While Elsi’s Autobiography is returning from the Orient we have been looking at some of her effects. There are a number of Pandora’s bags of which what follows is one. Gives a pretty good insight into life of RST and MEE!!

Bag 1: Contents as it came out of the bag!

The Skull of a Hare
Envelope from L. Garvin Honey Merchants containing Grey Mullet Scales
Letter from Joan Merchant (in whose house Elsi lived in Chirk)
Cheese Box containing Puffin’s beak, together with Windsor and Newton leaflet containing advice on control of moth damage and mildew to paint brushes
Envelope containing Snow Bunting Feathers
Windsor and Newton Paint tube box containing sheets of ‘English Gold Leaf’
Cartoon by Victus of Harold MacMillan: The Prime Minister was wonderful-he shot everything 1960
Envelope containing ms of list of Mills in the County of Merioneth. Nd George VI 2.5d stamp
Envelope containing charcoal in clay holder..many dug up in Sarn garden
Letter from Monica Rawlins about Christopher Wood
Letter from WA Chaney Lawrence University Wisconsin 29 March 1992 Vigil of St John Climascus
Booklet: The Land of The Cymry (sic) Trust Houses
Envelope containing bits of old silver foil..’from Aunt Ethel’
Envelope marked Caseg Fedi containing photographs of Corn Ornaments from The National Museum of Wales together with bill for 6 shillings also 2 drawings of Scottish and Norwegian Butter Moulds
Catalogue of an Exhibition at Spink:The Old Watercolour Society and Its Founder Members 1973
Letter from Malcolm Fry Secretary of RWS 1978 about the Sale of a Panel for the Gobowen Mural
Photograph b/w of the same panel
Post Card of La Vieille Maison Alle s Semois France from Mme Daschbeck.Germaine Hunter’s mother?
Childrens Cinema Book; In the Landof The Crofters by John Maddison
Pamphlet Ty Draw by P. Smith and D.B. Hague
Reprinted from Archaeologica Cambrensis 1958, with letter from Hague: Dear Condry (Bill)
Envelope containing Hair prescription from a Dr. Ferguson of \Bromsgrove
The Report. Together with original drawings for the CPRW 23rd Annual Report 1967-8
Booklet containg a Cataloge and plan of the gardens of Plas Yn Rhiw 1966
Envelope and Letter from The Medici Society confirming purchase of the copyright in illustrationds from The Sea Shore
Booklet Plas Yn Rhiw by Honora Keating 3 copies
Letter from MEE to Gwydion
Envelope containg Birth and Marriage Certificates
Plastic Phial containing ‘African Spiral Seed’
Exercise Book ..blank
Catalogue of Old Master Drawings from the Collection of Dr and Mrs Francis Springell National Gallery of Scotland
Exercise Book. List of Paintings sold to Spink 1968-1978
Exercise Book Estates of FC Eldridge and MM Eldridge
Exercise Book Inventory of Sarn Y Plas
Letter from Monica Rawlins requesting that Christopher Wood Painting be given to Elsi when M died!
Book of Phone numbers-none!
Christmas card Cathedrale de Lyon
Medici Bill of sale for Chgristmas Cards
Letter to Ronald and Gwydion about Euthanasia
Copy of Will
Copy of deeds for Arfryn Nantmor
Various brown envelopes-empty
Envelope containing Will of FC Eldridge
Envelope containing detail of rent at 3 Bridge Street Leatherhead
Envelope containg photographs of Gwydion and Examination Certificates
Envelope containg Aluminium Mesh: Especially made for reinforcing rust holes

Letter from Kyffin Williams 1988
Post card from Marie Therese Castay Aurillac 1973
Post Card from Anne Moorey Sete 1972
Post card from Joan Merchant Oban 1973
Various envelopes from Halifax BS, Guardian Royal Exchange, Elys and British Gas
Post Card of Menai Bridge
Leaflet about Phostrogen
Christmas Card Cathedrale de Chartres
Old Listing of British Hallmarks
Post Card Diano Marina from Dorothy Bates 1972
Christmas Ceads from Phyllis Williams Gardner and Suzanne Knowles

Post Card of Cockle Carts at Penclawdd
Post Card of ship Parramatta

Christmas Card of Connemarra from Peter McPoddie (RST)
Sheet of Dried Flowers from Bethlehem
Post Card of Shetland Ponies
Christmas Cards-Rouen Liege Evreux Plogonnec Strasbourg
Carton of Anemone Blanda
Christmas Card from Audrey Keates
Christmas Card from Harriet Alcom
Signed Christmas card-print by Stuart Milsom
Post Card of the Nanteos Cup
Christmas Card from Germaine Hunter

5d stamp
15 Cards from the Bodleian and Fitwilliam ms Illuminations

Post Card Shetland Boat and Croft
Post card Ynys Enlli
Post Card Fanlac Dordogne Denise Bates 1972
Post card Sumburgh Harriet Alcom
Label tin of Herring Fillets
PostCards Twin Peaks of Quinag and Aberglaslyn
Dummy Mock up of Book In My garden
Long letter to Gwydion 1976
Letter from Mary Behrend Jersey
Notice of OGM of National Trust

Notes of Hugo Van der Goes
Post Card of Slate Splitter Merioneth
Letter from National Trust
Letter to the AA (containing feathers)
Envelope containing Woodcock fearhers
Envelope containg dead prawn
Envelope containg adder skin
Envelope containg ‘Moorhen’s seat’
Envelope containg grass seeds
Book containing Income Tax returns 1966-1989
Phial containing chaffinch feathers
2 unlabelled Phials containing feathers of cuckoo +?
Bowles One sheet plan of \London and Westmister 1805
Letter from Dilwyn John national Museum of Wales 1958
The Penguin Modern Painters Paul Nash
Catalogue The Face of Wales Welsh Arts Council 1965
Book The Laws of the RWS together with letter of election 1956
The Dublin Magazine 1955 April-June
The Studio Magazine Jan 1942
Envelope containg correspondence and Sales slips from RWS
Envelope of Press Cuttings of RST Books decorated with drawings of Redwing
Magazine Forethought nd containing RST poem Fact
Catalogue of Paintings Exhibition MEE Beaux Arts Gallery 1937
Leaflet Regualtions RWS
Penguin Modern Painters Frances Hodgkins
2 postcards from Nevill Coghill to Gwydion
Photo Watercolor Aulla LG Duke474
Letter from George Clausen 1935
19th C valentine card
Letter from News Editor Birmingham Post 1951 press clipping enclosed RA..ME Eldridge is the first artist to have all her pictures purchased this year at the Royal Academy
Letter from Michael March to RST 1983
Letter from Aurum Press to RST
Penguin Modern painters Henry Moore
Short ms entitled Pope Easter Sunday
Photo Grannie Eldridge
Photo MEE and MME
Photo Painting Against The Frost in possession of J Speddar Lewis Leckford Abbey Stockbridge
Christmas Card from Alan Pryce jones
The Listener July 9 1953..Peasant Girl Weeping RST
The Listener July 5 1956 A Chapel Deacon RST
Representative Body of the Church in Wales Notice of Stipend 1 Oct 1948 £86.12.10
3 drawings of a tree
I drawing of a man with a staff and gulls
2 copies Daily Telegraph Magazine November 7 1975 Byron Rogers on RST also letter from Byron
Booklet Mural Paintiongs Brockley County School
Article The Birmingham Post Feb 11 1954 on the Gobowen Mural
Envelope containing 4 leaf clover Manafon Garden
First letter in ink from AGT to MME

Letter from FCE to MEE 7.3.48
Letter MEE to FCE Pensione Windsor Capri 15.IV.34
Photo MME
Large Photo Sheep in a Slate Pen MEE
Envelope Letters and Cards from FCE to MME
Correspondence with RJAH Hospital re mural together with ms description of it by MEE
MEE brief cv
2 letters fro John Rothenstein The Tate Gallery 1951 and 1953
Photograph of Mural Foundation at Prudential Cricket Pavilion Chiswick
Envelope of material from MME
Photo painting Nets for the cherry tree 1938
Photo panel of Mural RJAH
Photo painting Misstle Thrush and Skull 1949
Letter from Alan Powers re Brockley Mural
Letter from Elsi to FCE Poggio Gherardo June 3
Photograph of Grandpa Eldridge and Great Grandpa Eldridge
The Holborn Series Tracing Book I drawing of a hand
The Mandeville Press Spring Collection Album RST 1977
Food For Free Richard Mabey
Envelope containing 25 ms letters from Leonard Duke
Photo of MEE c. 1958
4 Photos of AGT 2 with MME and FCE
Letter ffrom M M Keesey 1937
6 Photos of AGT
Photo of painting Bagnone Massa Carrara 1934 Duke Collection?
Poem The Bear by AGT c.1954
Card from Nevill Coghill to AGT
Copy of letter from Stanley Spencer to Mary Behrend Cookham 1959
Letter from MEE to FCE Florence
Letter from MEE to parents Poggio Gherardo
Letter from MEE to FCE Poggio Gherardo
Parts of 2 letters ditto
Letter from MEE to parents Scuola Brittanica Roma
Letter from Alwyn Rees Extramual Dept Aberystwyth 1950
Letter from Monica Rawlins 1974
Letter from RWS 1942
Letter from Charles Skilton Publisher 1960
Various photographs of AGT
Letter from JL Naimaster 1979
Booklet 30 Welsh Paintings of today.. contains photo of Hill Sheep Corris
Art Quarterly Vol 3 No 4 September 1960-Article by Mark Bourne
3 ms pages by RST Y Llwybrau Gynt 11
handbill Royal Collage of Art Distribution of Diplomas 1933
Photograph MME
Photo Oil Painting Flying Kites Dryden House Oundle College
Newspaper cutting Orpheus and the Maenads at the Poetry Recital
Photograph Drawing Thumb and The Eagles Duke Collection
Photograph Painting The Turn of the Year “ “
Photograph Painting Brown Trout “ “
Photograph Oil Painting Freeing The Birds Birmingham City Art gallery
Photograph Oil Painting The Melody of Grief
Photograph Oil Painting Untitled (2 girls in a river
Photograph Oil Painting Untitled
Christmas Card from Alan Pryce Jones
Nets and Olive trees
4 Photos of AGT
Photo of a Shelduck
Photo of MEE
Large file of papers relating to Income Tax 1950s
Booklet Charles Mahoney. Tribute by John Rothenstein 1968
Y Faner March 4 1977 O’n cwpas by RST
Letter from Keating Sisters 1957
Thesis From The Stones of the Field to Pieta by Marie Therese Castay
Queen Magazine May 25 includes Poets Talking with Mary Holland, Poem The Betrothal RST and photo of RS
Observer Magazine 22 June 1969 Photo of RST
Queen Christmas Issue 1968 Carol by RST
Country Life March 17 1988 Article by Alan Powers Wards and Walls-Gobowen Mural
TLS May 30 1975 Abercuawg by RST
Tantalising ms snippet!:
Of course that would come. No I don’t but that is not the part of Thomas I mean-Thomas his verse R’s disgust at hearing O’Sullivan say I like Sterne better every day-Just like barnes and his Jane Austen and then the overpraising of AE. AE the man always present for them ?ing their vision of his work. Two bad sort of ?ish paintings by him at O’Sullivans. Then finding that Seumas contradicted himself when a summer at Starkey’s (Lanfairfechan) R had said Do you like Emily Bronte Seumas had replied My dear fellow do I ‘like’ her Then when R said to Clarke Do you think AE shows signs of having been influenced by Emily Clarke replied that he he thought AE would hardly have been able to see her work then O Sullivan said O Emily B was only a frail romantic but AE my dear….Continued disenthronement. They didn’t understand his pseudo Irish Patrick Molloy and told him it was terrible stage Irish.Said go on writing your own tuff..Cyclamen..that is your stuff go on with it when he had long ago passed the stage of thinking Cyclamen good Why to see it in print made him feel it stuffy and old and spoiled….(more)

M.E.Eldridge 1913



Wimbledon

I have promised to try and make a recording of the early years. So I must try and gather together in my mind the many happenings of those years
The first person I remember is not my father, whom we very rarely saw all, and who was shy and quiet not at ease with us. Nor all my mother who was a strict nebulous figure always there in the background. She grew less strict as she grew older and we came to love her and carry out all the things that she as a strong personality used to having our own way insisted that we should do in the way that she decided so that we, my brother and I, were quite old if all we could make up our own minds about anything.

My father had seen a terrible road accident with a man in a horse drawn omnibus in London and suffered severe nervous shock for the rest of his life, very like the shell shock which people suffered in the First World War. A man was knocked down by the horses and run the over by the Omnibus. It all happen right in front of him as he waited to cross the road.

