PARIS 1900.

All my life I have suffered from "geographical emotions".
Places are often easier to understand than people.

According to a tradition at home I had just missed being
born at Naples and the folklore of my childhood began with
stories of a city buried under flaming lava, avalanches in the
Alps or long walks in a forest of Christmas trees. My family
travelled constantly to such mythical-with-adventure countries,
and any day might be the longed for first date of "going abroad".

Once, when I was four, I was taken aboard the Newhaven
steamer. It was a windy day, I trotted up and down the deck
wondering how the planks were fitted together, there was salt
in the air and eddies of dust. I had promised to be obedient
so I had to walk up the gangway (but oh, how reluctantly) before
the London train arrived. Somebody lifted me into a carriage and
we drove back home. Still, France was not altogether strange to
me because the coast line was said to be visible from our cliffs
on a clear day. I used to stare at the horizon but what I
thought was land may merely have been clouds.

One May evening my mother's voice woke me up. "If you are
good, we are going to Paris to-morrow." I was five years and
eight months old.

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The hour on the ship, my first, blurs into other voyages.
There were to be so many of those hot summer crossings in my
childhood. I expect that I took my father's hand and followed
him to watch the baggage being lowered into the hold. Everything
was heavy, where possible it was solid, and I have wondered since
whether the constant shifting of tremendous weights gave men the
courage to build skyscrapers. Certainly a historian could recon-
struct the age from its luggage. Trunks had hooped lids bound
with straps and buckles. Square hat boxes were new. I seem to
remember that they were considered a little fast. Light cases
must have been synonymous with a lack of morals because nothing
less ponderous than pigskin studded with brass nails was to be
seen.

One item would not have been with us, the flat enamel bath
packed with toys that accompanied us on our English journeys.
Bathrooms had yet to come into ordinary use. An early excitement
in Paris but to be dated some years later was a bath into which
water flowed and was not poured.

There were always oilskins thrown over a line of deck
chairs, and apprehensive faces under wide, uncomfortable hats.
"So long as you close your eyes, my dear, the motion is hardly
perceptible." I watched the seamen enviously, having longed
for a boy's sailor suit ever since I could remember. "I go be-
low and lie on my back until the stewardess tells me we are

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inside the harbor." We were as certain to hear such phrases
as we were to see heavily fringed shawls and bright yellow bags.

At Dieppe the train surprised me, the steps were so high.
Even with the guard pulling me up, it was hard to get inside.
Then to my astonishment, quite big boys raced along the platform
in blue blouses and socks. I had been put into long tan stock-
ings for the journey, only babies in England had their legs un-
covered. Fisherwomen held up baskets of fish or, shouting against
the wind that refrilled their white bonnets, offered us dolls
dressed in bright banded petticoats and wooden sabots exactly
like themselves.

The white pattern of the seat covers is so early a recol-
lection that I seem always to have known it. They were very clean
in contrast to the dusty floor but rough to the hands. I know
that the compartment was full and that I made a tremendous effort
to be still and not ask often, "is it much longer to Paris?"
All the same, it was an eternity, those four hours.

Discipline might be suspended in private but in public I
was supposed to be seen and not heard. I might not run about,
there could be no question of nibbling a biscuit between meals.
I think I read of a picnic first in a book, it seemed an extra-
ordinary liberty. Thus in a train there was nothing for me to
do but look out of the window, read or make up stories.

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My children's paper that day was full of animals dressed
as boys. Jacko, the monkey, with a scarf flying out from his
neck, was pelting an elephant with snowballs. I stared at the
drawings hoping that I might get into the world on the other
side of the pictures because then the danger of my "worrying
about the time" would be over, but that afternoon I was too
excited for the magic to work. I could not say I had been to
Paris until I had set foot in the city, and I was afraid that
somehow I might be disobedient and my parents would turn back
at the gates.

At five I knew nothing of history. I had seen people
shake their heads and whisper the word "Dreyfus" but I did not
know what it meant nor that fifty thousand English had marched
in protest to Hyde Park. I had heard others say, however, that
they would not venture to the Exhibition on account of the hostile
feelings of the French about the Boer War.

My first impression of Paris is of walking down a street
from the station, and seeing Americans wearing tiny flags in
their buttonholes in case they were mistaken for English and
molested. In my then frame of mind I was hopeful for a fight.
I remember perfectly well that I clenched my fists, shouted the
words of a patriotic song of the moment that I must have learned
from my nurse, and waited eagerly for a Frenchman to reply.
It never occurred to me that I could not knock him down. I was

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plump and small, about the height of a child of three, so it
must have been an incredibly comic spectacle, but pride and a
magical belief that being English I was certain to win, blinded
me to reality. I neither thought of leaving an attack to my
father nor that my truculent behaviour might bring trouble on
my parents.

