The first draft of The Love Child was written in a few weeks, but when I tried to transcribe it, I found this a most troublesome business. The spiritualized animal which took possession of me in the night wrote a handwriting which was all but completely illegible; and each night’s work took over a week to read. This erratic handwriting still flows from my hand whenever I try to write a book. The mind works so fast that the hands cannot follow it; and if the instrument lags behind, the whole thing is spoilt. I find that I cannot remember the end of any sentence that I begin. I therefore trained myself to compose on the typewriter. The typing of my first drafts is always abominable, but it is at least more legible than my writing of them. Though I am sure to have hit most of the wrong letters, the words come out at about the right length, so I can generally guess what they are.
Since the night when The Love Child was born, I have become a fairly steady writer, and people often ask me why I didn’t begin before. I began to write about a year and a half after my sister Mildred died. We had been lifelong companions. She was an enchanting talker, and an inspiring listener. All the fun which one gets out of inventing a story and writing it down, all the pleasure which is given to the writer who finds sympathetic readers—all this criss-cross of give and take, Mildred and I had enjoyed together without the labour of writing anything down. We often told each other that we would write books, and she did indeed write one extremely funny one which she afterwards lost; but we found each other’s companionship so completely satisfying that we sought no wider public.
After her death some dozen of her friends combined to write a little book about her, each one contributing an essay describing that facet of her character which he or she knew best. Harry Newbolt insisted upon my writing a preliminary essay in this book, which he said, wanted a more definite picture of Mildred’s life than could be given by any of the separate writers, and that was really my first piece of writing. The Mildred Book was printed on a hand press at Shaftesbury and was illustrated by Rex Whistler and Stephen Tennant; and when it was finished, the idea of The Love Child suddenly came to me.
Alice Sedgwick was staying at the Daye House when I wrote my first two chapters, and I showed them to her in the morning. She liked them, and it was entirely because of her encouragement that I went on with the book. Afterwards her sister Anne introduced me to my first publisher, and so this gifted writer became, as she called herself, ‘ Godmother to one of your children’.
Long before this, while Mildred was still alive, we had once said that As Far as Jane’s Grandmother’s would be a good title for a book, and I had gone so far as to write down some suggestions for the first chapter. This phrase had always been one of our family sayings. My elder brothers used to walk with Jane, their nursery-maid, to visit her grandmother, who lived in a cottage in the Hare Warren, a mile and a half away. It was the longest walk they ever took in those days and it became our family measure of distance. I now saw it as a spiritual measure, and used it to suggest the story of a girl whose grandmother was so dominating a personality that all her life she could never walk beyond the sphere of that overpowering influence.
I liked this subject. The autocratic grandmother was a type I knew well in my father and his sisters. It is a character which charms me, mostly because I could never be at all like it myself. Such characters are rare to-day. They suggest a life lived in a secure and unshakable setting. The tides of varying opinions may sweep to and fro outside it, but all the time it remains completely watertight. The house of such people is indeed built upon a rock. Fashions and opinions may change, the world look this way and that, uncertain what to believe or how to act, but within those impenetrable walls, life goes on as before. The master of the house remains its master. A personality such as this sounds harsh and forbidding, and it may be so at heart, but in the case of my father, I had seen it veiled in an outer garment of courteous old-fashioned manners, which simply made him impossible to argue with. If one ever attempted such a thing, he could always finally and definitely place one in the wrong. The longer one knew him, the more one came to see that his system worked. He had made his own conception of life as he had decided that it should be lived, and he continued to live in that way, whatever the world around him said, thought, or did. The first reaction of youth was naturally to rebel against this overmastering authority; but in order to rebel successfully, the rebel must have his own conception of life, equally complete and equally believed in. Not many people possess this.
The story of Jane with her few ineffectual struggles is really a symbolic picture of life in my own father’s house.
I notice that many of my friends feel obliged, when publishing a book, to lay their hand on their heart, and solemnly to protest that it contains no portraits—that all the people described in it are dead or have never lived. I have never done this because I don’t think that