The person that I loved as a very young girl was my grandfather William Dowling Chevalier
father of my mother and of Aunt Catherine. He was a splendid old man when I knew him. A large and tall very upright figure with a large white beard and he always wore a black silk cravat. He was the love child of the daughter of a family of Huguenots who came to England when they were turned out of France in 1685 by Louis XIV. They were not given free access to France again until 1788.

Among these Huguenot Protestants were many fine French craftsmen- weavers, glassmakers carpenters. The Venetian Giacomo Verzelini came from the Venetian island of glass makers Murano to the this country via Belgium. He was the first to make in England the very beautiful goblets. He lived and had his work room in London . Three times they were burned down by the jealous inferior british glass maker. He was making goblets at Crutched Friars Aldgate in 1577.

Grandpa spoke French well. He had three wives and 10 children. I have a photograph of him sitting in the middle of a and large group of children of all ages. I thought it was the grandpa and a Sunday school outing until Aunt Catherine told me that it was her father with his very large family of children. They all adored him and when he came home each afternoon from Marylebone they saw that he was comfortably seated in his armchair by the fire and rushed to get his slippers for him. He spoke French to them and told them stories which his mother Sarah Chevalier had told about the French countryside I where her mother was born. All three wives died of tuberculosis for which there was then no cure.Each time one died he had to marry again to cope with all the children. It was when he came to be Postmaster at Marylebone Post Office that he made his stamp collection which G has. There were few letters in those daysand they were not delivered but collected from the Post Office. When a letter with an interesting stamp arrived he would ask the owner of the letter if he might have the stamp.

My mother married Frederick Charles Eldridge who was one of three brothers who lived in Bishop's Cleeve in Gloucestershire. His father had married Ann Yeend, daughter of Eliza who was one of the seven children of J.F Yeend, who had gone to America and lived at 1 Lawrence Street Mobile Alabama.
(My mother never spoke of Father's family for fear I suppose that we should ask about hers. Grandpa Chevalier being a love-child she did not consider to be 'quite nice' I learned about my mother's family from Aunt Catherine who adored her father and at 80 assured me that she saw nothing strange about being a love-child and that my mother had always been narrow-minded about it!)
My father's parents both died when he was about 10. After living for a while with an Uncle, Richard Yeend, and an Aunt at Woodmancote in Bishops Cleeve, the uncle died, and Woodmancote was inherited by Richard's spinster sister, also called Ann Yeend, who lived with him. She then sold her brother's estate. I have the notice of sale. Richard Ann Yeend were the nephew and niece of William Yeend of Charterhouse
J.F.Yeend who went to America married a Ms. King and the children took the name of Yeend King; one of whom was the painter Yeend King.

When his uncle died my father, as a young boy, went to London to seek work and eventually became an assistant at a jewellers shop in the Strand called Attenborough. As children we usedto go to the Strand to see the Lord Mayor's show. We sat on the balcony of the Attenborough shop to watch the procession. Many decorated wagon's, groups of the Lord mayor's staff and many soldiers on horseback. They were led by the drum major on his fine white horse, tossing his drum sticks whirling into the air and catching them again with each hand to continue his drumming. There were soldiers and sailors of many nations-Indian, Australian, Canadian-an early introduction to the realities of Britain's 'empire'. However we loved the spectacle -especially the horses, bands and gun carriages and the Indian soldiers in their beautiful turbans of all colours.
I always wondered how the drum major caught his drumsticks againfoe by the time they came down the horse had moved on a pace or two!



When the procession had passed by we had, with the other members of the staff, a splendid lunch in the dining room where every morning Mr. Attenborough gave the staff breakfast when they arrived for work. There was always a spotless white damask tablecloth and napkins folded in the shape of flowers. A large joint of roast beef was brought in by the rosy cheeked little old lady who was the cook. It was carved by the senior member of staff; several vegetables went with this and very crisped brown potatoes to be followed by jelly and cream, which was a great luxury in those days.

My father had only spent a short while at the village school and accumulated all his education from exploring London and spending hours in the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert, Natural History and Science Museums. These could be visited without payment and he could stay all day if he wished. All his knowledge of silver and silver hallmarks and the appreciation of the many lovely silver objects, jewellery and clocks displayed was gathered in this way. At the British Museum he gathered his knowledge of clocks from the very earliest ones to the present day, which of course can still be seen.
The painter Yeend King exhibited at the Royal Academy-always young women in white, pink or lilac gowns in the fields and orchards of Gloucestershire. There were always ducks and geese around their feet -all very popular in those days. There is a large painting of two girls with geese in the vaults of the National Gallery?Tate I can't remember which.

When my father married they lived in Dunmore Road in Wimbledon and later in Arterberry Road. My brother and I were born in Dunmore Road where the small garden was full of roses and fuschia and huge oriental poppies. Under the plum trees, where we had a hammock to play in, the grass grew tall and it was full of moon daisies. Standard rose trees and fuschias were grown by everyone in those days. They grew about head high like trees in a Noah's Ark garden-if he had one. I could walk about among them with my head in the flowers as it were.. I used to watch father pricking out small seedlings and carefully grafting very special rose buds onto the wild rose stocks.
My brother, Freddie, was always interested in shooting. Eventually he got into the team at Kings College School in Wimbledon and went to shoot at Bisley. Freddie and a friend and I all lay down in the long grass and with our air guns fired at the paper targets fixed to the wall of father's workshed where he did all his carving and woodwork. He had a lathe there on which he turned the most delicate of ivory boxes and other treasures. Our shooting did not improve the workshop walls but we became very good marksmen.
When I was six years old I had Bo Bear as a Christmas present which makes him six years older than Christopher Robin's Pooh Bear! He has lived with me for 74 years and now shares his chair with a very small two year old bear which R.S. brought me from Cardiff! He arrived in 1915 and having been made before the first world war did not cost a desperate amount. My mother had saved up for him for a long while. She was very good at saving scarce pennies and also absurdly generous in giving them all away when she had some. After paying for everything at her own wedding she had just one penny in her pocket- a penny I still have!
There was a lovely small sweetie shop on the corner of Crooked Billet on the edge of Wimbledon Common. They sold sugar sticks with coloured whirls, pink and white sugar mice and enormous black and white striped mint humbugs. The small window of the shop was about head high from the ground with many panes and I have always thought of windows like this as sweetie shop windows!. There was a lovely one in the kitchen at Manafon, looking down towards the river at the bottom of the garden. I always wanted to put glass jars of sugar sticks and mice and humbugs in it!
Air raids were daylight raids in the first world war. I believe there were no bombs. When we heard the fighter planes overhead we waited to hear the pieces of shrapnel bouncing off the pavement and hiting the chestnut lap fence of the garden. Then we ran out to pick up the pieces of shrapnel while they were still hot! I do not know why we were allowed to do this, but nobody had any experience of war and certainly not of fighter planes so I suppose saw no harm in it!
From six years old I was always painting and making intricate things for the Doll's House. We had very few toysbut the ones we had were played with continually and the few books read over and over again. Freddie and I together made things for the doll's house-lampshades were made of Cape Gooseberries with the central large seed removed and torch bulbs fitted inside connected to the doll's house main supply-a torch battery. I did not like dolls but made dozens of paper figures with all kinds of clothes for every time of the year. Some had foreign costumes based on photographs of Indian, Chinese or Eskimo children in My Magazine, edited by Arthur Mee. These were all painted with great detail. We collected many stamps and cigarette cards of Wild Flowers, and Kings and Queens. There was a card in every packet of cigarettes and duplicates we used to swap with other children. The Players cigarette cards were printed often on silk. The few books that we had we knew by heart and there was always excited anticipationof a large fat Annual at Christmas time. Amongst the toys that we did have were tops-spinning tops and humming tops which span to the musical sound when the twisted metal od in the centre was pressed down. We also had hoops-iron hoops for the boys bowled along by a metalstick with a hook at the end and wooden ones for the girls with wooden sticks.





Christmases

Christmas was always an exciting and lovely time.It began a week or so before Christmas with the making of the Christmas Pudding in the huge brown pottery steen, which was the bread steen. When all the ingredients were in, the milk and eggs, flour and fruit, then the brandy was added. Then we all had to stir and wish. About two days before Christmas we went out into the woods to find a Christmas Tree and to gather holly. There were the many branches of the tree to be decorated with coloured candles and glittering balls and glass birds and tinsel. Small presents were hung on the branches and larger ones placed at its foot. Bowls of strong flour and water paste were made to stick the lops of the paper chains to hang across the ceiling.
Two Aunts and Two Uncles came on Christmas Eve to stay with us. Often others came as well on Boxing Day so that there was the added delight of sleeping on a mattress on the floor in order to give over our beds to the visitors!
Mother got up at 7.00 am on Christmas morning. Half awake we crept downstairs to watch her put the giant Turkey into the oven. It took about 7 hours to cook for it always weighed about 28lbs. After we had been to church at 8.00 am and home again for breakfast we helped to prepare 'the table for lunch.' This never took place before3 o'clock by which time it was nearly dark enough to have candles on the table. There were two large candlesticks of silver and two smaller ones. We had to polish and polish the silver thistle condiment set which lived in a large leather case lined with royal blue satin. There were salt cellars and mustard pots and pepper pots all with cut glass bases, cut to imitate the fat bases of the thistleheads with silver tops representing the seed head of the thistle. Anne has these!
Father carved the turkey and the enormous pink ham boiled and covered in breadcrumbs. There was great consternation if the pudding was not as black as usual! Brussels Sprouts and Roasted Potatoes were always served with the meat. The Devonshire Cream, bought by my Uncle was eaten as well as brandy sauce with the pudding.. Graves superieure was usually taken with the first course, port after, and finally liqueurs-either Benedictine or Crème de Menthe. When all was over the presents were taken from the tree and distributed. We were even anxious to clear the table for Freddie and I dipped our fingers, on the sly, into the little drops of bright green Crème de Menthe and golden Benedictine when there was a little left in the bottom of the tiny liqueur glasses of Mother and Father.
We would put father's presents on the table beside him. But he never undid them, never, never looked at them or even undid them. Often we had spent a long while making something that we thought would please him. But receiving presents was something which he never showed any interest in. He preferred to give presents and gave us some very lovely ones over the years. Clutching our presents we went to have a rest in what was left of the afternoon and gathered at about 7 o'clock for tea and Christmas cake with cherries and the snowman on top. Usually we then played cards until, as small children, we were falling asleep as we played.
What a terrible orgy of eating. No wonder that I thought the first Christmas that RS and I spent together at Tallarn Green was the dreariest that I have ever known. Many church services and out to lunch at the churchwarden's where we were put in a room, the parlour, alone to eat it. It was not considered quite proper for the farmer churchwarden and his family to sit down with us! Years later a similar thing happened in Manafon. Mrs. Wilson asked us to have supper at the Ffinant. We sat at a huge table with her and while we ate the door of the dining room was lft open and through it we could see the rest of the family, two girls and four boys, sitting motionless round the walls of the kitchen which was next to the dining room-silent so that could listen to all that was said. That was for the same reason that it was not proper for working men to sit at the same table as the Rector!

School
I went to school when I was seven and made a clay mouse on the first day there. Later when I could not add up, and still cannot, I was given an abacus with lovely coloured beads to learn how to count. Everyone at home thought it was a great disgrace to have it, but I thought it was beautiful with all its brightly coloured beads. I hated all my schooldays. I only remember every term looking through the new books we had to buy to see if there were any line illustrations which could be coloured.. I remember best of all the paperback copy of Chaucer's Prologue which has been a joy ever since but then had very special paintable line drawings of knights and ladies and 'the squire embroidered was he as it were a mede, all full of freshe floures white and rede'-with great detail and brilliant manuscript colours I was able to make Duc de Berry manuscript paintings of the drawings.
One other happening I remember clearly and vividly was having to go to the Headmistress''s room to be told how evil I was, to have drawn in pencil, around the pattern of bunches of grapes on the white table cloth at lunch time. For this crime I got a disorder mark and when having told me this:' You would not have done it at home.' I truthfully replied Yes, I think I would, for all kinds of drawings are good. For this reply I got a second disorder mark-a second life sentence! O those marks. Carelessness marks for untidy work, deportment marks for not sitting up in class with a straight back, disorder marks for speaking on the stairs as you passed a friend or any other unplanned happening which was considered evil. Once on being told to write out a story we knew I wrote Peter Rabbit. This I had read dozens of times and knew by heart. Only to be given a black mark and a severe reprimand for having 'copied' it word for word from the book. How clearly one can remember being accused unjustly!
When it came to having to have colloquial French for examinations-Matriculation first, then Higher Certificate followed by Intermediate Arts I was sent to France.

