Josephine Tey Read online

  While Colin was working hard expanding the fruit shop, Josephine’s family was hit by fresh tragedy. Only five months after Colin’s father died, on 13th November 1900, Josephine’s niece, Mary’s daughter Elizabeth Ellis Jeans, died aged two. She was buried alongside her sister Josephine, and a sad gravestone in Tomnahurich cemetery records the resting place of Bessie’s two little cousins. It must have been very hard for the sisters Josephine and Mary, who had gone through their pregnancies together. Both Mary’s daughters had died, while Josephine’s had lived. Mary must have felt the unfairness and the loss, while Josephine must have felt fear for her own children. As an adult, Elizabeth MacKintosh was to say that life was for living, as death could come at any time. Many years later, a schoolfellow remembered her saying, ‘If there’s anything you want to do, do it now. We shall all be in little boxes soon enough’.9 The phrase about ‘little boxes’ was often repeated, and this fear of time running out was almost an obsession. Elizabeth was to live through two World Wars and to suffer her own share of bereavement as she grew older, but her outlook was also shaped by her early childhood and by her mother’s experiences.

  By 1904 Josephine was pregnant for the third time. She, Colin, and their two daughters Bessie and Jean had moved house, again staying in the same area, but renting something bigger. They were now on Greenhill Terrace, close to Norwood Villa where they had lived when they first married. It’s an address that, thanks to development, no longer exists, but valuation rolls show that the houses here had around five rooms, while newspaper adverts of the time list houses for sale on the street as having ‘coalyard and stabling’. In addition to paying the rent on his own house, Colin was still the named tenant at his old family home at 67 Castle Street, where his mother Elizabeth, widowed and now almost seventy, and his sister Mary and her illegitimate son Donald, were living. Mary was now working as a cook, and Donald had also found work in service, as a footman.10 It is a measure of Colin’s success and upward social mobility that while his sister and nephew were working in service, Colin was moving into an area where his neighbours were hiring servants of their own, as Colin was eventually to do. When the MacKintosh’s third daughter, Mary Henrietta, was born, she was born into a family that was settled and doing well.

  Mary Henrietta was born on 21st June 1904. She was to be the MacKintosh’s last child. Etta, as she was soon known, was almost eight years younger than Bessie. Bessie had started school a couple of years before, and Jean was getting ready to start. The two older girls called their new baby sister ‘The Kid’, a nickname that stuck, half-joking, half-teasing, until Etta was an adult.11 Over time, Etta was to become the sister Bessie was closest to, though Etta’s outlook on life and her view of her place in the world was slightly different to her elder sister’s. Bessie had been growing up in a large extended family, with many cousins, and had memories of the houses they had previously lived in. Etta, by contrast, knew only one house, and was brought up with very little contact with her family on the MacKintosh side.

  Relations between Colin and his brothers had deteriorated until they could no longer work side by side in the shop. Colin’s mother was elderly, and his sister’s and nephew’s jobs in service were not what he wanted for his own children. Many years later, Etta told her own son that neither she, her sisters, nor her mother Josephine had contact with her father’s family. Etta told her son that her MacKintosh grandparents were from Applecross, and gave the impression that they had never lived in Inverness. When Colin went to visit his mother, climbing the stairs to her flat up the street from his shop and conversing in Gaelic, he went alone.

  In pre-war society, class was a constant preoccupation, and Inverness, a very small town, was particularly divided. The awareness of class is constant in Elizabeth MacKintosh’s writing, from her bitter early short story, ‘His Own Country’, where people in a small town cannot let go of the idea that ‘they knew his father’, therefore can judge the man whatever his achievements, to the uncharacteristic lapse of confidence Sara shows in The Expensive Halo when she first visits the races in the company of her aristocratic boyfriend. In Josephine Tey’s novels social standing is the key to The Franchise Affair, on view everywhere in the village of Salcott St Mary in To Love and Be Wise, and part of the world that Brat Farrar needs to learn. In classic crime, with its country house settings, its butlers and the introduction of criminal low lifes, class and social standing are part of the plot. The entire genre of crime writing has a focus on class – on the disruption of the order of things, and then its reordering with the solution to the crimes. ‘Josephine Tey’ had such varied experiences of the class system in her life that it is perhaps no surprise that she ended up as a crime writer. By the time she started school she had already experienced her family’s social mobility, and a changing place in the class system was to be one of the themes of her life, and one of the reasons that she ended up living different ‘lives’, creating this image of her as a mystery.

