Charlotte Mew: and Her Friends. Penelope Fitzgerald

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      Heer’s the same little fishes that splutter and swim,

      Wi’ the moon’s old glim on the grey, wet sand;

      An’ him no more to me nor me to him

      Than the wind goin’ over my hand.

      Ellen Mary was the farm cousin nearest to Charlotte in age, though not in temperament. In later years she joined an Anglo-Catholic community as Sister Mary Magdalen; she described Lotti as a child as ‘full of the joy of life’, and, less cautiously, as ‘hard to manage’. But on Sundays the whole party walked by the field-path, thickly edged with dog-roses, to the new church of St Paul’s, Barton, for Evensong. On the way they usually passed a blind man, who ‘would put his fingers to his ears and tell me they were his peepers’, with ‘the piteous smile of one doomed to find no answer to it in the faces of his kind’. At St Paul’s the vicar sometimes muddled up the responses, and Charlotte told, or more probably overheard, that he had been driven partly out of his wits by a young woman who was also pointed out, dressed in her white Sunday best, on the path to church. The blind man and the distracted priest, who would have been frightening to most children, fascinated her.

      These were the days and nights, she said, ‘of a short life when I could pray, years back in magical childhood’. But Sunday at Newfairlee, when she was not allowed to race through the cornfields or get soaked on the beach, was ‘a day of eyes’. ‘This was the thought that claimed my childhood,’ she wrote in 1905, ‘and in another fashion, claims it now. “A day of eyes”, of transcendental vision, when the very roses … challenge the pureness of our gaze, and the grass marks the manner of our going, and the sky hangs like a gigantic curtain, veiling the face which, watching us invisibly, we somehow fail to see. It judged in those days my scamped and ill-done tasks. It viewed my childish cruelties and still, with wider range, it views and judges now.’ From the age of six or seven Lotti, ‘full of the joy of life’, knew that she was guilty.

      It seemed to her that she was self-convicted. But, strangely enough, it was the loyal and loving Elizabeth Goodman who had deeply imprinted on Lotti’s mind the certainty of God’s retribution. Every day she had to read a fixed number of pages from Line Upon Line, a book which re-tells the Bible stories extremely well, only after each one comes the sting. ‘You remember how proud Absalom was of his hair. God let that very hair be fastened to the tree. We should pray to God not to let us be proud of anything we have.’ Always we must be ready for judgement day, watch and prepare. ‘Then you too will live with Jesus in heaven. You will sit down with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and Joseph, and Moses and David.’ This last prospect terrified Charlotte. But she did her best to prepare for it.

      ‘In early years the rite and reality of daily prayers were for us strictly insisted on,’ she wrote, ‘and “Forgive us our trespasses” was no idle phrase when after it, each night at bedtime, we had to specify them.’ Not only every sin (she was taught) but every moment of happiness has been given its fixed price in advance – though not by us – and must be paid for. That is why the roses and the grass, which she loved, seemed to challenge Lotti and ‘mark the manner of her going’. Guilt of this nature can never be eradicated, a lifetime is not long enough. Unfortunately it will survive long after the belief in forgiveness is gone.

      The Mew children sometimes stayed on till mid-September, long enough for the first of Newport’s ‘Bargain Zadderdays’ or Saturday markets. These were hiring fairs, when hundreds of men and women farm servants, dressed up to the nines, crowded into Newport to get harvest work. The town was en fête, with stalls for ribbons and gingerbread. In the evening there was dancing, people got drunk, fighting raged up and down the High Street and if it was fine enough lovers rolled about the cornfields. Lotti was certainly kept clear of everything except an early look at the fairground and the stalls. But Saturday market ‘grinning from end to end’ remained with her as an image of terror.

      Childhood has no escape from the random impact of images, however little wanted. They come before the emotions which will give them significance, as though lying in wait. As a child, and later as a writer, the idea of a coffin carried out at the door and a ship going down with all her lights, but without a sound, haunted Charlotte Mew. So too did church bells, a high wind, rooks flying, broad moonshine, and an ugly sight at Newfairlee.

      I remember one evening of a long past Spring

      Turning in at a gate, getting out of a cart, and finding

      a large dead rat in the mud of the drive.

      I remember thinking: alive or dead, a rat was a godforsaken thing,

      But at least, in May, that even a rat should be alive.

      This rat was never exorcised and in her last, unfinished story she described it again, the dead bristling body, the finer texture inside the ears. The worst thing about it was its silence. It couldn’t state its own case. And, as a poet, she was struck by the image’s self-recall. She had remembered the rat many years afterwards, not for its own sake, but because she had seen a tree cut down.

      At home in Doughty Street there was one picture in particular (although all the walls were hung with Fred’s sketches) which fascinated Lotti. This was a drawing by her grandfather Henry Kendall, the picture of the Shining City. In the 1830s, when old H.E.K. had been developing the waterfront at Rosherville, on the Thames, in a modest and sober style, young Kendall had produced his own ‘fancy composition’ for the river entrance to the site. He could never have expected his father to take his design seriously, but in 1851 he developed it as a dessin libre and showed it, first at the Academy, and later in the English section of the Paris Salon, where Baudelaire had raved over it. The drawing showed marble staircases and monuments dwarfing the tiny human beings, and whole fleets at anchor by the golden gates. To the Mew children this was Jerusalem, all the more because it was a Kendall image, hung in the drawing-room, and could only be seen on special occasions.

      Certain colours, particularly white and red, always obsessed Charlotte Mew. She was more sensitive to colour than she wanted to be. She ‘knew how jewels tasted’. There was also a favourite repeated movement, ‘tossing’. In her poems there are tossed heads, ‘tossed shadow of boughs in a great wind shaking’, the toss in the breast of the lover, new-tossed hay, tossed trees, tossed beds. It can be active or passive – ‘you will have smiled, I shall have tossed your hair’. Charlotte herself was a head-tosser. Everyone who knew her noticed this. Neat in all her movements, she could carry the gesture off, even in middle age. It expressed contradiction, relief from tension, and a defiance of what the tension meant. With ‘tossing’ went an obsession, which in itself seems mid-Victorian or Pre-Raphaelite, but probably had a more complex origin, with a woman’s long hair. Her own hair was cut short; Miss Bolt, she had noticed, had ‘only a small allowance’; Elizabeth Goodman’s was decently hidden under her cap. Like nearly all her range of imagery, the vision of long, or rough, or flying hair came to her early, to be understood later. It was part of what she called ‘the dazzling lights and colours of childhood’s enchanted picture’.