Aggression is a part of nature and a special need of child-
hood, it was the hours of inactivity that made me clench my fists,
and how much of history is not due to such simple pyschological
reactions? We have the knowledge now to understand, and how often
do we use it?

Curiously enough, I should have got on better with French
rather than English children. My father had lived as a boy for
several years near Caen in France and I think it must have been
the happiest time of his life. Certainly my training at home
was French in character. Wherever my father went, he took me.
If he discussed politics with elderly gentlemen whose black beards
came to the bottom of their waistcoats, it was not only expected
that I should listen but I was occasionally allowed to express
an opinion, naturally echoed from my father's views. My political
education began in Paris because we lunched most days at a
restaurant near the Madeleine much favored by ministers. I soon
discovered that it was an exciting game, like the animals in my
picture book defending their snow fort. There was a party working
for the good of the country, and everything that they suggested

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was right. Then there was a second, even secret group that tried
to snatch their power away, and if this happened, it would be
almost the end of the world.

I listened quite greedily. France was a Republic. I was
not quite sure what this was but I knew that England was a king-
dom because it was ruled by a Queen, an old lady in black for
whom I had had to leave my mud pies, and stand at the edge of a
pavement. Anybody might govern France, the boy riding his bicycle
or (as I thought then) the woman selling balloons. The royalist
system was safer, my father explained. Safer! Then I knew that
I was a republican. Liberty, equality, fraternity, to be free,
equal, and friendly, these were the signs of adventure and being
a boy whereas a royalist was old, careful and like a governess.
"I believe in the Republic" I announced and the old gentlemen
(I wonder now which ministers they were?) patted my head.

The entrance and the symbol of the Exhibition was an immense
arch. It was the magnified twin of a hair ornament of the period,
a two pronged comb over which the convulvulus of many decorations
ramped in flowery dots. Everything at that time had to curl;
a name should exist to describe the horror of 1900 over any blank
space. In fact, I have often wondered how English lawns survived?
How it must have hurt their owners to see them bare of hillocks
and curves; perhaps they had eyes only for the formal borders
where yellow calceolarias, blue lobelias and the drooping pink

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geraniums that were considered more discreet than their scarlet
fellows, were grouped in geometric patterns.

There was a long wait before we could buy our tickets,
then we walked through the archway into an avenue lined with
white pavilions. My first impression was of gravel. It was
deceptively like sand, and seemed to be endless. The first
building that we entered, (was it to the right of the entrance?)
contained Krupp's exhibit of long, shining guns.

My mother hurried me out. My father explained that it
was terrible that so much money and labor had been expended upon
tools to kill other men. I ought to be able to record my own
horror but nothing in the exhibition interested me so much.
I wanted to touch the cannon, and of course longed to fire them.
I remember these sensations too well to have much confidence
now in theories that the children who are discouraged from play-
ing at soldiers will be against war when they grow up. Most
five year olds are aggressive, and the more outlet they have in
games in a reasonable way, the less likely they are to be violent
when they are older, and it is far more dangerous.

We walked from the artillery, (I had no idea that it was
incongruous) into a long gallery filled with toys. The "set
piece" was a corner of the *Champs Elysees* filled with dolls.
All were dressed in the costumes of the day. There was a
soldier flirting with a nurse, who looked very gay in a wide

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skirt with broad flowing ribbons, a little girl with a hoop,
I decidedly critically that she did not grasp her stick as an
expert would hold it, and several small boys. Some things were
strange, just look at the soldier's red trousers! Everybody knew
in England that khaki was better as it blurred into the landscape.
And that baby in front of them, howling wildly, with tears stream-
ing down its face! At first I thought that these were paint but
my mother told me afterwards that they were a light, transparent
glue. The pebbles, the park bench and the trees were a familiar
scene and, remembering Kensington Gardens, I felt secretly
superior to the Frenchwoman who was holding her skirt up in one
hand, and pointing out some stitch in a piece of embroidery to
her companion. I was only worried lest it should be thought that
I liked dolls. I had no wish even to play with the figures but
I did want to know how they were made?

