The Orchid Trilogy Read online

  A word which, more than most, evokes for me that Kentish village, is the word ‘afternoon’. The cool, green, slumberous syllables refuse to be detached from the cottage-garden, drowsing among its trees, the tea-table laid in the shade, the buzzing of wasps busy among the fallen plums – a subdued, perpetual bourdon orchestrating the shriller melodic line of birdsong and the voices of children. In memory, the village seems held in a perpetual trance of summer afternoons: possibly for no better reason than that we seldom visited it in the winter. Half-hidden by trees and (in those days) remote in its valley, the little street with its scattered houses, its squat-towered church and its slate-roofed Victorian pub was still comparatively ‘undiscovered’. A celebrated Jacobean divine had ended his days in the rectory; in the closing years of my childhood, an eminent novelist inhabited the dower-house, a pleasant early-nineteenth-century building near the church; these were the village’s only claim to fame. But even in my earliest childhood the bourgeois invasion had begun – my family, indeed, formed part of the vanguard – and nowadays the number of cottages inhabited by land-workers is in a small minority. The lanes and hedges, today, have become scrupulously tidy; the grass in the churchyard is punctually cut; the cottages have sprouted new wings, carefully disguised by expensive ‘weathered’ tiles; the dower-house is to be pulled down; and the eminent novelist is commemorated by a bogus-Tudor porch tacked on to the parish Hall. The village, in fact, is fast becoming a garden-suburb.

  But it was not only words which were to become permanently associated with that particular childhood background. Whole tracts of experience – certain types of landscape, certain phrases and passages of music, innumerable smells, particular ways of speech became for me (and remained) imprinted indelibly with the same atmosphere of a summer afternoon. The process of identification began early: when my Nurse read Beatrix Potter aloud, and still more when I had learnt to read myself, the landscape of Mr Tod and Jemima Puddleduck seemed indistinguishable from the landscape of our village. I knew the track which Tommy Brock took through the wood, when he made off with the rabbit-babies: it was none other than the path, fringed with bluebells, through the copse which we called Teazel Wood. The hillside where Cottontail lived with her black husband was the park behind the big Queen Anne manor house . . . ‘The sun was still warm and slanting on the hill-pastures’ – how well I recognized the description! Tommy Brock’s abduction of the baby rabbits, the agonized pursuit by Benjamin Bunny and Peter Rabbit – the whole long-drawn and tragic tale was for me bound up (and indeed still is) with a landscape which I knew and loved. Reason (and Miss Margaret Lane2) tell me, nowadays, that the scene of Beatrix Potter’s stories was really Westmorland; none the less, the path through Teazel Wood is still haunted, for me, by Tommy Brock and the foxy-whiskered gentleman.

  I have wondered, too, lately, why when re-reading Ronald Firbank, I should so often be reminded of Miss Trumpett; and can only conclude that the peculiarly gushing, late-Edwardian conversational style which characterizes so much of his dialogue (especially in the early Vainglory) is for me an echo of tea-parties at the cottage where, like an exotic bird, plumed with crimson or scarlet, Miss Trumpett would suddenly appear and hold me spell-bound by such a vision of sophisticated elegance as I had never beheld before in my life.

  If Mr Bundock haunted the village-evenings with his mops and buckets and disinfectants, it was Miss Trumpett who was the presiding genius of the afternoons. Tea-time was her hour: I cannot believe that I ever saw her in the morning, though in the nature of things I must have done. Of Creole extraction, her mother had married a well-off English solicitor; the Trumpetts had, indeed, become more English than the Royal family: their very Englishness was excessive, and served to enhance their innate exoticism.

  Miss Trumpett, as I remember her, was (perhaps consciously) slightly Beardsley: full-lipped, with powdered cheeks of a peculiarly thick, granular texture, and raven-black frizzy hair. She affected clothes, too, which put the village in a flutter: on summer afternoons she would appear in gowns worthy of Ascot, and wearing an immense hat of crimson or vermilion, and scarlet shoes (like Oriane de Guermantes). A scarlet umbrella completed the ensemble; or, at other times, a paper parasol which I was assured in awed tones, was authentically ‘Burmese’. (The idea of Burma is associated for me, to this day, with the curious ‘tacky’ texture and resinous smell of Miss Trumpett’s parasol.) Her whole personality seemed to have a velvety bloom which, with her richly-powdered cheeks, suggested to me an auricula. I was entirely fascinated; all the more so, since Miss Trumpett had a slight flavour of forbidden fruit.

