Matches in the sitting-rooms were meant only for lighting candles and for sealing letters; and as soon as the winter fires were lit, the matchboxes were moved into the background, and in front of each was placed a vase (‘vause’ my father called it) containing paper spills. How near we then were to the poetry of life! A girl lighting her candle with a spill, lit from a stove in which burnt the ashes of last winter’s fires, was in the tradition of the Vestal Virgins: while the man who carried the light to his pipe from the fire in his grate, was of the family of Prometheus.
Then there were economies in journeys. To begin with, their number was limited. Travelling by train now costs if anything rather more than it did before the war, but it was then looked upon as quite an exceptional expense. Country people did not think of running up to London every week, or of staying in a different house every week-end. Many engagements were fitted into one journey. When I once developed an alarming cough, and was taken to London to see a specialist, my mother and I left Wilton station at half past seven on a winter morning, so that we might get full value for our tickets, as we should thus have time to see not only the doctor, but the National Gallery and the South Kensington Museum as well.
People stayed in each other’s houses more seldom, but when they came, they stayed longer. They ‘saved their pockets’ by making a round of visits arranged on an elaborate plan worked out with the help of Bradshaw. Many visits lasted a week or a fortnight, and some of my uncles and aunts always came for a month every summer.
When our guests arrived, only very honoured or very lame ones were met at the station by a cab. Everyone else was escorted on foot, to and from the station by a large or small contingent of the family, their luggage being brought to the house in the donkey-cart, or pushed by the garden-boy in a wheelbarrow or a pair of trucks. Those walks to and from the station helped to keep us and our guests on easy terms with the townspeople. Everybody knew who had come to stay. When my sister came home for the first time after her marriage, we, most of us, met her at the station, and a jolly old dame called out as we passed her house:
‘Any family, Mrs. Collins?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Never mind. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again.’
These friendly greetings cannot reach a passing motor car.
I remember one funny little economy which I am sure has been now outgrown by even the most old-fashioned of nannies. When we learnt to sew, our nurse would place the hem or seam for us, and then tack it. When we had laboriously and clumsily crawled down our piece of work with the needle, we were taught to draw out the tacking thread, and wind it upon an empty reel. It was then used again and again.
Perhaps cotton was very expensive in those days, for when my mother gave out garments and children’s clothes to be made before Christmas by poor seamstresses out of work, she always gave them too the cotton to sew with. But no one was given a whole reel. It was our part as children to wind off on little twists of paper the quantity allotted for each garment, and this allowance, and no more, was given away with the material.
Paper and string were, of course, carefully saved from all parcels which came to the house, and the string was made into neat loops and kept in a drawer in the dining-room. In an adjoining drawer were placed the half-sheets of unused notepaper, torn from the backs of letters. We played an enormous number of word games at Wilton, and these were written on the large sheets of paper which had contained parcels from the grocer. To this day, the mention of certain games calls up for me the faint far-distant aroma of Mr. Gidding’s brand of China tea, and I see again the very pretty early nineteenth-century trade advertisement which was printed in pale red ink on the paper which he used for packing his most homely parcels.
Sending the boys to school was a costly business, and so for a long time there was no governess for the ‘little girls’. Our ‘education’ would be despised to-day. My mother taught us herself. We learnt everything by heart—pieces of poetry, passages from the Bible, history, geography, or French and Latin grammar; and then she came to us for about half an hour to ‘hear us’. After that she wrote copies for us, in her lovely harmonious handwriting, leaving us by ourselves writing for an hour or so. I only had lessons from real governesses for four years of my life, and money was certainly saved on the education of my sisters and me, but though our training was very unconventional, I think we were not any the worse for that. We learnt how to read for ourselves, in English and in French, and were given plenty of opportunity to do both. We learnt how to live in the family circle, which costs nothing, and is very useful in after life.
As children we were abominably dressed. This was of course partly from economy, though it must also be confessed that my mother was completely destitute of dress-sense. She was indeed in many ways blind to appearances. Her humorously affectionate vision saw chiefly what was beneath the surface. She did appreciate my father’s good looks, but as for her children, she loved them equally whatever their appearance. She did not care what we looked like. In fact
