The queen drove in the last procession, surrounded by a mounted bodyguard of her sons and grandsons, and preceded by the English princesses in carriages. I tried with all my might to write down my personal impressions of each of these, though I lamented that they went by too quickly for me to see them properly. I thought the Duke of Connaught ‘very good-looking’, and the Duchess of Albany ‘very popular’, while Princess Maud was ‘ a dear little thing with a dear little tiny face’. The Prince of Wales looked ‘ very jolly’ as he rode on ‘ a splendid horse’ directly in front of the Queen, with the Dukes of Edinburgh and of Connaught on either hand; but I declared that ‘the most kingly man of all’ was the Crown Prince of Germany in his shining white uniform.
As the Queen drove to the Abbey, I was disappointed because she did not look up as she passed us, and I thought that her face was ‘very pale and sad’; but as she came back ‘she looked quite happy and smiled and bowed’. In fact, I added kindly, ‘she looked very nice indeed’.
I must have been a funny little girl, for I see by my diary that, except for the jewels of the Indian Princes, the gorgeous pageantry of the day did not much impress me. What I was looking for was the intimate expression on the faces of the people who drove by. I wanted to know what they were like. It was this which interested me.
The procession of Indian Princes was the last to leave the Abbey and we got off our stand and walked round to the West Door to see those glorious men get into their carriages. I enjoyed this close view of the jewels I had so much admired in the morning, but again, our easy approach to the Abbey door shows how simple the arrangements must then have been. People could move about the route with very little difficulty. Before we left our stand, we had seen the Bishop of London come out of the Abbey where he had been officiating, tuck up his robes, and run some way down the route to a stand where a seat was waiting for him. He did not heed the laughter and the cheers of the crowd who welcomed him as they had welcomed the dustman in the morning. He meant to see the procession.
When we reached Wilton next day, my sister Mildred had a sad story to tell. An important part of the Wilton Jubilee celebrations had been a dinner in the market place, when the whole grown-up population of the town had sat down to feast off steaming roast beef and ‘viggety pudden’, as the Wiltshire people call plum pudding. In the evening, when we had gone to London, Mildred had found a rather feeble-minded young labourer crying his heart out in his mother’s wash-house, because he had lost his ticket, and so had been shut out of the banquet. Mildred implored my father to do something about it, and the young man was accordingly sent one of the lavish meals which had been provided for invalids and old people who could not walk to the market-place. But it was no good. The boy shook his head and pushed away the plate. He could not eat. Indeed he did not want to. He was not crying for roast beef and plum pudding, but for having missed the fun of eating them in the market-place with the sun shining down upon his head.
Chapter Two
ECONOMIES
We sometimes think of the later Victorian and the Edwardian times as days of care-free opulence, when everyone was rich and secure, and when neither individuals nor nations knew what it meant to stand on the brink of bankruptcy. In a way this is true. Incomes seemed to be safe and secure when I was a child. Young people married possessing either a large or a small fortune invested in ‘the Funds’, and they knew just what that fortune was. Every year ‘the Funds’ produced the same income upon the investments. To this solid permanent foundation, professional men added the steadily rising incomes derived from their professions; and they were confident that as their families grew, their resources were bound to grow correspondingly.
Yet that old prosperity rested upon a background of frugality unattempted to-day, although everyone complains of poverty, a thing which nobody used to do. It was considered bad form to talk about money, whether to say you had too much or too little of it. You were expected to live up to your position and under your Income, and to say nothing about it: you tacitly kept a watchful eye on your bankbook to make sure that this precise balance was always maintained.
My father was a country parson with a large house and a small living, and he had ten children. He also had a great sense of ecclesiastical dignity. The population of Wilton with its little hamlet of Netherhampton was about two thousand. There were two churches and two curates. Nowadays this would be an excessive staff, especially as my father hardly ever left home even for a day. But in his eyes it was essential that at least two clergymen should always be present at the Sunday services in Wilton church, he thought a solitary parson so inadequate as to be almost ridiculous there. He was extremely active in mind as well as in body, and he was for ever thinking of new mediums for Church work, all of which cost money; and yet he was determined that the old things should always be done in the old opulent way, however many new things arose to be paid for too. Nothing would induce him to cut the cassock according to the cloth. So it came