France
Living with us during the war we had two young French soldiers Pierre and Henri Desruelle who were prisoners of war in this country -eventually to be returned to France to continue the fighting. Henri was killed by the Germans then. Their parents were always so grateful that we had been able to make them happy when they were prisoners of war so, of course, it was to Monsieur and Madame Desruelle that I went-to their farm outside Lille. They were still very poor and had suffered so much shortage of food and fat during the war that the young people were still eating bread and lard in order to get more fat in their food. Later I went to Monsieur and Madame Grand in Paris. He was a dealer in furs and went often to Russia. They had lots of money and a very large family and a large apartment in Paris. For having six children Madame had received a medal from the government for helping to build up the French population again after its depletion during the war. The whole family went to Poligny in the Jura for the summer, so I went too. In the tiny village there was a shop which sold fabric and sewing silk and cotton and wool. It was owned by three old sisters Mesdamoiselles Primote, cousins of Madame Grand. There was, as you can imagine, very little business going on and we all sat in chairs under the shop awning on the pavement so that we could greet every villager who passed by while we did our sewing and embroidery.
One day an uncle, M. L' Abbe from Besancon came and there was a great commotion. The best wines and special food were provided for him and for all of us. He was a large ponderous old man who obviously did very little but pray and drink and eat enormously! His cassock, I remember, only just managed to be fastened over his enormous middle and his hands were fat and white. As I recall he kept his clerical hat on all the time, even while seated for lunch.
An enormous meal ended with what I later found in Mrs. Beeton to be Souffle Fritters. They had to be prepared and eaten straight away, each person receiving their share one by one, while they were hot and crisp. Beginning as you can well imagine with M. L' Abbe. They were deliciously crisp. After receiving and blessing more or less everyone in the village as they called to see him, he made his way in a horse-drawn cart to the monastery in Besancon.
The Grand's house in the Rue du Theatre was exactly like all the others. A large grey stone house with wrought iron grilles at the lower windows. Just down the road was the convent. Two of the nuns were always trained to go out into the village to visit and look after tose villagers who were ill. Otherwise none of the nuns ever came out of the convent and were never seen until they died. When they died they were put in their open coffins in the shrine on the left of the main convent door. The French windows were opened wide behind the wrought iron grille where the coffin lay. The villagers all came, one by one, to offer a prayer to the good Lord that the nun might rest in peace. The ones I saw all had very beautiful faces, with very lovely bone structure. But everyone looks rather lovely when they are dead! After drawing and painting the skull of a young Frenchman, who was killed during the Franco-Prussian war, which I borrowed from the dentist in Welshpool I hoped that even I might make a lovely skeleton! But now I realise not everyone's bones are beautiful. The bones of the Frenchman's skull were finely drawn and sharply chiselled. Now I know not all bones are like that.. I have a drawing of my father when he died. He was always quite good looking with an arched nose and very, very blue eyes, but not nearly as beautiful as when the ivory skin was taughtly drawn over the fine bones. When my mother died, who was not so beautiful in life, with with black hair and brown eyes there was revealed a good bone structure and a close resemblance to her sister Aunt Catherine who in life was very gay and had blue eyes and curly light brown hair. I suppose it was a Chevalier family likeness revealing itself when the body was freed from its self-built lifetime character!
One day at Poligny I went out into the vineyards to paint and made one especially good one which later won for me the William Rothenstein prize. The painting finished, I wandered off into the surrounding fields and found a very small, very old church with groups of sculptured figures above the curved Romanesque arch of the doorway. As I opened the door a cloud of dust rose from the floor and danced off across the slanting beams of sunlight that I had let in. Everything in the church was thickly covered in a gray dust-floor, pews, pulpit and altar. I learned later that it was never dusted as it was holy dust and must not be disturbed.
The garden behind the Grand's house rose from a great square stone-flagged courtyard straight up the hillside. It was terraced to grow flowers and shrubs just as all the hillsides were terraced to grow vines.
The courtyard was covered overhead for half its length by wooden lattice over which grew a vine with the bunches of grapes hanging down from the lattice-work ceiling. It was a very pleasant and easy way of learning French.
In the afternoons the children of the Grands, Therese, Collette, Isabelle and I went to play a kind of pelota ball game on the small flat grassy square of the village where the women were hanging out their newly washed curtains and tablecloths. I made several paintings of these and of the women working in the vines. We were always given a piece of dry French bread and a lump of dark plain chocolate-in the heat of summer! I have always hated plain chocolate since then. We would return with delight to an evening meal ending with peaches. Peaches always remind me of M. Desruelle. Years before this, when in Lille, he would fill our glasses right up to the brim saying ' It is not Sunday, so we do not have to have a collar at the top of the glass.'
Much later when he was an old man, he and his daughter Madeleine went to live in St.Malo. There, with many peaches to be had, he used to crack the stones and eat the kernels. These contain small quantities of Prussic Acid and he eventually died from the poison. It took the doctor a long while to discover how he had so much of the Acid in his body!
When Gwydion and I came home from Provence one time some years later we went to have lunch with Madeleine. A doorway in the high stone wall on the roadside led into a paved courtyard. This was No. 12 Rue du Rocher. Round the courtyard were archways and recesses with mimosa and roses growing everywhere. Under each archway was a group of men, some old just talking together, some young playing cards and in the half-light looking like Cezanne card players. We went up a wide stone staircase on one side of the courtyard to the apartment in which Madeleine lived. We had a delightful lunch with salad from her garden. Afterwards she took us to see the rest of the house, and eventually we climbed to the top storey where there were two doors facing one another. One room was empty, the other with only a skylight. The ceiling went up to the roof and bunches of dried herbs were hanging from the ceiling. After smelling the scents of all the lovely herbs and trying to identify them we found that the door had closed by itself. On trying to open it we found that it was locked against the open door of the empty room. I imagined us all being marooned up there under the tiles with no means of attracting the neighbours attention and no means of reaching the skylight in the high ceiling and a few bunches of herbs to eat! Strangely Gwydion had a small metal comb in his pocket and he gently put it through the small slit which was as far as the door would open. He managed to free the latch from the one on the other door and with what relief we hurried out and went down to the lovely garden behind the house.

St Abbs
Summer holidays were usually spent at St. Abbs in Berwickshire. The exciting journey began by catching the Flying Scotsman night express train. This steam train left London at about 10.00 at night to reach Reston near Coldington and St. Abbs early the next morning. How difficult it was to go to sleep in the bunk bed listening to the shouted names of the stations as we passed through. Always listening for the harsh voice which called Grantham, Grantham knowing it would be many hourse before we could get up and go to the dining car for breakfast with lots of buttered toast and individual very small glass jars of marmalade. At Reston we were met by Willie Cowe from The Haven, St. Abbs and it was not long before we had glimpses of the ea beyond Coldingham and then the bay and the great sweep of sand, golden sand below the Cowe's Hotel. She was a great character and known all over Scotland. She was a fishergirl from the tiny village of St. Abbs round the headland. There was one small street of fishermen's cottages and a harbour full of fishing boats. The women all wore black and white striped skirts and black shawls around their shoulders. But Miss Cowe stood apart from them by having put t sea in the greatest storms to save people from ships dashed onto the terrible rocky coast. She had worked with the men on the breeches buoy which was on the headland and saved many lives attaching the ropes to the sinking ships and winding any survivors back to the headland. When they had been able to get into the breeches-taking the survivors back home for warmth and brandy to restore them. She once road from John O'Groats to and's End on a tricycle to raise money for a new lifeboat.
We often went across the heather covered moor to Lammermoor and if one had the head for it crossed on a very narrow path which fell straight to the raging waves on either side of the castle where the Bride of Lammermoor was imprisoned. Such an evil place with such wonderfully beautiful moorland all around with curlews and lapwing calling and snipe drumming in the bogs.
To my shame I was about 15 when on the moors I first really saw a great white cumulus cloud and was able to recognise cumulus, cirrhus and alto cumulus clouds. It was many years before I became aware of the beauty of the sky, to my shame.
The journey home began by going to Galashiels. The house always seemed very dark but there was a bathroom window which looked across the Eildon Hills. The greenness, brilliant green of the hills after London was breathtaking. It was like a magic world with the lush garden below. While there we nearly always went to Abbotsford, Walter Scott's country wandering round the Abbey ruins and lingering by the sparkling river near his house. The greenness of it all made me catch my breath.

Leatherhead
At 16 we moved to Leatherhead in Surrey. My father had bought a jeweller's shop which many years later caused L.G.Duke to write in his catalogue of paintings-Mildred Eldridge, daughter of a tradesman! Duke's aunt owned and lived on the island of Rhum which now belongs to the Scottish National Trust. He was an HMI (His majesty's inspector of schools) spending his holidays in the West of Scotland, so if he had not specially liked my work he would not have had anything to do with the daughter of a mere tradesman! He bought many paintings for himself and as an HMI many paintings to go to various London schools.
When we went Leatherhead in 1925 it was still as small village surrounded by fields on all sides. The woods were full of primroses and bluebells and on the banks grew wild thyme and dog violets. Sometimes in midsummer when it was too hot to sleep Freddie and I went into the fields to see the moonlight glimmering on the river Mole, the moon gradually setting behind the huge beech, chestnut and willow trees just as Samuel Palmer watched the sun rise and the moon setting when he worked in Kent.
At Wimbledon High School only when one reached the Sixth Form was it permitted to see the Library. The first books I borrowed were the rest of Caer and one by one the complete works of Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Tennyson, for we had only studied selected poems from these. I also remember borrowing Michael Fairless The Road Mender.. What joy it was to leave school where I learned little but made a few good pots. The one with the turquoise glaze outside and the broken gray within being the best of them.
Travel in the last terms at school and then to Wimbledon School of Art was by superb steam trains. The carriages had wide deep seats which seated only four people on each side. Very few people travelled in them so it was possible nearly ale
Ways to have an empty compartment all to oneself. Under the seats ran hot water pipes-what delight to sink into the warm soft seats after a day being frozen at school where it was always cold. No heating of any kind in a large school at that time!
At Wimbledon School f Art all changed. For the first time I was doing something in which I was really interested. Drawing and printing and painting-a period of continual work.; all day with a break at lunch to eat a bread roll and a sixpenny tin of sardines and then an evening class until 9.00 pm. Experimenting and trying to improve in every way to be able to draw well and paint all the things I wished to tackle. Experiments with oil, watercolour, tempura panels and sculpture. The staff were uninspiring but urging work, work..and then a train journey home and working at weekends in the fields and woods doing landscapes and plant studies.

RCA
At last working at something I liked and which would perhaps make it possible to go to the Royal College of Art. A free studentship in 1931 took me to the RCA which in those days was attached to the Victoria and Albert Museum. There were huge doors from the V&A into the College which were kept securely locked but as there was always one of the museum keepers on duty on the other side of the doors, special signs and knocks could be made so that after signing on at the RCA entrance desk it was possible to escape into the V&A and make drawings of the splendid treasures in the museum or experimental drawings of one's own which would probably have received severe criticism from the RCA staff. From there sallies could be made ty the Science Museum across Exhibition Road or to the Natural History Museum to make studies of animals, plants and fungus. Now and again a Life Class had to be attended all day as Rothenstein and the various professors had a way of quietly coming into the room and offering a bit of advice and checking on who was present.
Gilbert Spencer, Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden, Sorel and Mahoney were some of the ones holding professorships in the School of Painting at that time but as they all had studios they were very rarely seen. I also worked in the Indian Museum drawing the many masks and sculptures and used the V&A library. The Diploma Examination was held in the central glass roofed hall of, I believe, the War Museum where there were two good paintings by Henry Lamb and Stanley Spencer-both of Macedonia in the war. The Henry lamb, with pink cyclamen and other flowers in the stone filled ground of Macedonia. The Spencer was his ?Travoys arriving?. It was at this time that Henry Lamb was thought to be going to develop into a fine painter but as it turned out it was Stanley who took that position.
As the Diploma Examination was held in June the temperature under the glass roof rose to suffocation point and the oil paint slipped down the palette. Each student worked in a small separate compartment built of Essex board about 10' x 12' and a painting had to be done on a given subject, during the fortnight that the examination lasted. Then gathering together the best drawings and paintings that had been done during the three year course it was possible to make a small exhibition in each cell which the examining board could assess.

In 1934 The Rome Scholarship competition was held-the subject Music-I submitted the 5' x 5'



Telling The Bees<

which later became the central part of the first panel in the mural in the Dining Hall of the Nurses Home at the Gobowen Orthopaedic Hospital.



The scholarship was won by a very sedate, very stereotyped Italianate composition. It was considered that this person could gain more from a studentship at the British School in Rome. This was very lucky for me because they gave me instead the Travelling Scholarship worth £100 which in those days was a fortune. It was only later that I found out too how I should have hated working in Rome.

