Between the death of the Queen and her funeral, I see by my diary that I spent several mornings in working designs in purple velvet appliqué, which I sewed on to heavy black hangings for the church. I then covered the velvet with jewels. This seems to have been a very big piece of work, but I had so completely forgotten it that when these hangings were shown to me at the time of King George’s funeral, I could not remember that I had ever seen them before. What I had not forgotten, but what takes up far less space in my diary than do those hangings, is that on the morning of the funeral the King’s printers had not delivered our copies of the special service which was to be held simultaneously in churches all over the country. My father would never admit defeat, and he was resolved that no King’s printers should prevent his expected congregation of eight hundred people from following the funeral service in Wilton Church. He therefore decreed that we should write out enough copies for them. I shall never forget that morning. Typewriters did not then exist except in the most modernized offices. No one possessed a duplicator. We had only our hands and our pens. There existed some horrible contraptions called ‘jellies’ on which it was possible to reproduce very uncertainly and unevenly about fifteen copies from one manuscript, and we also possessed what we called a printing press, which would make twenty or thirty copies in vivid purple ink. We collected a party of nine or ten of the young women of Wilton, and we spread ourselves over the drawing-room, the dining-room, the schoolroom, the hall and the staircase. There, from nine to one, we all wrote, rolled, pressed, squashed, and jellied; till it seemed that the burial service for Queen Victoria must be for ever written, rolled, pressed, squashed, and jellied on our hearts. But now I cannot remember one word of it. Thus was spent the morning of the Queen’s funeral day, and by two o’clock, some four or five hundred copies had been written out. Almost every other person was able to have one, for more than a thousand people came to the service, crowding into the aisles when all the seats were full. The people were very silent except for the sounds of unconcealed sobbing.
I can find little in my journal about the death of King Edward VII, for, when he died, I was ill in London, so I had little opportunity of seeing how his death affected people. I remarked that Hailey’s Comet was then between the earth and the sun for the first time in fifty thousand years, and I quoted Shakespeare’s words: ‘The Heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.’ A day or two later when I was well enough to get up and look at it out of the window, it seemed to be only ‘a faint smudge of rather luminous cloud’.
The first time I went out after King Edward’s death I went for a drive in the park, and was struck by the truth that mourning is by no means a uniform. Women dressed in black differ more than they do at any other time. It is a commonplace to say that we all look our best in it, but, like most commonplaces, this is the impression of a one-eyed observer. What I saw then, and have often observed since, is that black clothes make women appear to be either duchesses or charwomen. They are resolved to wear their rue with a difference; and this is fundamental, for while a man suffers the tortures of the damned if he is not dressed exactly like all his fellows, nothing annoys a woman more than to meet another wearing the same model as herself.
I was at Wilton at the time of King Edward’s burial on May 20th, and then I noticed that the ‘Church and churchyard were packed. People in every aisle. Everyone in black. Trains and trams all over the country stopped dead at the time of the burial.’
Chapter Twenty-One
WRITING BOOKS
Ten or eleven years ago I woke up in the middle of the night with the idea of a story in my head. I had not thought of it before that moment, but it struck me as being a very good subject, and I immediately sat up and scribbled away for three or four hours. I thought at first that it would be finished in one chapter, but when I began to write I found that it was going to be a much bigger thing than that. Before morning I had finished two chapters of The Love Child—my first book.
Till that night I had never thought seriously of becoming a writer, and now I did not know whether what I was doing would ever be any good. I was sleeping badly at that time and I wrote practically the whole of that first book during those feverish wakeful hours when the body is weary but the mind seems let loose to work abnormally quickly. I have often thought that in wakeful nights one is quite another person
