Charlotte Mew: and Her Friends. Penelope Fitzgerald

wore it. It was pawned at once. The little Mews collected their own possessions into a parcel to give to her, but this was absolutely forbidden. Miss Bolt, disappointed, repeated the ambiguous rhyme:

       Give a thing, and take a thing

       Is a dirty man’s plaything.

      What truly impressed Lotti in her child’s-eye scrutiny was the recklessness of this dowdy woman in her endless self-sacrifice, and her pride. Pride was as important as survival. Miss Bolt would use low shifts, but would never condescend to be found out. Asked to come for an extra day’s work, she would sometimes pretend to be ‘previously engaged’. It was a crushed but unrepentant courage, the product of the London streets. Lotti saw through it immediately, and respected it.

      Miss Bolt called for the last time, looking even shabbier than usual, in the autumn of 1876. On this occasion Charlotte, aged seven, was sitting with three-year-old Anne (who must have been almost as tall as she was) clasped on her lap. Miss Bolt asked where Richard was, and it was Lotti’s responsibility, apparently, to tell her that he was dead. Miss Bolt, in return, confided that her niece, young Fanny, for whom she had done everything, had gone to the bad. She then withdrew downstairs to the kitchen, where the supper was, ‘leaving me, like the childhood in which I knew her, mysteriously and without farewell’.

      Though Lotti clearly can’t have understood that Fanny had gone on the streets, she responded to the hushed tone of voice. Her fascination with the prostitute’s story seemed the first hint of an end to childhood. In Charlotte Mew’s original draft for her article there was a good deal more about Fanny: ‘Even at fourteen, she must have borne the indelible marks appointing her to be slain. I wonder sometimes if I have ever met her; if I and the unhappy girl, who was once such a real and well-known person to me, have since passed each other with a cold unmeaning stare.’ In this first draft, too, another of Miss Bolt’s odd connections appears – a female impersonator, for whom her sister-in-law made drag costumes which ‘suited ’im identical to the female shape.…’e nearly took me off my feet, when ’e put up ’is train hover ’is arm and offered to see me ’ome.’

      The point of Miss Bolt’s visits, however, was to help in the process of mending and making do. The Mews were reasonably well off during the 1870s, though not within reach, of course, of the grandeur of Brunswick Square. Fred could confidently expect, in the course of time, to become head of the firm. There was Henry, too, to come after him, but then there were three daughters for him to support until marriage. Elizabeth Goodman’s stern economies were an investment for the household’s future. But they were also the product of that wondrously strong Nonconformist ethic which put thrift as high as charity. Waste was not only an ingratitude to the Creator and an injury in a world where so many went hungry, but an insult to the nature of substance itself – shirts were turned because ‘there was still plenty of life in them’, and the skin of boiled milk must not be thrown away because ‘it was perfectly good milk’. Furthermore, the squandered despised object itself might spring up and confront you in reproach. You might – and in the nursery’s cautionary tales you did – face total disaster one day, just for want of a few drops of that same boiled milk.

      At 30 Doughty Street Anna Maria was protected from worry. It was agreed that she had suffered enough. But Lotti, a ‘noticing’ child, had a clear glimpse of the nether depths which Miss Bolt so narrowly avoided, and into which Fanny had disappeared.

      To a family so closed in, the seaside holiday was a release, and almost unmanageably exciting. In late May or June every year the Mew children went to the Isle of Wight. This represented a very considerable victory for Fred, particularly since the Kendalls had a seaside house in Brighton (No. 6 Codrington Place). During the development of Kemp Town, in fact, they had become a Brighton family of distinction, and Mrs Kendall, with her unmarried daughter Mary Leonora, spent every summer there. Anna Maria, it seems, preferred to join them at Codrington Place. But the children went on by the Mid-Sussex Railway to catch the boat at Southampton for the Island, in the care of Elizabeth Goodman.

      At Newport they were met by their aunt from the farm, with a wagonette for the luggage and a fly for the children. On one occasion the tiny, impetuous Lotti jumped up to take the seat by the driver (this, by rights, would have been Henry’s, as the eldest). When Elizabeth Goodman checked her by rapping her sharply over the knuckles with a parasol, Lotti is said to have seized the parasol and snapped it in half. She was intoxicated by the open air, the fields of standing corn, the estuary with ships made fast at the quay and the chequered lights and shadows of the Newport Downs. She wanted the driver to put on speed, or ‘go bomewish’ in the Island dialect which she knew perfectly well, but was not encouraged to speak.

      During the holidays the children had the chance to tour the Island from Newfairlee. ‘Past the white points of the Needles,’ Charlotte wrote, ‘over the Island sea, the pigeons of woods and other worlds flock home in autumn, dashing themselves sometimes at the end of the journey against the pane of St Catherine’s light, dropping dazed and spent on the wet sand.’ Shipwreck stories she could hardly have avoided, since they had more relations living ‘back of the Wight’, that graveyard of shipping; old Mrs Mew of Blackgang had once rowed out to take Christmas dinner to a crew stranded on what was left of their ship in Chale Bay. But Lotti’s was the summer and early autumn sea, and the phosphorescent darkness of the summer beach at night.

      Tide be runnin’ the great world over:

      T’was only last June month I mind that we

      Was thinkin’ the toss and the call in the breast of the lover

      So everlastin’ as the sea.

      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