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the four years of World War I, from 1914 to 1918, Londoners went cold and hungry and were bombed by German Zeppelins and that was the end of the cook and the maid. They left to take up war-work, which was better paid than domestic service. ‘I am not surprised,’ my mother said. ‘They lived in and had one afternoon a week off and were at our beck and call night or day.’ Frieda took over the cleaning and cooking and Edgar’s life continued easily enough. He was able to write of that time, in his Memories of an Edwardian, published in 1937, that ‘the war was the chief thing in one’s mind but it made little change in the routine life of a civilian past the age of active service. Bacon and eggs came to my breakfast: beef or mutton to my dinner with quiet punctuality; I did my day’s writing; I went down to Central London to play bridge at the Omega, or poker at the Savage.’ But presently he and his friend the poet Walter de la Mare were seconded to work for the Ministry of Food. Walter was put in charge of sugar rationing and Edgar produced The Win the War Cookery Book and a notable advertising poster, carrying a picture of a loaf of bread and the simple slogan, ‘Eat less bread’.
Many years later I tried to persuade the Smirnoff client to run the slogan, ‘Vodka makes you drunker quicker’, but they wouldn’t go with it. Too simple and to the point, though research had shown that people choose vodka rather than other spirits because it does indeed make them drunker quicker. Advertising must be seen to work, but not at the expense of the dignity of the client. Effectiveness and profit come a long way down a client’s list of requirements.
In his Memories Edgar speaks of Frieda thus. ‘I fell desperately in love with a lady in London…she had a greater natural charm and a better figure than any other woman I ever met. When we met she had just finished her training for the concert stage and had given one concert in Paris…Her father was Henry Holmes, the only English violist who ever enjoyed a European reputation, and her mother was a daughter of William Gale, a Royal Academician so old he must have been a contemporary of Benjamin West. As a child she had been used to go to tea at Holman Hunt’s.’ In fact Frieda and her sister Sylvia had as young girls sat as models for the painter, having the strong, rather noble features and the plentiful hair the Pre-Raphaelites so admired.
I was not to meet my grandmother Frieda until 1941, when after her mother’s death at the age of ninety-nine, she travelled from California to New Zealand, to join Margaret and ‘help with the children’. At her own request she was known to us all as Nona, that being Italian for grandmother. And this is what I shall call her from now on, because this is how I think of her.
She too suffered many changes of name: born Frieda Holmes, she became Frieda Jepson on marriage: Susan Jepson at her children’s request (Frieda being too Northern and too bleak for her, according to Edgar), and then she became Nona, because she couldn’t bear – as many women can’t – to be addressed as ‘Granny’ by her descendants. I think she was happiest as Frieda Holmes. My mother was Margaret Jepson, and then Birkinshaw, and that was that. She had a clearer personality than Nona or myself.
The run-up from Holmes to Jepson, for my poor grandmother, and no doubt for my great-grandmother, Mary Francis Holmes, was troubled, indeed traumatic. Edgar puts it like this in his Memories of an Edwardian. ‘We had been engaged but a little while when her father grew tired of England. It irked him to be at loggerheads, owing to his advanced views, which were almost those of Shelley, but rather more erotically practical, with the Council of the Royal College of Music, in those days a very stuffy and hypocritical band. It was said of them that they pooled the female students. He betook himself therefore to the city of Berkeley in California, and became its Musical Dictator, and when he died the inhabitants set up his statue in one of their public places.’
Which was all very well for Henry Holmes. Men have one name and stick to it. They go their own way, not having to absorb others on the way. Henry Holmes and Havelock Ellis, the sexologist, had seen fit to circulate a pamphlet extolling the virtues of Free Love and the dangers of standing in the way of the Life Force, and had included the Archbishop of Canterbury in their circulation list. Unfortunately, the Archbishop actually read it. The ensuing scandal was such that Henry had lost his post at the Royal College, and was obliged to flee to California, dragging poor Mary Francis and her teenage twins, Herriot and Hjalmar, with him. Nona, at the time a young concert pianist in Paris, a pupil of Clara Schumann and with one concert already under her belt, smeared by the scandal, was offered no more work. She married Edgar instead. He had to persuade her. ‘She had a theory that we were happier as we were,’ he writes, ‘but I did persuade her.’ I fear she was easily persuaded. She no longer had a home and what alternative was there? So from the age of six to the age of ninety-six she played the piano for between six and eight hours every day, but seldom to an audience.
This was the first of the three great blows that the Life Force, that male conceit, was to deal Nona during the course of her life. The second was when her daughter Faith was discovered in love and in bed with her Uncle Hjalmar. Free Love was for the paterfamilias, on the whole, not for the rest of the family. The ensuing mayhem was to drive Faith into a mental home, where she died some fifteen years later. Edgar visited her weekly, but Nona went into a denial so profound that she blotted Faith, poor Faith, out of her consciousness entirely. When she was in her eighties, and I showed her a photograph of her three extraordinarily beautiful children, taken in about 1912, she could still see only two of them. And the third blow from the Life Force was when Edgar made Lois pregnant, and Nona was back to where she began, living with her mother.
It was hard for the family to see what Edgar saw in Lois. She was conventional and without any noticeable grace or talent, at least compared to Nona. She was a great complainer, about everything from her marriage, to the weather, to the state of her electric blanket. But perhaps her very difference from Nona was a relief to Edgar. She could look after herself. She made demands. ‘We never quarrelled,’ wrote Edgar of Nona, in 1937, by which time he was married to Lois, and their daughter Jennifer was six, ‘I do not believe that she could quarrel…When we were young we were always hard up, and she had but a poor time of it. She never complained, not once. Sometimes she would look wistfully at a frock or a hat in a shop window, or at a hansom when she was tired, and that wistfulness I do not forget.’ Perhaps that passage was written as a subtle reproach to Lois, as a suggestion that she mend her ways, and do as well in this respect as his first wife. Writers are not above sending coded messages to their spouses in their books.
In my teenage I went to the same school as Jennifer, but she was my aunt and the same age as me, though in a junior year, so it seemed prudent for us to ignore each other’s presence, and no one ever knew we were related. We both still live within a mile of Adelaide Road, and these days enjoy a cordial relationship.
Nona’s home collapsed when she was eighteen, thanks to her father Henry’s behaviour, and so, homeless, she married Edgar. Her daughter Margaret’s home collapsed when she was eighteen, thanks to her father Edgar’s behaviour, and so, homeless, she married Frank. My mother collapsed her own house the month I turned eighteen, and left me homeless, and had there been a suitor around I’m sure I would have married him, but there wasn’t. I just hung around for a couple of years, rendered myself pregnant and thereby drew my mother back to me, and Jane did the same.
I made a real effort to break the run of compulsive behaviour – doing unto others as you have been done – and desist from rendering my own children homeless just at the wrong moment, but did not altogether succeed. Jane did it to hers by dying. The Life Force, once it’s set going, runs through families for generations, and causes terrible havoc. ‘I blame Arthur Machen,’ said Nona to me one day. ‘He cast too many spells.’ But I daresay Freud could have produced a more rational answer, and Arthur Machen frightened himself by his own necromancy, my mother said, and though he never lost his allegiance to the Old Gods of his native Wales, concluded that they had lost their powers in the new world, and there was no point in dabbling.
My mother was not sent to school. That is to