Italy

Just before Easter in 1934 I set out for Italy.
A good channel crossing and only one other person in the carriage from Calais to Paris. From Paris the trains were very crowded. Leaving at 8.00 pm. Everybody was going out of Paris for skiing and winter sports. After a great many stops, although it was supposed to be an express train we reached the frontier at Modane at about 6.00 am. Where our watches had to be put on one hour. There was still snow down on the railway as well as on the mountains, but bright sunshine as well. As we got away from the Alps through many dark tunnels the banks were covered with primroses and violets. There came to be occasional glimpses of the sea, of small Tuscan farms and gatherings of houses forming the few villages and everywhere, everywhere under the vividly blue sky in the glittering landscape the almond trees began to show a little pink blossom until outside Genoa they were in full flower. Terrrace upon terrace of small trees about 6 feet high and between them the grass unbelievably green in the brilliant sunshine under a sky so blue it was alarmingly breathtaking after all the darkness of the innumerable tunnels.

In Genoa there were crowds of people just meandering about in the arcades. In the main shopping places the streets are all arcaded like the Rue de Rivoli so when it rains everyone flocks there. The next morning at 10.00 am a train to Rome arriving at 7.00 pm A long interesting journey There had been heavy rain all the previous night and people were washing in the streams-clothes and themselves. Women were clothes and a small boy washing his legs-a woman washing too children-what do they do for water when it does not rain? The railway runs all along the coast with glimpses of the very blue Mediterranean.

Stayed at the British School in Rome, a ponderous building in the Via Giulia. Such enormous entrance doors about 20 feet high and so heavy that I could not open them. A huge white building with arcades and arches built around a central garden with mimosa in full flower and rather dingy palm trees. The principal hideous and apparently half witted but who improved on further acquaintance! There were seven of us in all , all students, for dinner in the great hall which was a very solemn affair-waiters, finger bowls, and splendid Italian food-especially the glazed chestnuts served with the meat.

It was Easter. Christmas at home was gay and splendid but lovelier even than Christmas was Easter. Beginning on Good Friday when we all went to church in the early morning-except father who later became a mason. We came home to breakfast with Hot Cross Buns, which are now eaten on any day at all. Easter Day was so very lovely with bowls of primroses everywhere-just ourselves-no visitors-and nests which we had made of willow strips or grass, filled with very small chocolate eggs covered in foil of many colours. Freddie and I always had a long narrow box of sugar birds eggs each with the name of the bird written beside it. They were so beautifully coloured an speckled to look like Robin, Chaffinch or Thrush eggs. Father loved beautiful things and I remember that one of the presents he gave me was an egg hand cooler of coloured stone-most delicately veined. These were used long ago by ladies who were doing embroidery or making lace to keep their hands cool. The egg is surrounded by fascinating traditions and long vanished folk customs. Associated with Easter particularly by children it could be a painted hen's egg one made from glass, china or chocolate. In Germany the Easter hare hid eggs in the garden for children to search for. In Eastern Europe-in Poland, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia the gg at Easter is looked on as a religious fertility symbol. The time of the year when all is being born again. Which reminds me in some way that in Eastern Europe Penduline Tits build a nest of wool and moss rather like a Long Tailed Tit but larger with an entrance hole in the side. The children watch over the nests all the early summer until the young birds have flown and then they collect them to make warm slippers for the winter time. Let us hope they are not like the nesting box on Gwydion's windowsill in Eglwys Fach which had a Pied Flycatcher nesting in it. We could not make out how after a visit from Dr. Davies the room was full of fleas!. Gwydion had a bad throat infection-we discovered the bird box was full of fleas and the doctor had opened the window. I wonder if he noticed them. Let us hope he was concentrating on throats. I rather thought that bird fleas kept to birds. Certainly cat fleas do not keep to cats.
So-In Rome it was Good Friday. No one seemed to know where there was a church where the Allegri Messiere would be sung so I have still only ever heard a recording of it. But the markets on Easter Sunday were full of flowers and fruit and symbols of Eastertide made of plaited palm leaves bleached gold and intricate. I sent a boxful of flowers home which all arrived completely dead-which mother later told me-she could see they had been lovely for they had such long stalks. Margery Kendon once sent me a box of wild flowers from the meadows of the Pyrenees which arrived as a boxful of hay. It was when she was staying at Lescun where she slept under four down quilts and duvets, one white, one blue and white patterned with pale lilac and one pink. It was of course long before any duvets were used here.

On Easter Sunday in the afternoon an enormous crowd gathered on the Piazza in front of the Vatican. The Piazza encircled by a wide collonaded stone roofed arcade. Colza oil lamps hanging from the stone ceiling were lighted and everyone waited in complete silence waiting to see the Pope come out onto the balcony of the palace after the ceremony of canonisation of Dom Bosco.. Italians in a crowd used to get terribly annoyed with one another and became so excited that they had to be parted from one another on the verge of a fight. While we were waiting the fountains began to play. The priests and pilgrims began to come out of the church and the Pope carried on the papal chair appeared on the balcony and raised his hand to bless the people. Instead of any noise or cheering everyone waved their handkerchief and lastly clapped frenziedly-that was the only sound that had been made during the whole afternoon.
Every day in Rome was spent discovering all the paintings and sculptures which one only knew as reproductions in a book. Now and again there was a small church crammed between the other buildings in which going into the complete darkness after the brilliant sunshine outside one found a splendid old tryptich or other small painting of great beauty. Could not help thinking where in London or the rest of Britain could one go into a small church and find a glorious painting as one often did in Italy
Rome I did not like not being interested in old buildings. I left Rome after a while and went to Florence where I first stayed in a convent suggested by the almoner at the British School John Strachey was staying on Capri and I promised to go and see him. Mrs. Lindsay who was with him now that he was nearly blind took me to explore the whole island. A rough crossing had ended on the shore with all the fishing boats with their coloured and patched sails. A few trattoria and the odd fisherman's small house. There was no road up to the village which was reached by climbing up narrow streets and steps just wide enough for a donkey-so no wheeled traffic except the carriage which could only use the winding road to the top of a very steep hillside but could not enter the narrow streets of Capri itself. Some of the lovely small houses had walls that were leaning perilously and there were very beautiful arches built across the narrow streets from one building to another for support. All the houses and archways were whitewashed with many flowers on the wrought iron balconies. Many sandy bays between craggy grey stone cliffs, the water in the bays so clear and so greenly blue on the white sand that bathing was shared with myriads of small coloured fishes swimming all around. There are flowers everywhere-anemones of all colours, orange blossom, arum lilies growing everywhere under the trees and freesias. Everywhere too along the sides of the paths many kinds of olearia growing wild some with large white daisy flowers some with small. The olearia with the very small daisy flowers is known over here as Olearia Scillonensis. It likes a little shelter though on Capri it grows on the open cliff top with orchis around its feet. When Mrs. Lindsay was invited out to lunch Strachey and I decided to go on a spree to Anacapri. The only transport was one of the carozzi-carriages large enough for two in the open carozza and the driver on the box in front. The horses were all decorated most gaily. Some had feathers and white plumes together with three pheasant feathers standing up on their heads. Large straw hats decorated with flowers kept the viciously strong sun from their eyes and were tied on with wide brightly coloured ribbons.. We chose one with three pheasants feathers, a pale yellow bow on its straw hat and a spray of wisteria under each ear. In this grand style we drove up to Anacapri-hairpin bends all the way and went to the Eden Paradiso hotel where Strachey had made an appointment with the manageress to teach him how to peel oranges so that they were cut into a rose on the top-so much better when mandarins are used.
Oranges are brought to the table , three or four on a stem, with the leaves and it takes quite a lot of courage to pull one off and spoil the stem. We went after to Francis Brett Young's house-Strachey had translated one of his books into Braille years ago and wanted to see him. A lovely villa with a wonderful view over the sea towards Naples and away up to the olive terraces inland-their tapestry curtain as they called it. Strachey left for Venice and I explored other bays. The water so clear and green that the sun makes rainbows on the white stones under the water. The water is very salt too. All the small pools among the rocks are dried up by the sun and a circle of white salt crystals left. Got up as usual at 6.00 am the next day, the loveliest and coolest time, and went right to the top of Mount Solario and sat on a carpet of lovely wild pink orchids. Vesuvius on the left Capri down below, the Sorrento peninsula away beyond and miles and miles of brilliant shining sea. I went then to Amalfi and Sorrento and back again to Florence My mind was still full of Capri, of the olearia lined paths which led to Axel Munthe's house with gates that were kept locked to protect him from the many people that flocked to Capri. He had become so famous with his cures for ailments, all of which according to him were based on colitis. On past the house to the promontory at the end of the island from the crags of which Barbarossa ?Tiberius used to push enemies and unwanted guests down the sheer drop from the cliffs into the sea.
Amalfi was a strange mixture of extreme poverty and extreme riches. Down in the main square in front of the Duomo the long line of shallow steps was filled with stalls of flowers, brilliantly coloured fruits and vegetables brought in from the surrounding fields. The flowers and vegetables made mounds of vivid colours against the grey stone of the Duomo and the houses. The fishermen had fishes for sale which were strange and curious to me who had never seen them before-they were almost as wonderfully coloured as the flowers and vegetables.
Later Strachey and I went up behind the town to Ravello. He knew Lord Grimthorpe so we went to see the original figure of the young boy in the middle of the large pool in the villa garden. Strachey had a replica of the seated boy in his charming garden at The Little House in Leatherhead. At the Villa Cimbrone the pool and its surrounding flower garden with the dark cypress avenues looked away down below to the sea so blue and so calm, with all the poverty of the town hidden away.
I went back to Florence to explore further. The great galleries of paintings were marvellous and it felt so strange to be face to face with real Botticelli paintings and in those days the galleries were almost completely empty. Very few visitors ever penetrated them. So I could enjoy all the Michaelangelo paintings and sculptures and the Donatellos on my own. I thought it mot disorientating to enter the Uffizi gallery on one side of the river and on coming out to find oneself on the other side. The Ponte Vecchio was very lovely in those days too over the dingy yellow waters of the Arno.On both sides of the bridge were small jewellers shops full of treasures. Not for nothing was it called the bridge of jewellers. I thought Florence had far more charm than Rome-not half the noise and traffic, lovely gardens and great stone palaces crammed with wonderful collections of paintings and sculptures.
I had a letter of introduction to Aubrey Waterfield and his wife Lina and after exploring for a while more I wrote to him and when he saw that I was staying in the convent in Florence immediately sent a car to fetch me to stay at Poggio Gherardo for he detested nuns. I went to Poggio Gherardo with a sheaf of drawings and sketches for Aubrey Waterfield to see. He was fortunately delighted with my work as it seemed I used the same blue and gray tones that he did.

The road to the house climbed through terraces of olive trees under which oats, gray-green were tall. They were looked after by women wearing white head scarves and siena red or black and gray dresses and white aprons. The house was a rather forbidding gray stone four square solid ..with splendid wrought iron grilles decorating the ground floor windows. It was built in the C13 and is perched on the top of a hill.

There are eight 'young ladies' staying with the Waterfields 'to be finished', that is taught to speak Italian, to paint, and to visit all the museums and get a complete knowledge of Italian painting, sculpture and life.

Aubrey so disliked nuns that he insisted I should stay with them. If ever any nuns came to the house asking for alms he would fly into a rage. "Tell them to go away" He could not endure anyone who was willing to shut themselves away from the beauty of Italy-for whatever reason.

He got up at 04.00 a.m and worked in the garden, which was full of pale iris, lavender and roses. At 08.00 a.m we had breakfast which for him was an egg, boiled for EXACTLY 2 and a half minutes and ate raw broad beans gathered from the garden just half an hour before peeling off the pale outer skins and eating the bright green seed leaves. Two or three of the 'young ladies' had breakfast with us and two or three different ones joined us for dinner in the evening.
After dinner with the heavy scent of jasmine and stephanotis floating in from the open doorway Aubrey read to us, beginning with The Duchess of Malfi

He taught me to stretch paper for watercolours- a method I have used ever since and to use water colours more freely in flat washes and broken colour washes. We often all painted in the olive groves with storm clouds gathering over the distant mountains, but which never came to break the golden light on the trees and ripening oats beneath them. At evening the fireflies gathered under the olives and floated over the oats, competing with the many stars in the deep blue of the night sky, so that it was not possible to tell which were fireflies and which were stars. Some managed to get into the bedroom and float around outside the mosquito net.
The evenings were especially lovely with the darkening of the olive trees and the oats growing from pale green to bleached gold underneath them; the fireflies drifting under the trees and the stars in the velvet blue of the night sky-and everywhere, everywhere the intense scent of flowers growing wild that one had only seen growing under glass in the North.

Some years later at an exhibition at RWS a painting of the fields and mountains by Aubrey was dismissed by several members as 'too good to be true'.

Waterfield was astonished that it was I, who had so much painting to do, should collect all the lavender flowers for him. He did not realise that to me to pick masses of lavender was sheer delight while at home the others had large gardens full of lavender and roses and lovely flowers and shrubs and trees either in Ireland or England.

