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Great-aunts

My great-aunt Maud was a maiden lady. Young men were in short supply when she grew up, unconscionable numbers of them having been killed in the First World War. My grandmother hinted indeed that there had once been a curate vaguely in the offing; if so, nothing came of it and he offed rather than offered. I have a feeling that Maud was earmarked by her mother as the daughter who would stay at home and care for her parents, and to this end was over-protected and discouraged from any adult autonomy.

Maud – or Madeline Maud Bellamy Higham, to give her her full name – went up to Cambridge in 1916, to Newnham, where she wanted to read English. This, however, was not permitted. Her mother feared she would be exposed to much unsuitable smut and nastiness in English literature; Maud was thus steered into reading History instead. In History, after all, decent veils could be drawn: if a Pope had illegitimate children they were at least always politely referred to as nieces and nephews. After coming down from Cambridge, she dutifully returned home. And after her mother’s death she continued to keep house for her clergyman father. I am sure she arranged flowers in the church, presided over parish sewing groups and did whatever else was expected of a country vicar’s unmarried daughter in the 1920s and ’30s.

As the bird flies back through time this is not so very long ago. Yet the habits and assumptions of Maud’s restricted youth now seem as alien to us as if they belonged to a far more distant past. When she left university it was without a degree, since women were not awarded the title of a degree at Cambridge until 1921. However, degree or no degree, Maud became a teacher in the small market town where her father had his parish. One might well imagine her teaching her younger charges to recite by heart the multiplication tables, making them memorize the dates of the Kings and Queens of England, instilling Christian principles and telling them Bible sto

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My great-aunt Maud was a maiden lady. Young men were in short supply when she grew up, unconscionable numbers of them having been killed in the First World War. My grandmother hinted indeed that there had once been a curate vaguely in the offing; if so, nothing came of it and he offed rather than offered. I have a feeling that Maud was earmarked by her mother as the daughter who would stay at home and care for her parents, and to this end was over-protected and discouraged from any adult autonomy.