  The MacKintoshes choice of school for their daughters was a clear indication of what they hoped they could achieve. The Inverness Royal Academy was a fee-paying school with an excellent reputation. The Academy was very close to their home in Crown, but it was not the only school nearby: there was also the High School, which was free, and which was considered more of a technical school, for children who were not so academic. Colin and Josephine had passed their love and respect for learning on to their daughters, and were determined that they would continue to better themselves. Elizabeth’s attendance at the Academy is one of the facts about her that is well known – and her relationship with the school has been given added importance because one of the few supposed authoritative biographical sketches of her was written by one of her schoolfellows, Mairi MacDonald. This article, entitled ‘The Enigma of Gordon Daviot’, was first published in the Scots Magazine not long after Elizabeth’s death, and then anthologized in a collection of Mairi’s work. Because there is so little written information about Elizabeth’s life, the sources that are available tend to assume greater importance than they might actually deserve, and Mairi’s article, with its assertions that Elizabeth was a loner, who didn’t like school and didn’t mix with the community, is quoted in almost every biographical source about Elizabeth, particularly on the internet. However, although Mairi did know Elizabeth, she was actually two years below Jean at school – that is, she was several years younger than Elizabeth. Much of Mairi’s article is actually based on secondary sources rather than personal knowledge, and Mairi’s assessment of ‘Gordon Daviot’ can’t be understood without an awareness of the class system of Inverness and where Mairi believed she and Elizabeth stood in that system.

  The Inverness Royal Academy, known locally as the IRA, still exists, though it’s rather different now. In Elizabeth’s day it was a prestigious private school situated in a grand building, noted for its strong academic reputation and stellar cast of Old Boys and Girls, tracing back its origins to 1792 (if not earlier). In the early twentieth century, when Elizabeth was a pupil, it took primary and secondary pupils, both boys and girls. The Education Acts that had made schooling compulsory had not made it entirely free. Although the IRA was still a fee-paying establishment, a crisis in its funding meant that in 1908 it was taken over by the burgh school board, the start of the process which was to see it become free to everyone, as it is today. Although the IRA was in the process of becoming a local authority school, it was still only taking the best students, the ones who were preparing for university or further study and doing exams. Elizabeth’s schoolmates would have been the children of doctors or teachers and of the leading families of the town, and there wouldn’t necessarily have been many other shopkeeper’s children there. Contemporary pictures of younger pupils of the era show serious-looking infants, unused to being photographed, the girls with white, full-length pinafores (even some very old-fashioned pinafores with sleeves) over their clothes, while little boys are in shorts, suit jackets and smart white shirt collars. The school
building itself, as it was in Elizabeth’s day, still exists. A large, impressive building in its own grounds, it is a focal point of the area. The IRA remained there until 1977, and it was for many years after that the Midmills campus of Inverness College. During Elizabeth’s time the school had a roll of around 350 pupils.