  Nothing very scandalous; but rumour (and something more than rumour) said that she had settled in the village to ‘catch’ a certain well-off bachelor who owned one of the two ‘big’ houses. Poor Miss Trumpett! She never caught her man; but she remained, for my Nurse, who strongly disapproved of her, ‘that naughty Miss T’. Her naughtiness, I fancy, consisted chiefly in her clothes and her general air of ‘smartness’; she was, ever so slightly, ‘fast’. I should conjecture that she was, in fact, completely virtuous; she was certainly extremely conventional in her tastes, with a passion for bridge which was sometimes indulged in the company of my parents (for the most modest of points – she would never have consented, any more than Mrs Hurstpierpoint in Valmouth, to play for ‘immodest’ ones).

  No, there was nothing very ‘naughty’ about Miss Trumpett; but the word, with its tang of Edwardian gaieties, is fitting enough. She was my first contact with the exotic: her clothes, her Latin-American ancestry, her putative wickedness, contributed something to the effect she had upon me; but what I remember chiefly is her voice – rich, resonant, with the same velvety, powdery texture as her outward appearance. Her conversation was enlivened with the argot (already rather dated at this period) of Edwardian chic. Phrases like ‘too divine’ or ‘divvy’ – unknown in my family circle – fell on my ears with an effect of alien and slightly immoral elegance. She would speak slightingly of something or somebody as ‘very mere’. Once, at tea, when I announced that I was ‘full’, she pulled me up sharply: it was rude to say that, she told me. If I must announce the fact, I ought to say ‘Je suis rempli’. She was free with her French phrases; and this, my first contact with the language, was to confer upon it, for all time, a certain imprint of exoticism, something of the elegant, powdered, auricula-like quality of Miss Trumpett herself.

  She was a great reader; in her cottage were ranged (among palms and fire-screens and unseasonable flowers) the complete works of Meredith; a little later it was Henry James; later still, Galsworthy. She played the piano, too, and sang: rattling off The Vision of Salome or some new and fashionable tango with great spirit, or singing Every Morn I Bring Thee Violets or Sweetest Li’l Feller in a voice which invested the songs with an air of mondain luxury and splendour, an atmosphere of plush, mimosa and the Edwardian jollifications of Homburg or Monte Carlo.

  One night, greatly daring, I walked round the garden with her by moonlight: it was my first romantic encounter. Had it been the Jersey Lily herself or la belle Otéro I could not have been more thrilled. I paid for the experience in the acute embarrassment which I suffered on returning to my Nurse. Contemptuous, she said nothing; but her disapproval was all too obvious . . . I did not repeat the exploit. Obscurely, perhaps, I felt that I wasn’t cut out for such as Miss Trumpett; her world was too alien, too romantically remote.

  Nor, it seemed, was I cut out for her young nephew and niece who, with their parents, took a cottage in the village that summer or the next. They were pretty and well-behaved children, excessively polite and even more conventional than their aunt. I loathed them. In vain did our respective parents seek to engineer an alliance: I would have none of it. In the company of the little Trumpetts I became more shy, more ill-behaved and in general more unpleasant than I was by nature. I preferred the children of a local farmer, Mr Igglesden; they were, indeed, my only friends, and I was happy with them. The lit
tle Trumpetts showed no inclination (fortunately for me) to fraternize with the Igglesdens; so I was able, in time, to avoid the bourgeoisie entirely and to throw in my lot with the working-class. This phase in my political evolution was speeded-up considerably when, at one of my unavoidable encounters with the Trumpett children, their mother overheard me explaining to Mary Trumpett the difference between a male and female tiger-moth. Thenceforth I was considered a corrupt influence, and encouraged no further.