My self confidence however was not to last the day. Gilded
ropes kept the crowds from pressing too closely against the furni-
ture, the walls were hung with tapestries, there were curtains as
stiff and solid as marble. Everything was carved and was either
gigantic or dwarfed. Mermaids slipped out of mother of pearl
water lilies to hold up the handles of vases with breakable
fingers. The legs of a table bent like bamboos in a wind, the
interior of hundreds of glass cases was a snail's shell of glitter-
ing surfaces, enamel, garnet, coral or amber, reproducing in

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miniature insects, reptiles or the strangest of exotic plants.

There is no link between childhood in 1900 and the present
day. It was an incredibly restricted time. An invitation to
tea was a sacred obligation, in the rare event that a bill could
not be paid directly to the shop-keeper in cash, a cheque was
immediately sent to him with a precisely worded letter on hand-
woven paper. It was easier to alter the laws of the land than
to miss a dinner party to which one had accepted an invitation.
Many ordinary sensations were unknown because we looked at the
world from behind barriers of flannel, stiff collars and trailing
dresses. This was not fashion, it was a taboo against the ex-
posure of the skin. Our symbol of freedom was nature, we were
the last descendants of Rousseau (though we were unable to read
his books) and as movement was difficult because even a man's
clothes hampered his agility, we tried to become one with the
landscape. Some of the people about me literally lived on views.
They had never felt sun or wind or rain except through a layer
of serge, so the storm and the savage became emblems of mystery,
and walks or drives through a remote countryside their only
permissible form of self expression. No wonder that so many
masochistic heroines of the period as an ultimate in self torture
took to their beds.

Perhaps the age, as it felt itself dying, flowered into

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this immense jungle of tiny and useless possessions? Surely
modern art was born at the Paris Exhibition? Thousands of people
must have longed unconsciously for blank walls and straight lines,
after walking all day through miles of jewelled thimble cases
and Fragonard paintings reproduced in beads on bags so tiny
that they could not have contained a handkerchief?

It was late afternoon. We were on our way back to the hotel.
Suddenly a monster darted out of an alley, a huge white face
with thick, vermilion lips bent towards me, two white tentacles
covered with red pompons made as if they would snatch me up.
I did not understand the joke, I do not think that I had seen a
clown before, what was he going to do to me? In utmost terror,
I opened my mouth, and howled.

No clown could spoil my pleasure in the moving railway but
I was afraid of meeting him inside some gallery. I began to cry
if my family tried to take me round the buildings, besides, it
was dull to walk through rooms where the cases were usually far
above my head. So they hired a wheeled chair pushed by an elderly,
bearded Frenchman, and I trotted about the grounds in his charge,
while they went to see the pictures and the carpets.

He spoke no English but I found out somehow that he had a
family. I loved trying to talk to him. My father had begun
to teach me French before we had crossed the Channel, and I even
read the little/lesson book for pleasure. At first I had to learn
red

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so many words a day, afterwards my father promised me a new
English book for every French story that I first read, and then
narrated to him afterwards. I was seven before I managed a whole
book by myself. It was the inevitable *Malheurs de Sophie*. I
thought and dreamed in French for quite a portion of my child-
hood but it was, alas, before the days of phonetics, and as the
rules of pronunciation were never explained to me simply, my
accent remained Churchillian, my inflexions incurably British.

We used to drive through the Bois in those May afternoons,
usually in an open victoria. The traffic bewildered me, it was
so fast, and for us, on the wrong side of the road. I do not
remember seeing any motor cars until later visits although the
first taxis that I noticed were French. Their drivers wore long
goatskin coats, and sat high above the engines like Greenlanders
paddling kayaks.

Men watered the streets with hoses, there were no patient
horses pulling huge water carts like the ones we saw at home.
The problem of dust was a real one; unless the roads were damp
it rose in clouds because it was long before the days of tar.
The Tour Eiffel was a landmark as we drove home in the evening,
and I supposed that it was a gigantic roundabout to mark the
Exhibition.

Of course I stared at the children. The nurses held
their charges firmly by the hand, and colored ribbons like kite

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streamers flew from their white caps. The little girls wore fawn or pale blue coats and skirts with black, buttoned boots. The colors surprised me because English children were usually dressed in white. The boys, more fortunate, played in gravel pits. My mother pointed out at once that the sand must be full of germs. I remember that we had to wait while a detachment of Arab cavalry crossed some avenue, their long cloaks falling softly over beautiful horses. "Have they really got lances?" I asked, except in picture books people carried umbrellas rather than spears. They were unfamiliar but they had no terrors for me, and I always hoped that we should see them again.

