An old lady living in Wilton had been the heroine of what must have been surely the one and only romance of family prayers. She had belonged to a large family of sisters, living with a most severe parent in Smith Square, Westminster. The sisters were all heiresses, but such was in those days the standard of chaperonage, that none of them had ever found herself alone with a young man. Our old friend had at last collected a lover, but how could he propose? Privacy was impossible. This ingenious young man had the brilliant idea of proposing during family prayers, and we made many guesses as to how he achieved it.
My brother Harold decided that he responded fervently in the Litany.
‘I beseech thee to have me good Laura.’
Laura was not her name, but doubtless the adored one was quick enough to glance demurely in her admirer’s direction when she murmured her next AMEN.
Evening prayers were not general except in clerical houses, but even there they sometimes failed in their effect through being introduced too unexpectedly into the stream of common life. It was often a great shock at Wilton Rectory, when we were playing games after dinner, to see the door suddenly open to admit a swift procession which disposed itself discreetly on its knees before the chairs at the far end of the room. The parlour-maid detached herself from the others, and, approaching my father, she presented him with a book. Laughter was abruptly stilled. Conversation froze on the lips. Counters rolled from the card-table. Everyone, flopped down to ‘smell their chairs’. But it must be admitted that this swift turnover to devotion was too sudden for any but the most gymnastic minds.
It was the servants who usually took the family by surprise, but once, at any rate, in our house, the tables were turned. My father must have been bored with his evening, and looking at the clock, he saw that the servants were late for prayers. He rang the bell sharply. There was a pause. He rang again. This time the kitchen-maid appeared, covered with confusion, as the rule of the house was that the young maids should not appear at evening prayers. They were supposed to be in bed. Now this embarrassed girl had to report that the upper servants were ‘having a game’ and were all dressed up, so they couldn’t possibly appear. They were not let off. A grave message was sent, ordering them to change, and to appear in ten minutes. Exactly at that moment, the door opened, and the customary procession entered. The carriage of the maids was perfect. Their figures stiff and rigid in the firm stays which controlled their panting: the parlour-maid handed the Prayer Book without meeting my father’s eyes: he took it with his usual gravity; and then all the flushed and guilty faces were comfortably buried in the chair seats. Only when Mildred and I were having our hair brushed upstairs did we learn that our respectable maids had actually been dressed as men, and had worn trousers—whose, we never learnt.
My first dinner party was at the palace at Salisbury in the days of Bishop Wordsworth. Most of the guests were old and very dignified, but there was one young man of my own age, Algy Bathurst. After dinner, he and I withdrew to a distant corner for a little light conversation, when all at once we caught sight of the last of the other guests disappearing through the drawing-room door. We had been left isolated. Horrified at the idea of doing the wrong thing, we followed at full speed, only to catch sight of that same figure vanishing through yet another door. We followed. Inside stood an unsmiling chaplain, who gravely motioned us in opposite directions. We did as we were told and then at once we found ourselves face to face in choir stalls on either side of a chapel. Before we had had time to pull ourselves together, yet another chaplain had begun to read compline. I have never forgotten the shock of that unprepared volte-face.
Family prayers are nowadays not easy to arrange because the routine of our days is so unlike that of the last century. It would be truer to say that our days have no routine. But in Queen Victoria’s time, country life was very regular, and we did not sit lightly in our places. We were glued in. Day followed day in an admired regularity. My parents were really annoyed even to hear of people moving rapidly and frequently (in the then meaning of those words) from one place to another. Most people stayed at home, except for certain regularly planned visits, which were generally as annual as Christmas Day, and were always arranged weeks, or even months ahead. No one appeared unexpectedly from motors or aeroplanes. And the whole household fell into this steady round. Servants were engaged as under-housemaids, nursery-maids, or kitchen-maids, and moved slowly up to the higher grades. If they ‘left to be married’, it was only after a courtship lasting two or three years at least. Meals were always at the same hours, and nobody was ever late. Everyone came down to breakfast. Not to do so would interfere with the routine of the whole house. In one house in Dorset where I stayed every year with my parents, the party assembled in the drawing-room before breakfast, to move from there to the breakfast-room in strict order of precedence, when the butler had flung open the door to announce that ‘Breakfast is served, Sir Richard’.
Before this, our host had read prayers in the hall, and from his place, he fortunately could not see the staircase, upon which belated guests would perch themselves at different heights. As the servants were filing out, a covey of figures fluttered up from these various levels, trying to give the impression that they were all rising from their
