Part 8 (1/2)

The epoch of tutors came to an end soon after the birth of my sister, which happened at Marseilles, when my mother was on her way to Cannes

After the event, my mother was pronounced by the doctors to be able to winter in England, and I and my two brothers, therefore, went back to Chewton Mendip and became private pupils of Mr Philpott, for the second time Here we remained till I went first to a tutor at Oxford--Mr Bell-- and then to live with my uncle and aunt, Professor T H Green (Mrs

Green was my mother's sister) There I was ”coached for Balliol” by two of the best scholars in the University One of them was Professor Nettleshi+p, who a couple of years later was made Professor of Latin, and the other is now Sir Herbert Warren, President of Magdalen They were both delightful expounders of the classics, and, though I was an unaccountably bad scholar, I a me However, I need say noabout it is supplied by Sir Herbert Warren in the letter which I have included in my Oxford Chapter

CHAPTER VIII

THE FAMILY NURSE

In the fareater effect upon the child, and so upon the man, than that exercised by the servants of the household in which he or she is brought up And of those influences, upstairs or downstairs, none, of course, is so potent as that of the nurse That is what Goethe would call one of the secrets that are known to all Why it should ever be regarded as a secret Heaven knows; yet it must be so considered, for it is very seldom spoken of except in the case of nurses

Anyway, I and my brothers, and in our earlier years my sister, were quite as fortunate in our nurse as ere in our parents and in our home Her name was Mrs Leaker She was not married, but bore the brevet rank always accorded to upper servants of her position She played h distinction She began as nurse; she next became cook; then housekeeper; then reverted for a ti more than housekeeper because she ruled over the nursery as well as over the kitchen, the store-room, and the housemaids' room But whatever her name in the household, and whatever her duties, she was always in fact head-nurse

She loved children, and they loved her, though not without a certain sense of awe She had a fiery terown-up people A child, if it knew the properit liked with her

Taken altogether, she was one of the most remarkable women, whether for character or intellect, that I have ever come across In appearance she had, what can be best described as, the gipsy look, though she did not believe herself to have gipsy blood Her complexion arthy, her hair was black, and her eyes dark and full of an eager and scintillating brightness which e with every ence If anyone who knew her was asked to state theabout her, I am sure the ansould be, ”mobility,” both of htness in her step--I hear it as I write--in the gestures of her hands and her head, and indeed in everything she did

Let nobody suppose for a itans_, or St Vitus' Dance There was nothing involuntary in her unrest It was all part of an intense vitality and an intense desire for self-expression When she was in one of her worst te at each wall like a lion in a cage, in a hich I have only seen one other person effect with equal spirit and unconsciousness That was an ereat political crisis Her nature was so eager and so active, and see her body andher in itations must wear her out prematurely and that she had only a short life before her, or else an iood health till over eighty, and to the last moment retained the full control of her faculties She died, as ht any other old person, of bronchitis In truth, she was an example of Sir Thomas Browne's dictum that we live by an invisible fla but invisible It was releamed, and took on, like the witch's oils, every colour in the spectrulowed and flashed the colours of her mind

[Illustration: Mrs Saloht up in a poor household, in an age when illiteracy, alas! seemed the natural fate of the poor But you could no more have kept education frory lioness She was deterht herself to read before she had reached woht herself by pure force of her will, adopting, curiously enough, ould now be described as the Montessori method She opened books and read the of the words Her letters her ht her She often told ht her to read When she had attained the power of reading, self-education was easy enough It led to results of an aht seem to prove all the lore of the educationalists at fault People, we are told, ood literature Without that training they will never know the good from the bad

Now read this story of an innate appreciation of good literature which she told me with her own lips I asked her once, when I was a lad, what she thought of ”Junius,” who had begun to exercise a great influence over my rhetorical instincts It was as natural to consult her on a point of literature as on one of doest ever e It ran in this way, for I recall her words

When I was a girl, and a young housemaid in my first place at Mrs

Lloyd's, in Clifton, I used to have as part of , I used to take down the books and look at as in thee or tith my duster in my hand Once I took down a volue or two, and as I read I began to feel as if I was drunk In those days I had never heard of the Duke of Grafton or Lord Sandwich, or any of the other people he talks about, and I did not knohat it all meant, but the words went to my head like brandy

Now, I ask anyone with a sense of literature whether it would be possible to give a better lightning criticism of ”Junius” and his style than that conveyed in Leaker's words She had got the exact touch

”Junius,” in truth, is not only eards his style There he is unquestionably great

Tuerated, and monotonous as it often is, his style does affect one like wine That is certainly how it affected, and still affects, e when I did not really know much more about the Duke of Grafton than did Leaker, and probably cared less, I had got the peroration of the first letter to the Duke of Grafton by heart I used to walk up and down the terrace, or across theto myself, orinvective I ives advice to the University of Cae They will, he hopes, take it to heart when they shall be ”perfectly recovered from the delirium of an Installation,” and when that learned society has becohtless avewords! How the lime trees rocked to the final crack of the whip over the unhappy Grafton!

”The learned dullness of declah happiest in fiction, will forget your virtues”

But that was by no nosis and the power to get hold of books somehow or other When in the 'twenties she came to Bristol from Dartmouth, which was her home, with her mother and brothers (her father was dead), she travelled, as did all people with slender on These vehicles proceeded at the rate of about three or four miles an hour All she could tell about her journey was that she lay in the straw, in the bottoon, and read Wordsworth's _Ruth, The White Doe of Rylstone_ She was, throughout her life, very fond of _Ruth_ and this was her first reading I have often thought to reat apostrophe irl:

Before ht, unfurled To music suddenly

In later life she had the poem by heart, and I venture to say that there was not a word of it that she did not understand, both intellectually and eh she loved books and literature, it must not be supposed that she was indifferent to other for beautiful in nature or art made a profound impression upon her When Leaker first went to Paris, on our way to Pau or Cannes, I forget which, my mother sent her to the Louvre and told her specially to look at the Venus of Milo She gave her directions where to find the statue; when she came back, she said to my mother:

I couldn't find the statue you toldin the world I never thought to see anything so beautiful, and the broken arm did not matter at all, for she stood there like a Goddess