The first visit blurs into a second made the following summer. There were giant hoardings where the plaster buildings had been, a general air of indifference and dust. I remember chiefly that we sat upstairs one very hot afternoon, the windows were open and the shades half drawn. I had been given a child's edition of _Robinson Crusoe_, but I could not read it. I was dissatisfied with the hero because he had said in the very first chapter that it was wrong to go to sea. The desert island after that meant nothing, and I wished I had brought the so much more satisfactory _Swiss Family Robinson_ with me. Instead, as I had no other book, I watched the people outside our hotel.

The Square was always crowded. How could so many horses get into it at the same time? Big drays full of boxes or tubs

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blocked the impatient carriages. Boys dodged between them with long, unfamiliar sticks of bread under their arms, the round stiff bowlers of the men shone in the heat, occasionally a woman crossed the road, in a doorway wide hat, holding up a handful of skirt. What a dull world it was, nothing ever happened, oh, when should I be able to be a cabin boy and sail across the ocean?

Suddenly in the middle of this so ordinary afternoon, people began to run. They came in dozens from the side streets, carriages stopped, men cheered. It was the first time that I had heard the collective roar of the crowd. Immediately opposite, but so far away that I could not see his features distinctly, an old man came to the front of the balcony. "Kruger is speaking," my father said, coming into the room, and we all stared out of the window.

I supposed that these people had come to take him prisoner but as soon as he held up his hand the Square was silent. He began to speak, they started to applaud.

I was puzzled and angry. Kruger was our enemy. In spite of my family's dislike of the war and their attempt to keep the details of it from me as much as possible, the flags and the posters stirred my imagination much more than their disapproval. I looked round. If I could leave the room unperceived and run down the long staircase, would the concierge stop me before I got as far as the pavement? Suppose I were able to wriggle

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through all the people before the speech was finished, I might
be able to capture him. I did not stop to think of the
problems involved in taking Kruger across a friendly land to Dover
but I did feel that in gratitude England should let me be a sailor.

We looked down on a mass of heads. I decided regretfully
that I should have no chance of crossing to the other side,
and opened my mouth to yell derisive remarks in English. At that
moment Kruger finished his speech, and left the balcony while
the Square rocked with shouts. "Why is he free?" I asked, "where
are the soldiers?" At six it was so difficult to understand
that France was not at war with South Africa.

I should have been even more astonished had I known that
Kruger would live at Clarens for several years, half a mile away
from where I was to spend most of my life, and where his house
is now a museum. There were other things that were equally
strange. Only a day or two later I saw a line of young men with
colored cockades marching down the street between two lines of
soldiers. Even to my eyes they looked unhappy. "It's the
conscripts," people said, the term was new to me and I had to
ask its meaning. "If you were a French boy, you would have to
go into the army whether you liked it or not" my father explained.
I was indignant, nobody should be forced to be a soldier. It
took the freedom of choice away that was the crown of being

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grown up. What was the use of Liberté, on the inscriptions if
you could not do what you liked? It worried me for several days.

It was only on my third visit when I was seven, that I
came to know the **Champs Elyseés** possessively, and with the full
rights of any Parisian child.

It happened on a gloomy day. I had spent the morning at
the Louvre, looking at dull pictures. I was also very hungry
because I could not eat French food. Perhaps a far off ancestor
had been an Eskimo? Perhaps there was something lacking in my
constitution? I was able to bear the hottest sun but shrivelled
at a touch of cold, and was a continual source of embarrassment
to my mother because if people offered me chocolates I refused
them scornfully, but she never dare leave a bottle of olive or
cod liver oil anywhere within my reach. I disliked sauces and
unfamiliar flavors, I wanted bacon for breakfast and roast beef
for lunch. I longed for my nursery tea of bread and butter
spread with golden syrup, I hated brioches and French pastry.
Yes, I was utterly and vociferously English in my tastes. My
parents had ordered a carriage this particular afternoon, it
meant another two hours of sitting still. At this moment, my
German governess interceded for me, could she not take me to
the **Champs Elyseés** for a treat? Paris was not London and to my
surprise, my family agreed. Half an hour later I was sharing
the reputed French freedom from convention. I was sitting in

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the coachman's seat of a small goat cart and I was driving it myself!

We were half way along the path that ran parallel with the road when a carriage stopped at the curb, and I heard my name. Oh well, I had not expected such a treat to last but my parents waved, told me to enjoy myself and drove on. What was a sin in England (because you might catch measles, darling,) was not wicked in Paris. I smiled to myself when I heard phrases later on about "Continental morality". I knew all about the double standard, had I not experienced it myself?

