His days were exactly planned. Matins in the church at eight: breakfast at eight-thirty: leave the house at eight-forty-five (after which we had family prayers without him): prayers in the chapel at Wilton House at nine, and so on throughout the day. He enjoyed thus to dovetail his work, including in his day a good number of fixed engagements between which he fitted the many unexpected demands which are made on the time of a country parson.
From this record of my father’s day, he might appear easy to know—a mere man of routine. Yet this is far from the case. The routine was on the surface: it had been deliberately assumed: beneath the uniformity was a man of quite another type.
My father used to tell us that when he left Oxford, he decided that he disliked his handwriting, which was ugly, irregular, and illegible. He therefore changed it, making it firm, clear, and very balanced. So it remained. This too was himself.
There were in my father two people—the natural man, and the man formed by reason, judgment, and a religion based on the Church Catechism, and centred round the duty towards God, and the duty towards thy neighbour. He did not ask from the faith which he so firmly kept, any mystical consolations: he demanded a definite line of conduct. Probably the fundamental traits in a character are never wholly obliterated, but by the time I knew my father, the Old Adam in him had become as completely sublimated as was his handwriting. He had adapted himself to the mould which he had made.
His Latin blood equipped him with a disposition which was active, lively, witty, artistic, and amusing. He was musical, highly strung, sensitive, and nervous. A small light figure, he won many a steeplechase at Christ Church, and distinguished himself at Oxford in the game of ‘real’ tennis, as he always called it. He hunted a great deal, and was an extremely good shot. He loved travel, knowing the small towns of Italy as well as the great celebrated places; and his walking tours with Oxford friends made him acquainted with all parts of the Highlands as well as the English Lake Country.
After becoming a clergyman, he gradually gave up all these pursuits, not, at first, because he thought them wrong (though he did ultimately almost think that they were) but because he was resolved to give every faculty he possessed, every ounce of energy, every moment of time, to the service of the Church. The swift firm steps carried him now no farther than the limits of his beloved parish: his sporting clothes were exchanged for clerical attire which was, even in those days, ultra-correct: the slim figure which he had delighted to keep down to ‘Derby weight’ became, without adding an ounce of weight, that ‘commanding presence’ which made Lady Pembroke declare that she always thought him ‘taller than George’, her husband of six feet six in height. Nobody would have guessed that he was to the end of his life an extremely nervous man, for he had taught himself an unshakable composure of manner, and could handle a difficult meeting, or face an unexpected emergency with unruffled ease.
Such self-control can only be achieved, as the Bible says: ‘by prayer and fasting’, and it must have cost my father a great deal of both. When he first came to Wilton, he still hunted occasionally with the Blackmore Vale, and kept a hunter at Sherborne; he shot frequently with the young Herberts; he played lawn-tennis two or three times a week with his curates. Then he found that all these things were taking him away from the work of his life, and by degrees they were all given up. To the last, he was completely at home when he got on to a horse, but he never kept one after he became Rector of Wilton. Only once do I remember his even contemplating the idea of shooting, and then he accepted a most tempting invitation to shoot grouse with a cousin in Scotland. He packed his guns, and started for the station. On the way, he thought he ought not to go, and he turned back and came home. But though for years he never shot, he did not lose his eye, and I remember once when we were children, we looked with him across a little stream at the end of the garden at the poultry field of a smallholder. Running about among the chickens was a huge rat. Papa sped back to the house and brought his gun. Then he climbed up on to a paling, and holding the gun at a most difficult angle, he picked out that rat among all the bustling chickens, and it rolled over dead amidst a chorus of squawks from the hens.
Gardening was a recreation he allowed himself, for though it was a pleasure, it was also ‘working in the garden’. He and my mother looked supremely happy and serene on summer evenings when she sat on her camp-stool beside him while he weeded, and a robin usually perched on the handle of the weeding-basket.
Sometimes when he was reading or writing in the study, with the forbidding label ‘Engaged’ hung
