Charlotte Mew: and Her Friends. Penelope Fitzgerald

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’.

       CHAPTER TWO Love between Women

      MISS BOLT had warned Lotti, from time to time, never to take lemon juice in the hope of growing thinner, because dieting would do no good – ‘what you’re made, that you will be’. Lotti did not want to believe this last remark; in any case, what she needed was something to make her stouter. She grew out of early childhood still small-boned and tiny, with her face a perfect oval, the ‘moonfaced darling of all’, but given to sudden withdrawals. She had become a reading and writing child, retreating under the nursery table and producing ‘sheets of pathetically laboured MSS’. These Elizabeth Goodman swept into her dustpan. Much of the faithful servant’s time was spent in planning small treats and great careers for the four children, but she didn’t hold with this writing rubbish. Poetry, in fact, she maintained, was ‘injurious to the brain’. Lotti turned to imagination’s refuge. Evidently, she deduced, she was misplaced and alien, her father and mother were not her real parents. ‘Never, I know, but half your child’ she wrote in The Changeling:

       Times I pleased you, dear Father, dear Mother,

       Learned all my lessons and liked to play,

       And dearly I loved the little pale brother

       Whom some other bird must have called away.

       Why did They bring me here to make me

       Not quite bad and not quite good,

       Why, unless They’re wicked, do They want, in spite to take me

       Back to Their wet, wild wood?

      These are verses for children, written in 1912. Charlotte used to read them aloud, when the time came, to children of her acquaintance, giving no explanation, because she believed (quite rightly) that none would be needed. They understood her at once.

      Anne was taller and prettier, but in spite of her brilliant violet-blue eyes, more usual-looking. She hadn’t Lotti’s strangely arched eyebrows, or her disconcerting look of astonishment, which might be sarcasm. Anne never wrote anything, but drew, or painted; she was the little sister, quicker to make friends than Lotti, but quite contentedly under her influence. Freda, the youngest, was the most striking of all. She was ‘like a flame’. Anna Maria took pride in this youngest, and, determined to live through her daughter, liked to take little Freda about herself, particularly to dancing classes. For these Anna Maria dressed elaborately, appearing, for example, in a pale blue boa, an awkward thing for a very short woman to wear.

      Henry, four years older than Charlotte, at a time of life when four years make the most difference, was the looked-up-to elder brother. In the room reserved as an office, he worked away at his drawing-board, but with an eye, quite naturally, to his own amusements. At the age of sixteen or so he began to go out dancing, and now, apparently, Elizabeth Goodman, ‘when she was called upon to deliver the secret note or the unhallowed bouquet, would stand stiff-backed and sorrowful-eyed, holding it in her strong, beautifully-shaped