There is a drawing of Poggio Gherardo in the National Library in Paris advertising best olive oil. It is from a Decameron Codex transcribed 40 years after the death of Boccaccio. The Poggio Gherardo house is on the left and in the centre a group of fair ladies riding on horseback through the olive groves. Olive oil was still produced and the autumn was full of work and bustle. Red and white wine to be made and Vermouth for export to London. The oats and corn were gathered and piled onto huge wagons drawn by sloww stepping oxen. The olives were knocked down from the tree with long canes and immediately taken to the press or to the huge stone jars to be preserved. There were many bamboo plantations from which to gather canes to beat the olives and also make real bamboo pipes and pens which used with diluted Indian Ink make such beautiful line drawings.

Continued painting the olives and the ripening oats until they were harvested., the garden with its very lovely pale blue iris and also the old gardener Giuseppe. Some of his sons and daughters worked either in the house or on the podere and they brought him every morning to sit in the shade, for he was now very old-he shelled beans or peas; they were always hoping he would die there, so that they could claim on the Waterfields for having died at work on their estate!. I went on several days to make drawings of him so that he would sit still and relax and not show any sign of dying!
Leonard Duke had most of the Poggio drawings.
Aubrey took me one evening to see Don Giovanni with Beniamono Gigli. We went over to I Tatti which was almost the next estate. The first time I went Berenson was not there and I had tea with Mrs. Berenson in the library. The library appeared to have no door, as the door was camouflaged with rows of books. Rather alarming to find oneself there, alone, apparently sealed in by books, with no means of escape.

Poggio Gherardo, A Visit to I Tatti, and to Castello della Brunella



All students visiting I Tatti were allowed to wander all over the house to discover the many paintings and treasures which Berenson had collected. A lovely house with white walls and gray stone skirtings and no doors at all; just archways leading from one room to another. Later Berenson showed me his special teasures- madonnas, altarpieces..so many that one became confused. I wonder what happened to the collection for in 1940, thereabouts, German soldiers took over all the larger houses. And 'lived' in them. The Waterfields managed to come back to London at the beginning of the war and I was able to take RS to see them. Hey said little of the horror of having to leave everything. Even the Castello della Brunella at Aulla was occupied by soldiers being an alarmingly important vantage point position. I went to the Castello with Aubrey for a prolonged visit. We got up at dawn and worked in the garden, which was on the roof of the castle. As early as that the white lilies in many groups were silver gray and dark against the snow covered mountains behind which were just catching the light of the rising sun. A moat ran across the front of the castle with a great entrance door. No need for such protection on the other side of the castle as for the ground fell precipitously to the valley below with mulberry and myrtle clinging to the sheer rock. I was able to make studies of the women doing their washing in the river far below. Still have one or two of these. Aubrey had decorated several of the rooms with watercolour landscape panels in the grays and blues he used and which looked splendid on the walls between the tall windows looking down to the river. From breakfast time we slept or read til midday. Then painting till the light faded into the luminous evenings………

On the way to Aulla we had stopped in a very small village to buy the most beautiful sheep bells. The kind of bells the shepherds were still using. They were spherical and very simply decorated with raised metal patterns. I remembered them so clearly when I read a while ago an article on the sheep bells being made in England about 17830. These have lovely names-Canister, Clacket, Cup, Crotal and Lateen. One marked J.B was made by James Burroughs of Devizes working from 1738-1755. Robert Wells of Ashbourne worked in North Wiltshire. There was a language of bells which the shepherds knew well. Every shepherd had sheep bells and they owned them. They were handed down from father to son. Apart from the pleasant sound they made they tell the shepherd what his flock is doing. A gentle jingling meant that the sheep were grazing peacefully, contentedly. A steady rhythmical ring denoted they were walking to get a drink at one of the dew ponds and an agitated jangling that they had been disturbed by a fox or a stranger. Some old village people remembered that, as children, whenever the bells were heard jangling they went rushing out into the fields and woods to see what was the matter. The bells enabled the flock to be located which was particularly useful in fog and on Salisbury plain. How important they must have been to locate the wandering sheep in these steep hills and mountainsides around Aulla.
Sometimes Aubrey fell to remembering the many people who had visited them. Lina Waterfield was foreign correspondent to The Guardian and so met everyone who came to Florence and who came to Poggio to see what they could find out!. Aubrey was only interested in the painters and writers. Telling of the days that D.H.Lawrence brought Frieda to lunch at Poggio-he used to recall the "alarming sight of Frieda bursting out of her bodice" as he described it-for she had been wearing a white blouse and laced up black bodice.
He was cheered by Lawrence's knowledge of Italian wildflowers which he described to them and told stories of the places they had visited. This drew from Aubrey a description of how they had gone to Sardinia after they were married. Knowing that they were newly married the wife of the farmer where they stayed had put on their bed the most exquisite bed linen bordered with handmade lace-out of her dower chest. They were, of course, as young people, two of the most elegant you could find.
The portrait by Lavery of Lina on horseback and Aubrey standing beside her gives some idea and there is a good head of Lina by Watts. She was brought up by an aunt at Fyvie castle-Janet Ross. Not having a penny and being so very lovely one of the white brocade curtains was taken down and made into a gown for her to go to a dinner party where she met Aubrey! He used to tell the story of how visitors coming to Poggio would tell him how beautiful his daughter Kinta was, but his reply was always: "possibly- but you should have seen Lina when she was young". (see Kinta Beevor. ?A Tuscan Childhood) She was still beautiful in 1934 and he was an elegant figure with his ramrod arthritic back. She was often rather wild and started telling us at dinner one night of the perfectly lovely dresses that she had just seen in one of the olive workers houses at the bottom of the podere- Gino the son of old Giuseppe was waiting at the table and Aubrey was horrified to hear her praising the possessions of a peasant worker reprovingly said: " Not in front of the servants, Lina" which ended her description of it that we were all longing to hear. I was not supposed to know any Italian at all and id indeed know very little so that when Aubrey asked an important guest, a politician, did he not think the student was rather beautiful-the reply was "solamente la testa" which showed us that a Rubens was more his idea of beauty. Having spent all my life knowing that I had an ugly body I knew well what he meant.
From Florence we went to stay in Ravenna. The mosaics were far more imposing and full of colour than I had thought. The tomb of Galla Placidia which had small porphyry windows had just had two of these smashed. The first instances of vandalism that I had ever seen. We went by train starting at about 6.00 am and arriving about 11.00. We went right over the Apennines by a very narrow pass and then saw that we had passed the watershed and all rivers were flowing towards thje Adriatic. Ravenna used to be a port but land has been reclaimed and many marshes and Ravenna is now only connected by large canals with the sea. Ravenna itself is rather a dull town with now and again a round tower shooting up from a church or building which makes discovery of the mosaics specially remarkable. One late afternoon we went in a horse driven carriage to some very lovely pine woods and saw the wide canals with the beautiful sailing boats with brilliant yellow and orange patched sails and the men fishing with large square nets slung out over the canal, which they lowered into the water by a pulley. The land was all very flat.
When we got back to Florence there was a great thunder storm. How different from the quietness of the Ravenna woods with wild pink cyclamen growing everywhere under the trees and the pines against the very blue sky made a pattern as startling as the line of mosaic sheep around the walls of the church.

Back down to stay in Assisi on the way back to Settignano. Stayed in a Franciscan Convent where there was a coloured serpent living in the gray stone garden wall. Many hours spent studying the Giotto frescoes-these were even more beautiful than one had supposed. I walked out of the village walls to climb the hillside to the


Basilica di San Francesco

and to Laverna and I Carceri. The hillside was covered in white narcissus as it rose towards I Carceri where St. Francis received the stigmata. St Francis retired to I Carceri before he died. The cell is more lovely in its simple cave like stone quality than the other churches.
High on the hillside above the small village and built on a great rock with the forest behind-a lovely stone built well in the centre of a small courtyard. A doctor who is head of the medical association in Florence, not a Roman Catholic, says that from experience it has been found possible for a person who is in an excessively nervous state of health-on the verge of death-as St Francis was-he was also blind by then-and living an almost entirely spiritual life-to reproduce in themselves the physical state of others-the stigmata in his case. To see I Carceri certainly makes one wonder if it may not be so.
The Franciscan nuns in Assisi drank the white wine of the district with their meals and we all slept in the most alarming beds with straw pillows and straw mattresses. The pillows made one's ears so sore that I had to fill the pillowcases with various woollen jerseys that I had with me. Made many drawings of the narrow streets and houses crowding in on either side-always nuns walking in the shade made by the closeness of the houses and far below in the green plain men and women working in the fields far, far below the village perched on its hilltop

I have only once, else, seen the white poet's eye narcissus growing wild on a hillside- and that was when Gwydion and I once on our way to Provence to stay in Aigaliers stopped for the night at La Chaise Dieu, so that we might see the wall painting of the Dance 0f Death. This turned out to be almost impossible as there was a television crew working there and all was floodlighted with a fearful golden yellow light. Quite horrible. The whole of the outside of the church a strange yellow in the glare of the spot lights. In the morning we found that the hills around the cluster of houses were covered in small white narcissus-much smaller than the ones outside Assisi for the surrounding mountains were high and the meadows much colder. Walking along the narrow main street of the village small white clouds would come along behind you , pass you by and sail out across the plain far below..
There were many shrines on the walls of the houses in Asisi. Young and old men came down from the Abruzzi at Christmas time to play their goat skin bagpipes and their shepherd's pipes in front of the shrines, all containing a small figure of the Madonna. The front of each shrine was covered by the most beautiful grilles of wrought iron. The shepherds wore very full cloaks which came down to their knees and their legs were bound around with cloth. On their feet they had sandals made of goatskin fastened with goatskin thongs. The pipes made an earsplitting noise and their bagpipes appeared to be made of the inflated skin of a whole goat and were played by older men.

The thunderstorm on returning to Florence had brought out the bullfrogs. They were perfectly quiet during the daytime, sleeping I suppose in the mud in the pool in the garden. But at night they sat around the edge of the pool and croaked as loudly as only bullfrogs can-very loud and deep. In the morning there were usually many books around in the grass thrown out of the bedroom windows in an effort to stop them so people could sleep. The nightingales, too, sang all night in the trees just outside my window.
When it grew cooler it was time to go to Venice.

I stayed in the Casa Frollo on the Rio della Pallada Giudecca




It was on the less grand side of the canal, to save money, and looked across to the beautiful palaces, houses and churches. In the morning, opening the French windows, I saw down below on the water boats, which had come into Venice in the very early morning. They had patched sails of orange and dusky yellow and tilers painted bright green. They were loaded with mounds of brilliantly coloured fruit, vegetables and flowers to be sold later in the market. The boats were long and narrow; the sails of some of them, terra cotta coloured, were furled after the long journey and the boatmen slept in the shade of the mounds of fruit. Across the canal in a gondola to see the mosaics in the Duomo san Marco. It was completely dark inside after the glare of the sun outside. Gradually as eyes became used to the darkness there came the gradual gleam of the gold in the background of the mosaics which covered every dome. Prayers were being said in some of the side chapels and the many votive candles patterned the darkness. Later I explored many of the side canals all with their floating rafts of unwanted flowers and vegetables. Many of the palaces were crowded with families with washing strung from one side of the canal to the other. Everywhere there were still gondoliers then and in the evening many would sing. I imagine that now all has given way to speed boats and other mechanically propelled horrors which are washing away the foundations of the palaces with their continual wake..
Every church seemed to have its great painted altarpiece and often many other paintings which had curtains drawn across them-only to be revealed by giving the attendant priest a large sum of money!
On the flat roofs of some palaces there were still a few ladies, then, who used to sit in the sunshine with very wide brimmed hats-straw hats- without the crowns and through the space where the crown should be they pulled their hair having anointed it with oil. In this way the bleached their hair so that one saw many golden haired Italians looking more like the fair people of the Dolomites than Italian.
A friend of the Waterfields lived in one of the most beautiful palaces. The gondola drew in towards the wide steps in front of a huge doorway leading to the enormous darkened low ceilinged rooms on the ground floor. These looked out onto a garden filled with flowers-roses, mimosa and dark cypress trees. The friend took me upstairs to see a room he thought I should like. The walls were papered with a white paper with a delicate pattern of very lovely grey-green leaves, reminding one of the rather heavy William Morris willow leaf pattern. Here and there, fixed to the wall was a slender twig on which perched an accurately coloured small bird, modelled in cotton wool stiffened with clear glue which allowed great detail. Gertrude Rowlands, Gwydion's godmother, had some Beatrix Potter figures made like this. Peter Rabbit in his enchanting blue jacket and Mrs Tiggy Winkle in an almost transparent immaculately white apron, which she lent to Gwydion-not to be played with or touched until returned!. This was too much for a 4 or 5 year old and he removed all Peter Rabbit's whiskers. Here was great consternation until I got Lewis the Manafon rabbit catcher to procure a young one and I was able to give Peter Rabbit his whiskers again. A strange wizened little man, Lewis, who could whistle the rabbits and also weasels to come to him. Going into the library he hesitatingly suggested that a painting he had recently acquired might be of interest. It was medium sized-a group of people-and without thinking I said "Oh, Tiepolo". He was horrified to think I could know by whom it was painted for it was his secret uncatalogued treasure-but it could have been by none other. He swore us to secrecy and hid it away!
I went to Bolzano in the Dolomites which was then an amazing town with rushing streams from the mountains pouring down the main streets in deep open channels. So much water and the thought of Capri without any and having to depend on the water boat which came every day from Naples. All the wonderful sparkling Bolzano torrents have been put underground, now. No doubt to make way for cars. The names of the streets were all in both German and Italian; though the people were much more Italian by temperament and Italian was preferable spoken. A bus went up into the mountains to the Albergo delle Stelle-meadows full of wildflowers where the snow had melted but otherwise snow and snow-in the evening turning to pink and red gold in the setting sun.