  But before the final split, the Trumpetts did prove of some value after all. One evening, coming back from a picnic in the woods, they showed me an unusual flower they had found. It was a year or two since Mr Bundock had brought me the orchid which had provoked in me such an acute moral conflict; moreover, I had never managed to find it for myself. Now, in the plant found by the little Trumpetts, I recognized Mr Bundock’s mysterious orchid. This time, I received exact directions about the locality; and shortly afterwards, in a copse only half a mile from the village, I was able to find it for myself. It was not the Military Orchid – I had long ago, reluctantly, abandoned that idea, in spite of Colonel Mackenzie. But it was the Brown-Winged – or, as it is more pleasantly called, the Lady Orchid; the most regal of British orchids, and perhaps the loveliest of English wildflowers: its tall pagodas of brown-hooded, white-lipped blossoms towering grandly, like some alien visitor, exotic as Miss Trumpett at a village tea-party, above the fading bluebells and the drab thickets of dog’s-mercury, in a wood which I had known all my childhood, but whose distinguished inhabitant I had never before discovered.

  IV

  If the village of our summer holidays was an afternoon-land, tranced in a perpetual and postprandial drowsiness, our real home, at Sandgate, was by contrast matutinal: my memories of it are bathed in the keen, windy light of spring mornings, a seaside gaiety and brilliance haunted by the thud of waves on the shingle and the tang of seaweed. At the time, Sandgate lacked romance, being merely the place where we lived (my father had his business in the neighbouring town of Folkestone); during the autumn and winter, the village became for me a Land of Lost Content, the symbol of a happiness which would only be renewed again in the spring. (With most children, this state of affairs is reversed: it is the seaside which enshrines the memory of summer-happiness, not, as for me, the country.) Later, in adolescence, Sandgate too would become part of the legend of the past, the private myth; but in childhood, it was the village in the Elham Valley which, alone, possessed the quality of romance. When I began to write, at about fifteen, I naturally turned to the valley-village for the background of my stories. But that country-legend had, after all, grown up with me; from earliest days I had surrounded the valley landscape with an aura of sentimental nostalgia, and in consequence, my adolescent recollections of it were apt to seem rather second-hand – mere memories of memories; my attempts to write about it seemed over-stylized and at the same time too facile. Some small episode, trivial as Proust’s madeleine-dipped-in-tea, must have accidentally evoked Sandgate for me at about that time and the whole atmosphere and flavour of our seaside home was recalled as Combray was for Proust: vivid and immediate, springing nakedly from the past without the swaddling of conscious sentimentality which had obscured my recollections of our country village.

  Our house was on the Undercliff: behind it, the cliff rose steeply to the Folkestone Leas; below, a garden descended in terraces to the beach. The house, from the road, presented an undistinguished façade of grey cement; at the back, however (on the seaward-facing side), it was faced with white stucco, and the windows were fitted with green persiennes, giving to the house an oddly Mediterranean air. The tamarisks in the garden (and an occasional stone-pine) added to this illusion of meridional gaiety. Had I but known it, the rest of the flora, too, provided curious parallels with that of the Mediterranean seaboard. Stationed at Ancona during the War, I was repeatedly struck by the number of plants which I remembered as growing at Sandgate: Horned Poppy, Bristly Oxtongue, Tree-mallow, Henbane. (The maritime flora is, in fact, singularly uniform from Northern to Southern Europe.) Walking on the cliffs by the Adriatic, I might have fancied myself back at Sandgate: till the scattered stars of pink anemones, or a glimpse of an outlying cornfield carpeted with wild red tulips, recalled me to a sense of reality.

  One summer – I think it was 1916 – a miracle occurred: the cliffs above our house were carpeted, in July, with the brilliant blue spikes of Viper’s Bugloss. The plant was common enough on the cliffs, but had never occurred in anything like such quantity: nor has it ever done so since. The other day, travelling up by the Portsmouth line from Petersfield, I saw near Liphook, for only the second time in my life, the miracle repeated: a field covered, as thickly as if with bluebells, by that noble and stately flower. The blue is of a brighter shade than that of bluebells: in the July sun it seems positively to sizzle and splutter, like a blue Bengal light.