Maud – or Madeline Maud Bellamy Higham, to give her her full name – went up to Cambridge in 1916, to Newnham, where she wanted to read English. This, however, was not permitted. Her mother feared she would be exposed to much unsuitable smut and nastiness in English literature; Maud was thus steered into reading History instead. In History, after all, decent veils could be drawn: if a Pope had illegitimate children they were at least always politely referred to as nieces and nephews. After coming down from Cambridge, she dutifully returned home. And after her mother’s death she continued to keep house for her clergyman father. I am sure she arranged flowers in the church, presided over parish sewing groups and did whatever else was expected of a country vicar’s unmarried daughter in the 1920s and ’30s. As the bird flies back through time this is not so very long ago. Yet the habits and assumptions of Maud’s restricted youth now seem as alien to us as if they belonged to a far more distant past. When she left university it was without a degree, since women were not awarded the title of a degree at Cambridge until 1921. However, degree or no degree, Maud became a teacher in the small market town where her father had his parish. One might well imagine her teaching her younger charges to recite by heart the multiplication tables, making them memorize the dates of the Kings and Queens of England, instilling Christian principles and telling them Bible stories. Perhaps she even read to her class from Mary Entwhistle’s Children of Other Lands, published by Oxford University Press in 1923 as part of a series entitled Friends of All the World and imbued with an artless colonial ethos: it is likely, at any rate, that Maud knew of this book since my copy comes to me from my grandmother, her sister. Innocent this picture might seem but it is inaccurate, since it leaves out of account both Maud’s intelligence and her undoubted historical imagination. As well as teaching and presiding over the domestic arrangements at the vicarage, Maud wrote several books. Some now seem so dated as to be positively quaint, but among them is a little gem, a book for children called Three Roman Pennies (1931). Mogs, one of the children in it, tells her brother, ‘Sometimes I get rather worried as to where magic ends and ordinary times begin’; as Catherine Firth points out in her foreword, ‘Substitute for magic a grown-up equivalent, and Mogs was voicing the experience of every historian possessed of imagination, and of every child to whom has been offered in living fashion the story of the past.’ Three Roman Pennies tells of three children who learn about Roman Britain by going back in time, achieving this simply by wishing to do so while holding the coins of the title. They are on holiday in Wales with their uncle, an amateur archaeologist, and the first episode of time travel is accidental: Mogs is handling the Roman coins in the train and wishes out loud that they really could get back to Roman times. ‘And then the strangest thing happened. [She] suddenly felt all tingly, as you do when you come out of a very cold bath, and there was the weirdest singing, buzzing sound inside [her] ears’, whereupon through the window of the train she sees Roman soldiers marching along a straight white road with a centurion at their head. She drops the coins and returns to the present. Needless to say, the children repeat the experiment several times, leading them to identify the site of the (imaginary) lost Roman town of Caerbont which their uncle and his American archaeologist colleague then confirm by excavation. Time travel is a common device in children’s books. What makes Maud’s book striking is that she resists the temptation to romanticize. On each occasion the children go back in time to a slightly different epoch, from that of Nero and Domitian in the first century ad to the fourth and fifth centuries when Picts, Scots, Irish and Saxons are attacking Britain. Each time the children witness sights of violence and brutality or, at best, fear and uncertainty: a soldier being killed, slaves being mistreated, a gladiatorial fight. On their last visit they see the Romans sailing away when the legions are recalled and Britain is left to fend for itself. In effect Three Roman Pennies describes the gradual end of an epoch. Keeping things in the family, it was my grandmother, Winifred Townshend, a professional book illustrator, who illustrated Three Roman Pennies. The lurid colour frontispiece is not one of her better efforts, but the black-and-white drawings have a certain grace. My copy is a delight to handle, printed on good thick paper and bound with the kind of proper stitching that rarely appears these days. It bears a Sunday School presentation label in the front, which in view of Maud’s family background and religious inclinations seems entirely appropriate. My great-aunt Fon, Florence May Greir Higham, was not a maiden lady: on the contrary, she was married to Maud’s brother. Like Maud she studied history, but hers was the history of research rather than fiction. She belonged to the admirable tradition of amateurs who pursued their interests and amassed their knowledge without any academic position; widowed fairly early on, she proceeded to bring up her children and produce a series of books on subjects ranging from John Evelyn in the seventeenth century to Lord Shaftesbury, that passionate fighter against social injustice, in the nineteenth. Fon was not a novelist yet she was interested in the way people experience their lives. She wrote not only of individuals who shaped events but also of the manner in which people were shaped by the events around them. Like her sister-in-law, she was a religious woman, yet her own beliefs never blur her clear-sighted common sense. She writes with sensitivity, for example, of the ambiguities in the married Evelyn’s obsessive friendship with Margaret Blagge, ‘sharing her devotional life, counselling her to marriage, yet unconsciously weaning her from it, establishing a benevolent emotional dictatorship [that] gradually brought her to the edge of a nervous breakdown’. Similarly, of Lord Shaftesbury she remarks that when Peel became Prime Minister and Shaftesbury, then Lord Ashley, thought it his duty to write to him advocating a strictly Protestant attitude in religious matters, ‘The letter must have strengthened Peel in his conviction that as a colleague Ashley would be utterly impossible.’ It says a lot for Fon that although I share none of her religious beliefs, I nevertheless read her books with interest. Emily Cox, my father’s great-aunt, was an undergraduate at Newnham a generation before Maud Higham. She took Part I of the Mathematics Tripos but perhaps also had an interest in chemistry, for the heroine of her novel, Lois Heriot, is a chemistry student at – where else – Newnham. Courtship and Chemicals (1898) tells the story of a love affair that ends in marriage, with everyone, presumably, living happily ever after. Yet the love affair is not exactly conventional; if I had to trace the distant bloodlines of this book I’d be tempted to say ‘by Mrs Oliphant out of Mrs Radcliffe’, for although it has a self-confident, contemporary heroine there are tenuous gothic undertones in the apparently sinister Dr Urquhart. As regards these, I can’t do better than quote from a review published in the London Daily Chronicle in November 1898:
When Lois Heriot, of Newnham, became temporary nurse to Mrs Urquhart, we felt pretty certain that she had strolled into the den of a medical man who was engaged in slowly poisoning his rich and elderly wife. Lois herself was inclined to share our view, and Mrs Urquhart had no doubt whatever on the point. We did not like the look of that laboratory at all, nor of that abstracted manner of the doctor’s.
In fact, appearances are deceptive: the laboratory is entirely innocent, Mrs Urquhart paranoid and manipulative, Dr Urquhart much maligned, and Lois bound to fall in love with him. She is indeed an independent-minded young lady and, after Mrs Urquhart’s (natural) death, proposes to Dr Urquhart herself since it’s quite clear that from diffidence he is never going to get round to it. It is always hard to detect such nuances at more than a century’s distance but am I right in thinking that ‘Lois’ was perhaps a daringly modern name in the 1890s, befitting the kind of girl who could overturn conventions and propose marriage to a man? Whatever the case, Lois Heriot is an unusually ‘modern’ woman simply by virtue of the fact that she has gone to Cambridge to study a science. It is easy to forget what an uphill battle scientifically inclined girls once had to fight, and how long these battles lasted. Emily Cox’s descriptions of life at Newnham in the last decades of the nineteenth century are engaging. A certain formality prevails: fellow-undergraduates refer to one another as ‘Miss Heriot’, ‘Miss Bernaise’, ‘Miss Cotleigh’ etc. while the Vice-Principal is addressed as ‘Madam’. Tennis matches are played against Girton and the Sunday service is attended at King’s. Newnham undergraduates entertain each other with cocoa in the evening. Yet they are not without malice. Irritated by Lois’s perceived arrogance, her fellow-students set her up for humiliation by telling her that the geology lecturer liked one of her papers so much that he wants to publish it. When, in all innocence, Lois hands him this paper publicly, his response is cutting:
You have not, it appears, done me the honour to attend to my remarks during the last three lectures . . . You are labouring under a misconception, Miss Heriot, in imagining that because you find no corrections marked on the paper, the theory you advocate is without flaw. You are even more mistaken in believing that I have any wish that your immature views should be circulated in print.
Good novels show their characters developing rather than static. The fact that Lois takes her college peers’ cruel joke for truth indicates not only a touch of arrogance but also a certain naïveté, delicately paralleled in her faulty judgement and willingness to believe the worst about Dr Urquhart. What this novel gently depicts is her gradual growing up. I never knew Emily Cox for she died before I was born. She does not seem to have written any other fiction although she did contribute many pieces to the Fortnightly Review. I couldn’t help hoping that she’d found a Dr Urquhart of her own, for anyone with so lively a sense of her characters’ feelings might seem well equipped for marriage. In fact, Emily Cox never married. She lived in Malvern with her sisters until ripe old age. Her surviving great-nephew tells me that they had a large and erudite library, that they may well have been founder members of the Society of Authors and that amongst their close friends were W. S. Gilbert and Annie Besant. They were redoubtable ladies, these great-aunts. Their feelings and experiences, their hopes, anxieties, disappointments and pleasures are long effaced. But – being a great-aunt myself now – I like to remember them, to read their books and wonder about their lives.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 24 © Petrie Harbouri 2009


About the contributor

Petrie Harbouri settled in Greece immediately after leaving Newnham and is both a translator and the author of three novels, Graffiti, Our Lady of the Serpents and The Brothers Carburi.

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