.

M.E.Eldridge 1934

The pictures are now visible without all the photographic clutter. Go to September 7th 2002 on the Incorrigible Cuckoo and work down. When you come to the Leonard Duke letters you have to scroll the whole width of the page to get the 'Next 5'

Two of the books missing from the Bibliography are:

RICHARDS, Tom. South Wales and Monmouthshire. Paul Elek 1949 illustrated by M.E.Eldridge.
FISH Margery A Flower For Every Day. Book Club ed. dust jacket

Does anyone know who Dorothy Richards was? Surely she was not Enid Blyton's 'friend'? Maybe it was a pseudonym? I cannot find anything useful in Google (nor anywhere else!)

AUTOBIOGRAPHY: TO BEGIN
I have promised to try and make a recording of the early years. So I must try and gather together in my mind the many happenings of those years
The first person I remember is not my father, whom we very rarely saw all, and who was shy and quiet not at ease with us. Nor all my mother who was a strict nebulous figure always there in the background. She grew less strict as she grew older and we came to love her and carry out all the things that she as a strong personality used to having our own way insisted that we should do in the way that she decided so that we, my brother and I, were quite old if all we could make up our own minds about anything.
My father had seen a terrible road accident with a man in a horse drawn omnibus in London and suffered severe nervous shock for the rest of his life, very like the shell shock which people su
ffered in the First World War. A man was knocked down by the horses and run the over by the Omnibus. It all happen right in front of him as he waited to cross the road.
The person that I loved as a very young girl was my grandfather William Dowling Chevalier father of my mother and of Aunt Catherine. He was a splendid old man when I knew him. A large and tall very upright figure with a large white beard and he always wore a black silk cravat. He was the love child of the daughter of a family of Huguenots who came to England when they were turned out of France in 1685 by Louis XIV. They were not given free access to France again until.
1788.
Among these Huguenot Protestants were many fine French craftsmen- weavers, glassmakers carpenters. The Venetian Giacomo Verzelini came from the Venetian island of glass makers Murano to the this country via Belgium. He was the first to make in England the very beautiful goblets. He lived and had his work room in London . Three times they were burned down by the jealous inferior british glass maker. He was making goblets at Crutched Friars Aldgate in
1577.
Grandpa spoke French well. He had three wives and 10 children. I have a photograph of him sitting in the middle of a and large group of children of all ages. I thought it was the grandpa and a Sunday school outing until Aunt Catherine told me that it was her father with his very large family of children. They all adored him and when he came home each afternoon from Marylebone they saw that he was comfortably seated in his armchair by the fire and rushed to get his slippers for him. He spoke French to them and told them stories which his mother Sarah Chevalier had told about the French countryside I where her mother was born. All three wives died of tuberculosis for which there was then no cure.Each time one died he had to marry again to cope with all the children. It was when he came to be Postmaster at Marylebone Post Offoce that he made his stamp collection which G has. There were few letters in those daysand they were not delivered but collected from the Post Office. When a letter with an interesting stamp arrived he would ask the owner of the letter if he might have the stamp.
My mother married Frederick Charles Eldridge who was one of three brothers who lived in Bishop's Cleeve in Gloucestershire. His father had married Ann Yeend, daughter of Eliza who was one of the seven children of J.F Yeend, who had gone to America and lived at 1 Lawrence Street Mobile Alabama.
(My mother never spoke of Father's family for fear I suppose that we should ask about hers. Grandpa Chevalier being a love-child she did not consider to be 'quite nice' I learned about my mother's family from Aunt Catherine who adored her father and at 80 assured me that she saw nothing strange about being a love-child and that my mother had always been narrow-minded about it!)
My father's parents both died when he was about 10. After living for a while with an Uncle, Richard Yeend, and an Aunt at Woodmancote in Bishops Cleeve, the uncle died, and Woodmancote was inherited by Richard's spinster sister, also called Ann Yeend, who lived with him. She then sold her brother's estate. I have the notice of sale. Richard Ann Yeend were the nephew and niece of William Yeend of Charterhouse
J.F.Yeend who went to America married a Ms. King and the children took the name of Yeend King; one of whom was the painter Yeend King.
When his uncle died my father, as a young boy, went to London to seek work and eventually became an assistant at a jewellers shop in the Strand called Attenborough. As children we usedto go to the Strand to see the Lord Mayor's show. We sat on the balcony of the Attenborough shop to watch the procession. Many decorated wagon's, groups of the Lord mayor's staff and many soldiers on horseback. They were led by the drum major on his fine white horse, tossing his drum sticks whirling into the air and catching them again with each hand to continue his drumming. There were soldiers and sailors of many nations-Indian, Australian, Canadian-an early introduction to the realities of Britain's 'empire'. However we loved the spectacle -especially the horses, bands and gun carriages and the Indian soldiers in their beautiful turbans of all colourse.
I always wondered how the drum major caught his drumsticks againfoe by the time they came down the horse had moved on a pace or two!
When the procession had passed by we had, with the other members of the staff, a splendid lunch in the dining room where every morning Mr. Attenborough gave the staff breakfast when they arrived for work. There was always a spotless white damask tablecloth and napkins folded in the shape of flowers. A large joint of roast beef was brought in by the rosy cheeked little old lady who was the cook. It was carved by the senior member of staff; several vegetables went with this and very crisped brown potatoes to be followed by jelly and cream, which was a great luxury in those days.
My father had only spent a short while at the village school and accumulated all his education from exploring London and spending hours in the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert, Natural History and Science Museums. These could be visited without payment and he could stay all day if he wished. All his knowledge of silver and silver hallmarks and the appreciation of the many lovely silver objects, jewellery and clocks displayed was gathered in this way. At the British Museum he gathered his knowledge of clocks from the very earliest ones to the present day, which of course can still be seen.
The painter Yeend King exhibited at the Royal Academy-always young women in white, pink or lilac gowns in the fields and orchards of Gloucestershire. There were always ducks and geese around their feet -all very popular in those days. There is a large painting of two girls with geese in the vaults of the National Gallery?Tate I cant remember which.
When my father married they lived in Dunmore Road in Wimbledon and later in Arterberry Road. My brother and I were born in Dunmore Road where the small garden was full of roses and fuschia and huge oriental poppies. Under the plum trees, where we had a hammock to play in, the grass grew tall and it was full of moon daisies. Standard rose trees and fuschias were grown by everyone in those days. They grew about head high like trees in a Noah's Ark garden-if he had one. I could walk about among them with my head in the flowers as it were.. I used to watch father pricking out small seedlings and carefully grafting very special rose buds onto the wild rose stocks.
My brother, Freddie, was always interested in shooting.Eventually he got into the team at Kings College School in Wimbledon and went to shoot at Bisley. Freddie and a friend and I all lay down in the long grass and with our air guns fired at the paper targets fixed to the wall of father's workshed where he did all his carving and woodwork. He had a lathe there on which he turned the most delicate of ivory boxes and other treasures. Our shooting did not improve the workshop walls but we became very good marksmen.
When I was six years old I had Bo Bear as a Christmas present which makes him six years older than Christopher Robin's Pooh Bear! He has lived with me for 74 years and now shares his chair with a very small two year old bear which R.S. brought me from Cardiff! He arrived in 1915 and having been made before the first world war did not cost a desperate amount. My mother had saved up for him for a long while. She was very good at saving scarce pennies and also absurdly generous in giving them all away when she had some. After paying for everything at her own wedding she had just one penny in her pocket- a penny I still have!
There was a lovely small sweetie shop on the corner of Crooked Billet on the edge of Wimbledon Common. They sold sugar sticks with coloured whirls, pink and white sugar mice and enormous black and white striped mint humbugs. The small window of the shop was about head high from the ground with many panes and I have always thought of windows like this as sweetie shop windows!. There was a lovely one in the kitchen at Manafon, looking down towards the river at the bottom of the garden. I always wanted to put glass jars of sugar sticks and mice and humbugs in it!
Air raids were daylight raids in the first world war. I believe there were no bombs. When we heard the fighter planes overhead we waited to hear the pieces of shrapnel bouncing off the pavement and hiting the chestnut lap fence of the garden. Then we ran out to pick up the pieces of shrapnel while they were still hot! I do not know why we were allowed to do this, but nobody had any experience of war and certainly not of fighter planes so I suppose saw no harm in it!
From six years old I was always painting and making intricate things for the Doll's House. We had very few toysbut the ones we had were played with continually and the few books read over and over again. Freddie and I together made things for the doll's house-lampshades were made of Cape Gooseberries with the central large seed removed and torch bulbs fitted inside connected to the doll's house main supply-a torch battery. I did not like dolls but made dozens of paper figures with all kinds of clothes for every time of the year. Some had foreign costumes based on photographs of Indian, Chinese or Eskimo children in My Magazine, edited by Arthur Mee. These were all painted with great detail. We collected many stamps and cigarette cards of Wild Flowers, and Kings and Queens. There was a card in every packet of cigarettes and duplicates we used to swap with other children. The Players cigarette cards were printed often on silk. The few books that we had we knew by heart and there was always excited anticipationof a large fat Annualat Christmas time. Amongst the toys that we did have were tops-spinning tops and humming tops which span to the musical sound when the twisted metal od in the centre was pressed down. We also had hoops-iron hoops for the boys bowled along by a metalstick with a hook at the end and wooden ones for the girls with wooden sticks.
Christmas was always an exciting and lovely time.It began a week or so before Christmas with the making of the Christmas Pudding in the huge brown pottery steen, which was the bread steen. When all the ingredients were in, the milk and eggs, flour and fruit, then the brandy was added. Then we all had to stir and wish. About two days before Christmas we went out into the woods to find a Christmas Tree and to gather holly. There were the many branches of the tree to be decorated with coloured candles and glittering balls and glass birds and tinsel. Small presents were hung on the branches and larger ones placed at its foot. Bowls of strong flour and water paste were made to stick the lops of the paper chains to hang across the ceiling.
Two Aunts and Two Uncles came on Christmas Eve to stay with us. Often others came as well on Boxing Day so that there was the added delight of sleeping on a mattress on the floor in order to give over our beds to the visitors!
Mother got up at 7.00 am on Christmas morning. Half awake we crept downstairs to watch her put the giant Turkey into the oven. It took about 7 hours to cook for it always weighed about 28lbs. After we had been to church at 8.00 am and home again for breakfast we helped to prepare 'the table for lunch.' This never took place before3 o'clock by which time it was nearly dark enough to have candles on the table. There were two large cadlesticks of silver and two smaller ones. We had to polish and polish the silver thistle condiment set which lived in a large leather case lined with royal blue satin. There were salt cellars and mustard pots and pepper pots all with cut glass bases, cut to imitate the fat bases of the thistleheads with silver tops representing the seed head of the thistle. Anne has these!
Father carved the turkey and the enormous pink ham boiled and covered in breadcrumbs. There was great consternation if the pudding was not as black as usual! Brussels Sprouts and Roasted Potatoes were always served with the meat. The Devonshire Cream, bought by my Uncle was eaten as well as brandy sauce with the pudding.. Graves superieure was usually taken with the first course, port after, and finally liqueurs-either Benedictine or Crème de Menthe. When all was over the presents were taken from the tree and distributed. We were even anxious to clear the table for Freddie and I dipped our fingers, on the sly, into the little drops of bright green Crème de Menthe and golden Benedictine when there was a little left in the bottom of the tiny liqueur glasses of Mother and Father.
We would put father's present's on the table beside him. But he never undid them, never, never looked at them or even undid them. Often we had spent a long while making something that we thought would please him. But receiving presents was something which he never showed any interest in. He preferred to give presents and gave us some very lovely ones over the years. Clutching our presents we went to have a rest in what was left of the afternoon and gathered at about 7 o'clock for tea and Christmas cake with cherries and the snowman on top. Usually we then played cards until, as small children, we were falling asleep as we played.
What a terrible orgy of eating. No wonder that I thought the first Christmas that RS and I spent together at Tallarn Green was the dreariest that I have ever known. Many church services and out to lunch at the churchwarden's where we were put in a room, the parlour, alone to eat it. It was not considered quite proper for the farmer churchwarden and his family to sit down with us! Years later a similar thing happened in Manafon. Mrs. Wilson asked us to have supper at the Ffinant. We sat at a huge table with her and while we ate the door of the dining room was lft open and through it we could see the rest of the family, two girls and four boys, sitting motionless round the walls of the kitchen which was next to the dining room-silent so that could listen to all that was said. That was for the same reason that it was not proper for working men to sit at the samre table as the Rector!
