A Great Task of Happiness: The Life of Kathleen Scott. Louisa Young

      

      Louisa Young

      A Great Task of

      Happiness

      THE LIFE OF KATHLEEN SCOTT

       Dedication

       For her descendants

      Wayland and Peter; Easter, Emily, Mopsa, Thoby and Zoe;

       Nicola, Falcon and Dafila; Alice and Remel, Louis and Theo; Arthur; Joe, Lily

       and Tom; Maud, Archie and Tolly; Emily, Dan, Lucy-Kate and Ben;

       Freddie and Helena; Lucy; Peter and Amber;

       and my Isabel.

       And unto the next generation...

       Epigraph

      ‘If I have faltered more or less

       In my great task of happiness...’

      From The Celestial Surgeon by Robert Louis Stevenson

       Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

       Dedication

      Epigraph

Introduction

One Motherless Daughter, Victorian Child

Two The Road to Hell

Three A Badly Dressed Virginal Anglaise in Paris

Four Babies Are Being Born

Five Isadora’s Baby

       Six Vagabonding in Greece

       Seven Frighteningly in Love with Captain Scott

       Eight Darling I Will be Good When We’re Married

       Nine Married Life

       Ten Going South

       Eleven At Opposite Ends of the Earth

       Twelve Daddy Won’t Come Back

       Thirteen Living in Ignorance

       Fourteen ‘Got My Wireless’

       Fifteen The First War

       Sixteen Sculpting and Dancing

       Seventeen Second Husband, Second Son

       Eighteen The Thirties

       Nineteen The Second War and the End

       Postscript

       Images

       Biographical Details

       Bibliography

      Index

       Acknowledgements

       Keep Reading

       About the Author

       Praise

       Also by Louisa Young

       Copyright

       About the Publisher

Introduction

      In the course of my parents’ fortieth wedding anniversary party in 1988, I was sitting on the old green velvet sofa at their house in Bayswater with my ancient cousin Verily, who was hooting with laughter. She told me that a good sixty years ago she’d been sitting on that same sofa in that same room with my grandmother Kathleen, her aunt, and that I was saying exactly the same thing that Kathleen had been saying. I think it was something about how lovely it is to sleep out of doors. Kathleen always slept out of doors, given half the chance. In Bayswater she slept on the balcony.

      Kathleen was my father’s mother. She was born in 1878 and died in 1947 so I never knew her, but statues she had made were all over the house and garden, and sometimes my father would point one out in a public place: Adam Lindsay Gordon in Westminster Abbey; Lloyd George in the Imperial War Museum, and The Man Who Wasn’t My Grandfather on Waterloo Place. I knew he wasn’t my grandfather because my grandfather had only one arm and wasn’t all bundled up. Gradually I realised who he was: Con, Captain Robert Falcon Scott, her first