I would faint like a medical student at an operation. I was surprised when Richmond took me to a specialist in Harley Street, but I thought no more of it. The incident was forgotten for four years.
Often of an evening I found myself in the company of authors. Richmond himself was one, if only of a book which I found rather dull reading, on educational theory. Walter de la Mare came to the house – the poet I admired most at that time – and wrote his spidery signature in my new-bought copy of The Veil . Often with him was his close friend; Naomi Royde-Smith, the editor of the Weekly Westminster , who had published RupertBrooke’s early poems; she was too kind to me, so that a year later I began to bombard her with sentimental fantasies in poetic prose (she even published some of them). J. D. Beresford came too – a novelist crippled by infantile paralysis. The Hampdenshire Wonder remains one of the finest and most neglected novels of this period between the great wars, although it was an inferior novel, Revolution , which appealed more to me then. One evening we played a game in which each guest in turn had to imitate a vegetable, and I remember how we all simultaneously recognized de la Mare’s stick of asparagus. Such evenings were far away from the hours of prep in St John’s musty schoolroom. My only duties were to read history of a morning in Kensington Gardens and at eleven o’clock to go in for an hour’s session with the analyst.
Kenneth Richmond had more the appearance of an eccentric musician than anyone you might suppose concerned with curing the human spirit. A tall stooping figure in his early forties, he had a distinguished musician’s brow with longish hair falling behind without a parting and a face disfigured by large spots which must have been of nervous origin. There were two little girls who were brought up on the principle that children should never be thwarted, with the result that they were almost unbearably spoilt. On Sundays I was left in charge of them for an hour, while Richmond and his beautiful wife Zoe went to a church in Bayswater of some esoteric denomination, where the minister asked the congregation to decide by vote whether they would prefer that evening a sermon or a lecture on a psychological subject. Meanwhile at home I was seeing to it that for one hour a week the children learnt what it was to be thwarted.
I kept perforce a dream diary (I have begun to do so again in old age), and fragments of the dreams I can remember still, though the diary has been destroyed for nearly half a century. There was one dream of which I remember colours of great beauty; there were towers and pinnacles which might have come out of Miss Nesbit’s The Enchanted Castle , and I heard a bodiless voice intoning, ‘Princess and Lord of Time, there are no bounds to thee’; and I remember a nightmare in which I was pursued by sinister Chinese agents and took shelter in a hut with an armed detective, but, just as I felt the relief of security in his company, Ilooked at the hand holding the revolver and saw that he had the long nails of a Chinaman.
Sitting in Kensington Gardens, reading of the Carolingians in a dull blue volume of Tout, I kept one eye alert for possible adventures among the nursemaids, but the only adventure I had was not of the kind I desired. An elderly man, with an old Etonian tie and a gaze unhappy and shifty, drew a chair up to mine and started to talk of schools. Was there corporal punishment at my school, and did I suppose there were any schools left where girls were whipped? He had an estate, he told me, in Scotland, where everyone went around in kilts, so convenient in some ways, and perhaps I would like to come for a holiday there … Suddenly he sloped away, like a wind-blown umbrella, and I never saw him again.
When eleven struck in a Bayswater church tower I would cross the road, turn a corner and go into the little house in Lancaster Gate. If I couldn’t remember the
Often of an evening I found myself in the company of authors. Richmond himself was one, if only of a book which I found rather dull reading, on educational theory. Walter de la Mare came to the house – the poet I admired most at that time – and wrote his spidery signature in my new-bought copy of The Veil . Often with him was his close friend; Naomi Royde-Smith, the editor of the Weekly Westminster , who had published RupertBrooke’s early poems; she was too kind to me, so that a year later I began to bombard her with sentimental fantasies in poetic prose (she even published some of them). J. D. Beresford came too – a novelist crippled by infantile paralysis. The Hampdenshire Wonder remains one of the finest and most neglected novels of this period between the great wars, although it was an inferior novel, Revolution , which appealed more to me then. One evening we played a game in which each guest in turn had to imitate a vegetable, and I remember how we all simultaneously recognized de la Mare’s stick of asparagus. Such evenings were far away from the hours of prep in St John’s musty schoolroom. My only duties were to read history of a morning in Kensington Gardens and at eleven o’clock to go in for an hour’s session with the analyst.
Kenneth Richmond had more the appearance of an eccentric musician than anyone you might suppose concerned with curing the human spirit. A tall stooping figure in his early forties, he had a distinguished musician’s brow with longish hair falling behind without a parting and a face disfigured by large spots which must have been of nervous origin. There were two little girls who were brought up on the principle that children should never be thwarted, with the result that they were almost unbearably spoilt. On Sundays I was left in charge of them for an hour, while Richmond and his beautiful wife Zoe went to a church in Bayswater of some esoteric denomination, where the minister asked the congregation to decide by vote whether they would prefer that evening a sermon or a lecture on a psychological subject. Meanwhile at home I was seeing to it that for one hour a week the children learnt what it was to be thwarted.
I kept perforce a dream diary (I have begun to do so again in old age), and fragments of the dreams I can remember still, though the diary has been destroyed for nearly half a century. There was one dream of which I remember colours of great beauty; there were towers and pinnacles which might have come out of Miss Nesbit’s The Enchanted Castle , and I heard a bodiless voice intoning, ‘Princess and Lord of Time, there are no bounds to thee’; and I remember a nightmare in which I was pursued by sinister Chinese agents and took shelter in a hut with an armed detective, but, just as I felt the relief of security in his company, Ilooked at the hand holding the revolver and saw that he had the long nails of a Chinaman.
Sitting in Kensington Gardens, reading of the Carolingians in a dull blue volume of Tout, I kept one eye alert for possible adventures among the nursemaids, but the only adventure I had was not of the kind I desired. An elderly man, with an old Etonian tie and a gaze unhappy and shifty, drew a chair up to mine and started to talk of schools. Was there corporal punishment at my school, and did I suppose there were any schools left where girls were whipped? He had an estate, he told me, in Scotland, where everyone went around in kilts, so convenient in some ways, and perhaps I would like to come for a holiday there … Suddenly he sloped away, like a wind-blown umbrella, and I never saw him again.
When eleven struck in a Bayswater church tower I would cross the road, turn a corner and go into the little house in Lancaster Gate. If I couldn’t remember the
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