I went to school when I was seven and made a clay mouse on the first day there. Later when I could not add up, and still cannot, I was given an abacus with lovely coloured beads to learn how to count. Everyone at home thought it was a great disgrace to have it, but I thought it was beautiful with all its brightly coloured beads. I hated all my schooldays. I only remember every term looking through the new books we had to buy to see if there were any line illustrations which could be coloured.. I remembe best of all the paperback copy of Chaucer's Prologue which has been a joy ever since but then had very special paintable line drawings of knights and ladies and 'the squire embroidered was he as it were a mede, all full of freshe floures white and rede'-with great detail and brilliant manuscript colours I was able to make Duc de Berry manuscript paintings of the drawings.
One other happening I remember clearly and vividly was having to go to the Headmistresses's room to be told how evil I was, to have drawn in pencil, around the pattern of bunches of grapes on the white table cloth at lunch time. For this crime I got a disorder mark and when having told me this:' You would not have done it at home.' I truthfully replied Yes, I think I would, for all kinds of drawings are good. For this reply I got a second disorder mark-a second life sentence! O those marks. Carelessness marks for untidy work, deportment marks for not sitting up in class with a straight back, disorder marks for speaking on the stairs as you passed a friend or any other unplanned happening which was considered evil. Once on being told to write out a story we knew I wrote Peter Rabbit. This I had read dozens of times and knew by heart. Only to be given a black mark and a severe reprimand for having 'copied' it word for word from the book. How clearly one can remember being accused unjustly!
When it came to having to have colloquial French for examinations-Matriculation first, then Higher Certificate followed by Intermediate Arts I was sent to France.
Living with us during the war we had two young French soldiers Pierre and Henri Desruelle who were prisoners of war in this country -eventually to be returned to France to continue the fighting. Henri was killed by the Germans then. Their parents were always so grateful that we had been able to make them happy when they were prisoners of war so, of course, it was to Monsieur and Madame Desruelle that I went-to their farm outside Lille. They were still very poor and had suffered so much shortage of food and fat during the war that the young people were still eating bread and lard in order to get more fat in their food. Later I went to Monsieur and Madame Grand in Paris. He was a dealer in furs and went often to Russia. They had lots of money and a very large family and a large apartment in Paris. For having six children Madame had received a medal from the government for helping to build up the French population again after its depletion during the war. The whole family went to Poligny in the Jura for the summer, so I went too. In the tiny village there was a shop which sold fabric and sewing silk and cotton and wool. It was owned by three old sisters Mesdamoiselles Primote, cousins of Madame Grand. There was, as you can imagine, very little business going on and we all sat in chairs under the shop awning on the pavement so that we could greet every villager who passed by while we did our sewing and embroidery.
One day an uncle, M. L' Abbe from Besancon came and there was a great commotion. The best wines and special food were provided for him and for all of us. He was a large ponderous old man who obviously did very little but pray and drink and eat enormously! His cassock, I remember, only just managed to be fastened over his enormous middle and his hands were fat and white. As I recall he kept his clerical hat on all the time, even while seated for lunch.
An enormous meal ended with what I later found in Mrs. Beeton to be Souffle Fritters. They had to be prepared and eaten straight away, each person receiving their share one by one, while they were hot and crisp. Beginning as you can well imagine with M. L' Abbe. They were deliciously crisp. After receiving and blessing more or less everyone in the village as they called to see him, he made his way in a horse-drawn cart to the monastery in Besancon.
The Grand's house in the Rue du Theatre was exactly like all the others. A large grey stone house with wrought iron grilles at the lower windows. Just down the road was the convent. Two of the nuns were always trained to go out into the village to visit and look after tose villagers who were ill. Otherwise none of the nuns ever came out of the convent and were never seen until they died. When they died they were put in their open coffins in the shrine on the left of the main convent door. The French windows were opened wide behind the wrought iron grille where the coffin lay. The villagers all came, one by one, to offer a prayer to the good Lord that the nun might rest in peace. The ones I saw all had very beautiful faces, with very lovely bone structure. But everyone looks rather lovely when they are dead! After drawing and painting the skull of a young Frenchman, who was killed during the Franco-Prussian war, which I borrowed from the dentist in Welshpool I hoped that even I might make a lovely skeleton! But now I realise not everyone's bones are beautiful. The bones of the Frenchman's skull were finely drawn and sharply chiselled. Now I know not all bones are like that.. I have a drawing of my father when he died. He was always quite good looking with an arched nose and very, very blue eyes, but not nearly as beautiful as when the ivory skin was taughtly drawn over the fine bones. When my mother died, who was not so beautiful in life, with with black hair and brown eyes there was revealed a good bone structure and a close resemblance to her sister Aunt Catherine who in life was very gay and had blue eyes and curly light brown hair. I suppose it was a Chevalier family likeness revealing itself when the body was freed from its self-built lifetime character!
One day at Poligny I went out into the vineyards to paint and made one especially good one which later won for me the William Rothenstein prize. The painting finished, I wandered off into the surrounding fields and found a very small, very old church with groups of sculptured figures above the curved Romanesque arch of the doorway. As I opened the door a cloud of dust rose from the floor and danced off across the slanting beams of sunlight that I had let in. Everything in the church was thickly covered in a gray dust-floor, pews, pulpit and altar. I learned later that it was never dusted as it was holy dust and must not be disturbed.
The garden behind the Grand's house rose from a great square stone-flagged courtyard straight up the hillside. It was terraced to grow flowers and shrubs just as all the hillsides were terraced to grow vines.
The courtyard was covered overhead for half its length by wooden lattice over which grew a vine with the bunches of grapes hanging down from the lattice-work ceiling. It was a very pleasant and easy way of learning French.
In the afternoons the children of the Grands, Therese, Collette, Isabelle and I went to play a kind of pelota ball game on the small flat grassy square of the village where the women were hanging out their newly washed curtains and tablecloths. I made several paintings of these and of the women working in the vines. We were always given a piece of dry French bread and a lump of dark plain chocolate-in the heat of summer! I have always hated plain chocolate since then. We would return with delight to an evening meal ending with peaches. Peaches always remind me of M. Desruelle. Years before this, when in Lille, he would fill our glasses right up to the brim saying ' It is not Sunday, so we do not have to have a collar at the top of the glass.'
Much later when he was an old man, he and his daughter Madeleine went to live in St.Malo. There, with many peaches to be had, he used to crack the stones and eat the kernels. These contain small quantities of Prussic Acid and he eventually died from the poison. It took the doctor a long while to discover how he had so much of the Acid in his body!
When Gwydion and I came home from Provence one time some years later we went to have lunch with Madeleine. A doorway in the high stone wall on the roadside led into a paved courtyard. This was No. 12 Rue du Rocher. Round the courtyard were archways and recesses with mimosa and roses growing everywhere. Under each archway was a group of men, some old just talking together, some young playing cards and in the half-light looking like Cezanne card players. We went up a wide stone staircase on one side of the courtyard to the apartment in which Madeleine lived. We had a delightful lunch with salad from her garden. Afterwards she took us to see the rest of the house, and eventually we climbed to the top storey where there were two doors facing one another. One room was empty, the other with only a skylight. The ceiling went up to the roof and bunches of dried herbs were hanging from the ceiling. After smelling the scents of all the lovely herbs and trying to identify them we found that the door had closed by itself. On trying to open it we found that it was locked against the open door of the empty room. I imagined us all being marooned up there under the tiles with no means of attracting the neighbours attention and no means of reaching the skylight in the high ceiling and a few bunches of herbs to eat! Strangely Gwydion had a small metal comb in his pocket and he gently put it through the small slit which was as far as the door would open. He managed to free the latch from the one on the other door and with what relief we hurried out and went down to the lovely garden behind the house.
Summer holidays were usually spent at St. Abbs in Berwickshire. The exciting journey began by catching the Flying Scotsman night express train. This steam train left London at about 10.00 at night to reach Reston near Coldington and St. Abbs early the next morning. How difficult it was to go to sleep in the bunk bed listening to the shouted names of the stations as we passed through. Always listening for the harsh voice which called Grantham, Grantham knowing it would be many hourse before we could get up and go to the dining car for breakfast with lots of buttered toast and individual very small glass jars of marmalade. At Reston we were met by Willie Cowe from The Haven, St. Abbs and it was not long before we had glimpses of the ea beyond Coldingham and then the bay and the great sweep of sand, golden sand below the Cowe's Hotel. She was a great character and known all over Scotland. She was a fishergirl from the tiny village of St. Abbs round the headland. There was one small street of fishermen's cottages and a harbour full of fishing boats. The women all wore black and white striped skirts and black shawls around their shoulders. But Miss Cowe stood apart from them by having put t sea in the greatest storms to save people from ships dashed onto the terrible rocky coast. She had worked with the men on the breeches buoy which was on the headland and saved many lives attaching the ropes to the sinking ships and winding any survivors back to the headland. When they had been able to get into the breeches-taking the survivors back home for warmth and brandy to restore them. She once road from John O'Groats to and's End on a tricycle to raise money for a new lifeboat.
We often went across the heather covered moor to Lammermoor and if one had the head for it crossed on a very narrow path which fell straight to the raging waves on either side of the castle where the Bride of Lammermoor was imprisoned. Such an evil place with such wonderfully beautiful moorland all around with curlews and lapwing calling and snipe drumming in the bogs.
To my shame I was about 15 when on the moors I first really saw a great white cumulus cloud and was able to recognise cumulus, cirrhus and alto cumulus clouds. It was many years before I became aware of the beauty of the sky, to my shame.
The journey home began by going to Galashiels. The house always seemed very dark but there was a bathroom window which looked across the Eildon Hills. The greenness, brilliant green of the hills after London was breathtaking. It was like a magic world with the lush garden below. While there we nearly always went to Abbotsford, Walter Scott's country wandering round the Abbey ruins and lingering by the sparkling river near his house. The greenness of it all made me catch my breath.
At 16 we moved to Leatherhead in Surrey. My father had bought a jeweller's shop which many years later caused L.G.Duke to write in his catalogue of paintings-Mildred Eldridge, daughter of a tradesman! Duke's aunt owned and lived on the island of Rhum which now belongs to the Scottish National Trust. He was an HMI (His majesty's inspector of schools) spending his holidays in the West of Scotland, so if he had not specially liked my work he would not have had anything to do with the daughter of a mere tradesman! He bought many paintings for himself and as an HMI many paintings to go to various London schools.
When we went Leatherhead in 1925 it was still as small village surrounded by fields on all ssides. The woods were full of primroses and bluebells and on the banks grew wild thyme and dog violets. Sometimes in midsummer when it was too hot to sleep Freddie and I went into the fields to see the moonlight glimmering on the river Mole, the moon gradually setting behind the huge beech, chestnut and willow trees just as Samuel Palmer watched the sun rise and the moon setting when he worked in Kent.
At Wimbledon High School only when one reached the Sixth Form was it permitted to see the Library. The first books I borrowed were the rest of Caer and one by one the complete works of Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Tennyson, for we had only studied selected poems from these. I also remember borrowing Michael Fairless The Road Mender.. What joy it was to leave school where I learned little but made a few good pots. The one with the turquoise glaze outside and the broken gray within being the best of them.
Travel in the last terms at school and then to Wimbledon School of Art was by superb steam trains. The carriages had wide deep seats which seated only four people on each side. Very few people travelled in them so it was possible nearly ale
Ways to have an empty compartment all to oneself. Under the seats ran hot water pipes-what delight to sink into the warm soft seats after a day being frozen atschool where it was always cold. No heating of any kind in a large school at that time!
At Wimbledon School f Art all changed. For the first time I was doing something in which I was really interested. Drawing and printing and painting-a period of continual work.; all day with a break at lunch to eat a bread roll and a sixpenny tin of sardines and then an evening class until 9.00 pm. Experimenting and trying to improve in every way to be able to draw well and paint all the things I wished to tackle. Experiments with oil, watercolour, tempura panels and sculpture. The staff were uninspiring but urging work, work..and then a train journey home and working at weekends in the fields and woods doing landscapes and plant studies. At last working at something I liked and which would perhaps make it possible to go to the Royal College of Art. A free studentship in 1931 took me to the RCA which in those days was attached to the Victoria and Albert Museum. There were huge doors from the V&A into the College which were kept securely locked but as there was always one of the museum keepers on duty on the other side of the doors, special signs and knocks could be made so that after signing on at the RCA entrance desk it was possible to escape into the V&A and make drawings of the splendid treasures in the museum or experimental drawings of one's own which would probably have received severe criticism from the RCA staff. From there sallies could be made ty the Science Museum across Exhibition Road or to the Natural History Museum to make studies of animals, plants and fungus. Now and again a Life Class had to be attended all day as Rothenstein and the various professors had a way of quietly coming into the room and offering a bit of advice and checking on who was present.
