat could not go, too. She insisted upon putting prawns into matchboxes and posting them to Mr Dive; and she would put her ear to a telegraph pole and say she could hear Dive purring – but this was remarked upon, and she ceased to believe it.
***
These notes were taken down by hand, from dictation, at Renvyle, Eire, in May 1965. By V.A.
I hope more may follow.
Dorset History Centre reference D/TWA/A21a (N/lower left/52/3),
Dorset County Museum reference STW 2012.125.1273
Notes
- Anthony Ashley-Cooper, seventh earl of Shaftesbury (1801–85), philanthropist and politician. ‘In later life he was to trace … his philanthropic zeal to his teenage encounter with a pauper funeral on Harrow Hill’, according to John Wolffe in his life of Shaftesbury in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: online https://www.oxforddnb.com/display/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-6210?rskey=mrk0qH&result=2 (accessible via subscription).⮭
- Thackeray’s ballad The Chronicle of the Drum was written in 1841. ‘Immortal Smith O’Brine / Was raging like a line’ – Thackeray, ‘The Battle of Limerick’, lines 97–8; William Smith O’Brien (1803–64), Irish nationalist prominent in the Young Ireland movement.⮭
- F. L. Bevan (later F. L. Mortimer), Reading Without Tears, Or, a Pleasant Mode of Learning to Read (1857).⮭
- ‘When in the sultry glebe I faint’: Joseph Addison, ‘The Lord my Pasture shall prepare’, line 7.⮭
- William Allingham, ‘Robin Redbreast’, lines 29–30.⮭
- Philip Doddridge, ‘Grace! ’tis a charming sound / Harmonious to my ear’ (1740).⮭
- Rev. Edward Monro, The Dark River: An Allegory (1845).⮭