  I know of no reason for these occasional displays by the Bugloss: they appear to be as irregular and unpredictable as (in Southern latitudes) the Aurora Borealis. But the year 1916 was, I suspect, something of an annus mirabilis for botanists; or do I imagine so merely because I myself was lucky? Henbane was one of my finds that year: not a great rarity, but often appearing sporadically, and disappearing again completely from the locality for a period of years. Its creamy flowers, veined with purple, and the clammy, corpse-like texture of its leaves, impressed me at the time with an agreeable sense of Evil. The Mandrake itself is a fairly harmless-looking plant; it is a pity that the name, with all its Satanic associations, cannot be transferred to the Henbane. (Is Henbane the ‘Hebanon’ of Hamlet? Nobody seems to know.) In practice, if not in theory, flower-names are oddly interchangeable. Many non-botanists, for instance, are convinced that they know the Deadly Nightshade when they see it; but in nine cases out of ten, the plant they are thinking of proves to be the Woody Nightshade, or Bittersweet. It is useless to tell them that the Woody Nightshade, that first-cousin of the potato, is not only not deadly, but scarcely even poisonous at all: they are convinced that it is lethal, and if shown the true Deadly Nightshade, a rare-ish plant of southern chalk-down, will refuse to believe you. It is a mistake that never fails to irritate me, detracting as it does from the sinister dignity of a plant which has a good claim to be the chief villain of the British Flora: a plant ‘so furious and deadly’ (as Gerarde remarks) that it is just as well it is not commoner than it is.

  Another ‘find’ of 1916 was the Coltsfoot: it seems incredible that I had not found it before. But I had formed the mistaken idea that it was a rarity, and therefore, presumably by a kind of inverted wishful-thinking, was simply unable to see it. The mistake arose through a mis-reading of Edward Step’s account of the plant, which refers to a dubious variety recorded by Don from ‘the high mountains of Clova’. This statement was taken, by me, to refer to the common Coltsfoot; and doubtless because of the romantic sound of the ‘high mountains of Clova’, I conceived a passion for the plant. I dreamt of Coltsfoot, I insisted on my Nurse purchasing some Coltsfoot-rock at a chemist’s, I copied Edward Step’s plate of it in washy watercolours.

  Then one day a teacher at my first day-school happened to mention that it grew on the foreshore at Seabrook, near Sandgate. On a March morning I set out to look for it: not really believing that a plant hailing from the ‘high mountains of Clova’ could grow half-a-mile from my own door. But there, on the shingle-flats by the beginning of the Hythe Military Canal – there, no more than a stone’s throw from the sea, in a spot I must have passed a dozen times before – there was the Coltsfoot, its golden ruffs widespread in the morning sun, abundant as any dandelion and perfectly at home. I was delighted; the discovery made me happy for weeks afterwards. But somehow, after that, the Coltsfoot lost some of its romance. Like a new and unusual word, encountered for the first time, which one is sure to meet again within a day or two, I soon began to see the Coltsfoot everywhere.

  Yet Coltsfoot has not, even today, entire
ly lost the romantic aura with which I at one time invested it. Seeing it from a train, precociously ablaze on some chalky embankment, or even straying up the sidings to the edge of some suburban platform, I still find myself cherishing a superstitious belief that the seeds must have blown there from the romantic heights of Clova.

  I have never been to Clova: I don’t even know where it is. For me it belongs in the same category as the Zemmery Fidd and the Great Gromboolian Plain. Similarly, I am inclined to be sceptical about the existence of Mayo and Galway. Here I think Colonel Mackenzie is to blame again; for those romantic-sounding counties were for me merely the home of Habenaria intacta, or, as it is called nowadays, Neotinea intacta, the Dense-spiked Orchid. Unlike the Coltsfoot, Neotinea preserved its romantic aloofness, and refused to oblige me by occurring at Sandgate. But having found the mysterious denizen of Clova almost, so to speak, at my backdoor, I saw no reason why the Entire Habenaria (thus it was crudely Englished) should not turn up too.

  I lived in hopes: the ‘Habenaria’ shared some of the glamour of Orchis militaris. It must have been in the year 1916 that Mr Bundock brought me the Lady Orchid; and it was in 1916, too, I am almost sure, that I was first taken to The Hills.

  They were referred to as ‘The Hills’ – those low downs behind Folkestone, knobbly and broken in outline by barrows and earthworks – rather as dwellers in the plains of India speak of Simla, though not (at least by my family) with any desire to visit them. Indeed, my mother insisted that they were ‘very dull’, and the long-promised expedition to Sugarloaf or Caesar’s Camp was for one reason or another delayed from year to year. Our walks took us almost to the foot of them: they loomed grey and austere against the sky, ringed with their concentric terraces trodden by grazing cattle. Beyond them lay The Country – a country which, in fact, I knew, but which, cut off by that high, forbidden barrier, seemed immensely romantic and mysterious.