Gilbert Spencer, Eric avilious, Edward Bawden, Sorel and Mahoney were some of the ones holding professorships in the School of Painting at that time but as they all had studios they were very rarely seen. I also worked in the Indian Museum drawing the many masks and sculptures and used the V&A library. The Diploma Examination was held in the central glass roofed hall of, I believe, the War Museum where there were two good paintings by Henry Lamb and Stanley Spencer-both of Macedonia in the war. The Henry lamb, with pink cyclamen and other flowers in the stone filled ground of Macedonia. The Spencer was his ?Travoys arriving?. It was at this time that Henry Lamb was thought to be going to develop into a fine painter but as it turned out it was Stanley who took that position.
As the Diploma Examination was held in June the temperature under the glass roof rose to suffocation point and the oil paint slipped down the palette. Each student worked in a small separate compartment built of Essex board about 10' x 12' and a painting had to be done on a given subject, during the fortnight that the examination lasted. Then gathering together the best drawings and paintings that had been done during the three year course it was possible to make a small exhibition in each cell which the examining board could assess.
In 1934 The Rome Scholarship competition was held-the subject Music-I submitted the 5' x 5' Telling The Bees which later became the central part of the first panel in the mural in the Dining Hall of the Nurses Home at the Gobowen Orthopaedic Hospital. The scholarship was won by a very sedate, very stereotyped Italianate composition. It was considered that this person could gain more from a studentship at the British School in Rome. This was very lucky for me becaue they gave me instead the Travelling Scholarship worth £100 which in those days was a fortune. It was only later that I found out too how I should have hated working in Rome.
Just before Easter in 1934 I set out for Italy.
A good channel crossing and only one other person in the carriage from Calais to Paris. From Paris the trains were very crowded. Leaving at 8.00 pm. Everybody was going out of Paris for skiing and winter sports. After a great many stops, although it was supposed to be an express train we reached the frontier at Modane at about 6.00 am. Where our watches had to be put on one hour. There was still snow down on the railway as well as on the mountains, but bright sunshine as well. As we got away from the Alps through many dark tunnels the banks were covered with primroses and violets. There came to be occasional glimpses of the sea, of small Tuscan farms and gatherings of houses forming the few villages and everywhere, everywhere under the vividly blue sky in the glittering landscape the almond trees began to show a little pink blossom until outside Genoa they were in full flower. Terrrace upon terrace of small trees about 6 feet high and between them the grass unbelievably green in the brilliant sunshine under a sky so blue it was alarmingly breathtaking after all the darkness of the innunerable tunnels.
In Genoa there were crowds of people just meandering about in the arcades. In the main shopping places the streets are all arcaded like the Rue de Rivoli so when it rains everyone flocks there. The next morning at 10.00 am a train to Rome arriving at 7.00 pm A long interesting journey There had been heavy rain all the previous night and people were washing in the streams-clothes and themselves. Women were clothes and a small boy washing his legs-a woman washing too children-what do they do for water when it does not rain? The railway runs all along the coast with glimpses of the very blue Mediterranean.
Stayed at the British School in Rome, a ponderous building in the Via Giulia. Such enormous entrance doors about 20 feet high and so heavy that I could not open them. A huge white building with arcades and arches built around a central garden with mimosa in full flower and rather dingy palm trees. The principal hideous and apparently half witted but who improved on further acquaintance! There were seven of us in all , all students, for dinner in the great hall which was a very solemn affair-waiters, finger bowls, and splendid Italian food-especially the glazed chestnuts served with the meat.
It was Easter. Christmas at home was gay and splendid but lovelier even than Christmas was Easter. Beginning on Good Friday when we all went to church in the early morning-except father who later became a mason. We came home to breakfast with Hot Cross Buns, which are now eaten on any day at all. Easter Day was so very lovely with bowls of primroses everywhere-just ourselves-no visitors-and nests which we had made of willow strips or grass, filled with very small chocolate eggs covered in foil of many colours. Freddie and I always had a long narrow box of sugar birds eggs each with the name of the bird written beside it. They were so beautifully coloured an speckled to look like Robin, Chaffinch or Thrush eggs. Father loved beautiful things and I remember that one of the presents he gave me was an egg hand cooler of coloured stone-most delicately veined. These were used long ago by ladies who were doing embroidery or making lace to keep their hands cool. The egg is surrounded by fascinating traditions and long vanished folk customs. Associated with Easter particularly by children it could be a painted hen's egg one made from glass, china or chocolate. In Germany the Easter hare hid eggs in the garden for children to search for. In Eastern Europe-in Poland, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia the gg at Easter is looked on as a religious fertility symbol. The time of the year when all is being born again. Which reminds me in some way that in Eastern Europe Penduline Tits build a nest of wool and moss rather like a Long Taileed Tit but larger with an entrance hole in the side. The children watch over the nests all the early summer until the young birds have flown and then they collect them to make warm slippers for the winter time. Let us hope they are not like the nesting box on Gwydion's windowsill in Eglwys Fach which had a Pied Flycatcher nestingb in it. We could not make out how after a visit from Dr. Davies the room was full of fleas!. Gwydion had a bad throat infection-we discovered the bird box was full of fleas and the doctor had opened the window. I wonder if he noticed them. Let us hope he was concentrating on throats. I rather thought that bird fleas kept to birds. Certainly cat fleas do not keep to cats.
So-In Rome it was Good Friday. No one seemed to know where there was a church where the Allegri Messiere would be sung so I have still only ever heard a recording of it. Butb the markets on Easter Sunday were full of flowers and fruit and symbols of Eastertide made of plaited palm leaves bleached gold and intricate. I sent a boxful of flowers home which all arrived completely dead-which mother later told me-she could see they had been lovely for they had such long stalks. Margery Kendon once sent me a box of wild flowers from the meadows of the Pyrenees which arrived as a boxful of hay. It was when she was staying at Lescun where she slept under four down quilts and duvets, one white, one blue and white patterned with pale lilac and one pink. It was of course ling before any duvets were used here.
On Easter Sunday in the afternoon an enormous crod gathered on the Piazza in front of the Vatican. The Piazza encircled by a wide collonaded stone roofed arcade. Colza oil lamps hanging from the stone ceiling were lighted and everyone waited in complete silence waiting to see the Pope come out onto the balcony of the palace after the ceremony of canonisation of Dom Bosco.. Italians in a crowd used to get terribly annoyed with one another and became so excited that they had to be parted from one another on the verge of a fight. While we were waiting the fountains began to play. The priests and pilgrims began to come out of the church and the Pope carried on the papal chair appeared on the balcony and raised his hand to bless the people. Instead of any noise or cheering everyone waved their handkerchief and lastly clapped frenziedly-that was the only sound that had been made during the whole afternoon.
Every day in Rome was spent discovering all the paintings and sculptures which one only knew as reproductions in a book. Now and again there was a small church crammed between the other buildings in which going into the complete darkness after the brilliant sunshine outside one found a splendid old tryptich or other small painting of great beauty. Could not help thinking where in London or the rest of Britain could one go into a small church and find a glorious painting as one often did in Italy
Rome I did not like not being interested in old buildings. I left Rome after a while and went to Florence where I first stayed in a convent suggested by the almoner at the British School John Strachey was staying on Capri and I promised to go and see him. Mrs. Lindsay who was with him now that he was nearly blind took me to explore the whole island. A rough crossing had ended on the shore with all the fishing boats with their coloured and patched sails. A few trattoria and the odd fisherman's small house. There was no road up to the village which was reached by climbing up narrow streets and steps just wide enough for a donkey-so no wheeled traffic except the carriage which could only use the winding road to the top of a very steep hillside but could not enter the narrow streets of Capri itself. Some of the lovely small houses had walls that were leaning perilously and there were very beautiful arches built across the narrow streets from one building to another for support. All the houses and archways were whitewashed with many flowers on the wrought iron balconies. Many sandy bays between craggy grey stone cliffs, the water in the bays so clear and so greenly blue on the white sand that bathing was shared with myriads of small coloured fishes swimming all around. There are flowers everywhere-anemones of all colours, orange blossom, arum lilies growing everywhere under the trees and freesias. Everywhere too along the sides of the paths many kinds of olearia growing wild some with large white daisy flowers some with small. The olearia with the very small daisy flowers is known over here as Olearia Scillonensis. It likes a little shelter though on Capri it grows on the open cliff top with orchis around its feet. When Mrs. Lindsay was invited out to lunch Strachey and I decided to go on a spree to Anacapri. The only transport was one of the carozzi-carriages large enough for two in the open carozza and the driver on the box in front. The horses were all decorated most gaily. Some had feathers and white plumes together with three pheasant feathers standing up on their heads. Large straw hats decorated with flowers kept the viciously strong sun from their eyes and were tied on with wide brightly coloured ribbons.. We chose one with three pheasants feathers, a pale yellow bow on its straw hat and a spray of wisteria under each ear. In this grand style we drove up to Anacapri-hairpin bends all the way and went to the Eden Paradiso hotel where Strachey had made an appointment with the manageress to teach him how to peel oranges so that they were cut into a rose on the top-so much better when mandarins are used.
Oranges are brought to the table , three or four on a stem, with the leaves and it takes quite a lot of courage to pull one off and spoil the stem. We went after to Francis Brett Young's house-Strachey had translated one of his books into Braille years ago and wanted to see him. A lovely villa with a wonderful view over the sea towards Naples and away up to the olive terraces inland-their tapestry curtain as they called it. Strachey left for Venice and I explored other bays. The water so clear and green that the sun makes rainbows on the white stones under the water. The water is very salt too. All the small pools among the rocks are dried up by the sun and a circle of white salt crystals left. Got up as usual at 6.00 am the next day, the love;iest and coolest time, and went right to the top of Mount Solario and sat on a carpet of lovely wild pink orchids. Vesuvius on the left Capri down below, the Sorrento peninsula away beyond and miles and miles of brilliant shining sea. I went then to Amalfi and Sorrento and back again to Florence My mind was still full of Capri, of the olearia lined paths which led to Axel Munthe's house with gates that were kept locked to protect him from the many people that flocked to Capri. He had become so famous with his cures for ailments, all of which according to him were based on colitis. On past the house to the promontory at the end of the island from the crags of which Barbarossa ?Tiberius used to push enemies and unwanted guests down the sheer drop from the cliffs into the sea.
Amalfi was a strange mixture of extreme poverty and extreme riches. Down in the main square in front of the Duomo the long line of shallow steps was filled with stalls of flowers, brilliantly coloured fruits and vegetables brought in from the surrounding fields. The flowers and vegetables made mounds of vivid colours against the grey stone of the Duomo and the houses. The fishermen had fishes for sale which were strange and curious to me who had never seen them before-they were almost as wonderfully coloured as the flowers and vegetables.
Later Strachey and I went up behind the town to Ravello. He knew Lord Grimthorpe so we went to see the original figure of the young boy in the middle of the large pool in the villa garden. Strachey had a replica of the seated boy in his charming garden at The Little House in Leatherhead. At the Villa Cimbrone the pool and its surrounding flower garden with the dark cypress avenues looked away down below to the sea so blue and so calm, with all the poverty of the town hidden away.
I went back to Florence to explore further. The great galleries of paintings were marvellous and it felt so strange to be face to face with real Botticelli paintings and in those days the galleries were almost completely empty. Very few visitors ever penetrated them. So I could enjoy all the Michaelangelo paintings and sculptures and the Donatellos on my own. I thought it mot disorientating to enter the Uffizi gallery on one side of the river and on coming out to find oneself on the other side. The Ponte Vecchio was very lovely in those days too over the dingy yellow waters of the Arno.On both sides of the bridge were small jewellers shops full of treasures. Not for nothing was it called the bridge of jewellers. I thought Florence had far more charm than Rome-not half the noise and traffic, lovely gardens and great stone palaces crammed with wonderful collections of paintings and sculptures.
I had a letter of introduction to Aubrey Waterfield and his wife Lina and after exploring for a while more I wrote to him and when he saw that I was staying in the convent in Florence immediately sent a car to fetch me to stay at Poggio Gherardo for he detested nuns. I went to Poggio Gherardo with a sheaf of drawings and sketches for Aubrey Waterfield to see. He was fortunately delighted with my work as it seemed I used the same blue and gray tones that he did.81