Now for the first time I saw Paris from my own level of vision. Leaves had fallen on the paths, I took off my gloves to hold the reins more firmly and was not ordered to put them on again. The figures that looked at the cart admiringly were my own age and size. The trip ended when we reached some cross roads. On the way back my governess then took me over to some benches in front of a Punch and Judy show. The excited children about me whispered or shouted but I was still unable to understand all the French words and it was too much like having to sit still in a carriage. "It's not real," I complained, suspicious of the puppets and their sometimes visible strings. I had no use for make believe, mine was an active world. Wisely, she led me away but the painted box, Dog Toby in his frilled collar and the man who came out in his shirt sleeves and walked up and down the

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lines holding out a cap, marked one end of my new geographical
chart. The other was a stall among the trees. Its owner was
cooking what appeared to be pancakes on a miniature stove. A
boy stood in front of him, with half a one in his mouth, other
children played ball or ran up and down, pretending to be trains.
"They are called galettes" my governess explained, and I supposed
it was part of a lesson but she had been so kind to me that I
must learn some new words to please her. We did not move, there
was another whisk of batter into the pan, and a moment later I
was handed two of them on a plate.

I did not know what to do. Nobody had ever given me any-
thing to eat in the open air before. My governess smiled en-
couragingly. I bit the galette excitedly, it was hot, papery,
and flavored with some mild spice. It was not an English bun
but this was freedom, and I must learn somehow to like them. All
the same, the world seemed to have turned upside down.

The paradise of that day was yet to come. There was a ring
beyond yet another line of trees. An old woman in a striped
skirt sat on a throne at the side of it, and as the painted horses
passed, black ones, brown ones, chestnuts with white spots, she
slid rings down a metal bar for their riders to catch.

The horses stopped, the ring emptied. I was lifted on to
a saddle, my steed had a bunch of feathers fastened above its
head, and bright, painted reins. They gave me a stick with a

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hook that was doubly satisfying because it resembled the iron
hoop that I had never been allowed to own. I could hold on to
the pole that held the animals in position but I was too big, was
I not, to be strapped? The woman walked round collecting dues,
was it ten, was it twenty centimes? The machinery and the music
started together, slowly at first, then faster and faster as we
leaned forward to snatch our rings until our sticks became a
jingle of sliding circles. A baby cried, and it had a belt on
too, oh, how I despised it! I was a warrior, astride a horse at
last, I lunged ferociously time after time, as the rings got
tighter because there was some mechanism whereby they were looser
for the younger children, until as we came to an undesired stop
I had tied with a bigger boy as the winner. Solemnly we were
offered sticks of pink and white and orange candy done up in
frilled paper. A remnant of English nursery training persisted
and I was about to shake my head when my governess reminded me
to say, "merci, Madame." In a daze of surprise I followed her
towards the Tuileries, sucking the first lollipop of my life,
earned as well in open combat. No wonder that after such an
afternoon to be in France seemed more "grown up" than being in
England. The Champs Elysees was admirable for my seven year
old mind. It is interesting to recall now that I was introduced
to them by a German.

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I cannot remember that anybody laughed at me, asked me if I were not too tiny to sit at so large a table, or whether I would not rather be at home playing with my toys, in all my visits to Paris. Such incidents were all too common in Sussex where there was a much sharper division between the drawing room and the nursery. A French family travelled together as a matter of course and my father having been educated there, I am sure that he thought of me as another smaller adult. Waiters and chambermaids treated me, in common with French children, as a responsible member of society. It was understood that I would not run about a restaurant, upset sauces or shout, and because this was taken for granted, I behaved quietly and reasonably. Later on, I had not the courage to force a younger generation to repeat my training in patience but for myself I am grateful for the training. It spared me much of the exterior worries of growing up; I was not afraid of dining out because I was used to it.

The Champs Elysees belonged to 1902. My first trip in 1900 ended at the station among a crowd of men in blue blouses and leather belts whom I had already learned to call "facteurs" and not porters. Our first memories are the important ones and much in later life was to depend upon this experience. Now I was initiate, after I returned to sailing my toy ships on the beach it was with new knowledge. The sea was my birthright, but I came back from France with some knowledge of "the land;" to my

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island sense was added the perception of a continent. The first
contact with another culture is not to be underestimated, with
me it came so early that Paris really became a part of early
childhood. There were to be other discoveries as I grew older
and independent but it was France that taught me first to be a
European.