Charlotte Mew: and Her Friends. Penelope Fitzgerald

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       When shall I penetrate all things and thee,

       And then look back? For this I must abide,

       Till thou shalt grow and fold and be unfurled

       Literally between me and the world.

       Then I shall drink from in beneath a spring,

       And from a poet’s side shall read his book.

       O daisy mine, what will it be to look

       From God’s side even on such a simple thing?

      This strange double perspective, the poet’s corpse buried beneath the daisy’s roots and at the same time contemplating the earth from God’s side, wouldn’t have been strange to Ruskin (who called the last lines some of the finest in modern poetry) nor to Christina Rossetti, nor, evidently, to the Gower Street girls. With all Miss Harrison’s liberality and fresh air went a certain morbidity. But hard work was called for, because it develops intellect, and intellect forms thought, and thought forms character. In this vein Miss Harrison returned to Carlyle, and to the idea of the heroic life as a model to imitate. She would speak of Sir Philip Sidney, and the girls sat and thought of Miss Harrison.

      At the end of the summer term there was an Open Day, when the reports were read and there was music, and a French or German play. Miss Harrison approved of amateur dramatics, though not of low mimicry. Lotti, a born impersonator who could ‘do’ anybody, and did mimic, perhaps in a low way, Professor Kinkel, the venerable lecturer in geography, would not have been encouraged to take part. But as a brilliant pianist with a delicate touch she was needed for the concert, and, at this stage of her life, still frankly enjoyed being told that she played well.

      The trouble was that she would only learn what interested her, and a number of things, including geography, didn’t. But in spite of these failures her one motive was to please her headmistress. In her plain black jacket and waistcoat, with her short hair and calm gracious voice, Miss Harrison brought into the room ‘the sense of august things’. Dissent would be shameful, and the ‘inexpressible charm of her presence’ made it impossible. There were no rules, as such, at Gower Street, although there were many precepts, from ‘if a pudding is begun with a fork, the help of a spoon must not be called in half-way through’ to Coventry Patmore’s

      Love wakes men once a lifetime each;

      They lift their heavy heads and look;

      And lo, what one sweet page can teach

      They read with joy, then shut the book.

      Lotti could not dress like Miss Harrison. She had of course, at the age of fourteen, no choice as to what she wore. She had a black-and-white checked dress, with a plain silver chain and cross, for weekdays, and a brown dress with a gold cross on Sundays. But she was allowed to keep her hair short, like Miss Harrison’s.

      Her best friends were sober, hard-working girls. The three Chicks – Elsie, Margaret, and Harriet, from Ealing – seemed set to become teachers. Ethel Oliver was the daughter of Professor Daniel Oliver, the curator of Kew Herbarium, and a friend of Ruskin and the painter Arthur Hughes. Maggie Browne, also a professor’s daughter, was the dull one, always the last to be told anything, but the most faithful and stolid of friends. All these girls had good, quiet homes – the Olivers were Quakers – and were not much disposed to question things. Lotti amazed them. They saw at school her wild side, her inquisitive, flamboyant, head-tossing, parasol-snapping side. The beloved headmistress could not be disobeyed, but Lotti seemed to pass her days in a state of painful emotion, as though listening to something they could not hear.

      In 1882, when Lotti was on the verge of adolescence, Miss Harrison, the undisputed centre of life in Gower Street, began to behave oddly. Her behaviour showed signs of overwork and strain. She was becoming what was then called (in reference to schoolmistresses) ‘unhappy’. It was felt by the governors that she must leave the school, and try what a rest would do. She was going, it was decided, to retire for the time being and take rooms in Hampstead, half-way up Haverstock Hill. During the daytime she would work in the British Museum, grimly persevering with her History of England, never, as it turned out, to be published.

      When Charlotte heard this news, she was practising the piano. She sprang up and ‘in a wild state of grief began to bang her head against the wall’. This recollection came from a much younger girl, Amice Macdonnell, a niece of Miss Harrison’s. Amice was dismayed, and wondered whether she ought to bang her head, too.

      Lotti was sick with one of the most cruel of all preparations for adolescence, the passion for a teacher, confusing intense sexual anxiety with the duty of loving the highest when we see it. Wisely or unwisely, Miss Harrison now offered to take some of the older girls from Gower Street as boarders, and to teach them English literature in the evenings, when their school day was over. Anna Maria was quite unable to face such a crisis, Lotti grieved wildly, Fred was called in to make a decision, and to put his foot down, and do something. He was frightened by his daughter’s condition. He is described as ‘going down on his knees’ to persuade Lucy Harrison to take Lotti with her.

      But if he had done the best he knew for Lotti, he can hardly be said to have understood her, for he believed the move would ‘stabilize’ her. For the next two years she was separated from her elder brother and her two sisters, Anne and the baby Freda. Anne continued placidly in the Gower Street junior school, ‘good at art’, giving no trouble of any kind. Miss Harrison’s boarders, on the other hand, had to undertake, twice every day, the three-mile walk to and from Gower Street, down Haverstock Hill and Chalk Farm, through Camden High Street with its markets, down Hampstead Road to school. In the evening the walk was uphill. But Lotti’s spirits were now so high, and she was so unpredictable, so entertaining, seeming sometimes to dance rather than walk, that the way seemed short.

      Two of the Gower Street assistant teachers walked in front, as chaperones. Behind came the two sixteen-year-olds, Edith Oliver and Edith Scull, the daughter of an American professor. The two Ediths, then, walked ahead; next came Lotti, in the highest spirits, with the puzzled little Amice Macdonnell. When the little party arrived at Haverstock Hill there was a gracious reception, but also plain cooking of the cold meat and rice pudding variety. Mrs Newcombe, the Gower Street housekeeper, who regarded Miss Harrison with love and reverence, had come to Hampstead to look after her.

      Eighteen months later, however, the situation totally altered when Miss Harrison herself fell passionately in love with Amy Greener, the teacher who had taken over the Gower Street School. When she recognized that her nerves had given way, Lucy Harrison had bought a piece of land, Cupples Field, near Wensleydale in her native Yorkshire. She had planted trees on the site at once, but waited for the right moment to build herself a house. Now, at one stroke she realized that the house must be shared. All the strength of ‘the fairest hill and sweetest dell’, she wrote to Miss Greener, ‘without you leaves me longing’, and again, in 1886, ‘Oh, for one hour with you again!’ and ‘Dearest, I do not feel at home anywhere without you now … with the person you love comes a halo and glow over everything, however miserable and poor, and without that presence the light seems to leave the sun itself. This is a trite remark, I am afraid.’ As she drove across the rough Yorkshire moors she recalled her walks with Miss Greener in the Tottenham Court Road. ‘Dear, dear love, there is nothing in the world that could satisfy me or fill your place for me, but if separation by death had to come, I think one could fly to the hope and thought of meeting hereafter; it would, I think, be impossible to live without that hope at any rate.…’

      These letters are quoted in Amy Greener’s biography of her friend, which treats a delicate subject delicately. Miss Greener had asked herself whether some people, knowing that СКАЧАТЬ