  Given the relatively recent change from private to burgh school, there was likely separation between the pupils whose richer parents had attended the Academy, and those, like Bessie, whose parents had only been able to benefit from schooling up to the age of fourteen. Bessie, by the time she started school, would already have been steeped in her own family history, well aware of the strength of Jane Ellis, her grandmother and a former servant, and, of course, loving and respecting her hard-working parents. In contrast, fellow pupils like Mairi MacDonald had families that had been well established in the area for generations, who were the town’s doctors and lawyers and elected officials – not people who had lived in the Maggot in recent memory. Colin and Josephine may have been able to send their daughters to a ‘better’ school, but they could not make Elizabeth feel part of it. As Mairi MacDonald makes clear in her writing, many Invernessians saw the class divisions in their town as an excellent and necessary way of ordering society, which should not be disturbed by social mobility. Any discord between Bessie and her contemporaries would be a fault Mairi would attribute to Bessie herself, as an individual, not to the society she lived in, because she was completely happy with the way society was organized, and saw no reason to change it. Mairi was readier to see Bessie as someone ‘different’ than to acknowledge that there could be people of different backgrounds within her social group. ‘Inverness’, wrote Mairi,

  was a very Highland, very residential town – two facts of which its inhabitants were highly conscious. Socially, it acknowledged four distinct strata. There were the “county” families, usually of long Highland pedigree; the professionals – doctors, lawyers, accountants and the like, and if any of those could claim descent from good Highland family, they mixed freely with the “county”; next came the trades folk and shopkeepers, many of whom were substantially well-to-do, but thought to be lacking in the social graces and culture of the other classes; and lastly, the “working class” and labourers. Social climbing was considered an ignorant vanity.12

  Even Mairi’s attitude to Gaelic was significantly different to the MacKintosh family: whereas Colin saw it as a backward language that he had to drop in order to get on in life, Mairi’s father was a major figure in the Gaelic Society of Inverness and an organizer of the Mod. For Mairi, Gaelic was a romantic, ancient language of poetry which was recited in concert halls; for Bessie it was the living language her relatives spoke in the poor part of town. Mairi’s romanticizing of Gaelic reflected the views of those around her, who wanted the positive cultural aspects of Celtic culture, with none of the perceived negative qualities. Alexander MacEwen, later a provost of Inverness and a significant figure in Bessie’s later writing life, wrote a polemic on Gaelic, Highland and Scottish culture entitled The Thistle and the Rose, where he expounded at length on the qualities of Gaelic and the Gaels, but simultaneously criticized ‘west coast’ characteristics: ‘Is there something in the climate and soil of the West which envelops the inhabitants with a miasma of lethargy and timelessness?’13 These were the attitudes that Colin was working hard to overcome; this was why he chose to raise his daughters separately from their MacKintosh grandmother and cousins.

  Whatever attitudes Colin was fighting against, and whatever decisions he and Josephine made about child-rearing, Bessie herself was relatively unaware of them in her early childhood. She remembered a happy, loving upbringing, and unposed family snapshots show the three MacKintosh girls with their mother in sunlit gardens, playing on swings, in front of deckchairs and lounging outside on the grass, wearing Victorian straw boater hats and clothes as relaxed as the demure long-skirted fashions would allow. These are the photographic memories of childhood summer holidays, and Bessie was later to commemorate these happy times in her first pen-name. The surname she first chose to write under, ‘Daviot’, was picked in remembrance of happy childhood holidays spent at Daviot, just outside Inverness, where the MacKintoshes had family friends. Bessie’s childhood was happy, and her writing is peopled with intelligent, happy children in loving families. Although remembered for her portrayal of independent, single, childless women (like Miss Pym), they are never women with a ‘secret sorrow’. They may not be women who have found love or had children, but this is presented as a choice, not something they were forced into or chose to avoid because of demons in their own upbringing. They were never women with unhappy childhoods.

  Colin and Josephine took their three daughters to professional photographers for posed family group shots, and the pictures show very proud parents with beautifully turned-out children: Bessie’s shy smile is mirrored by her younger sisters’, and her long hair, not yet as dark as in later photos, is brushed out and tied with a large bow. Jean’s hair is shorter, and she, like Bessie, has the strong features of her mother’s family, while Etta, blonde and pretty, holds a large doll. The three of them wear white, frilly dresses festooned with lace.

  Many of Bessie’s aunts and uncles had several children, giving her many cousins, but they did not join her as she went up the primary school at the IRA. Bessie remained closer to her mother’s side of the family, and Josephine kept in touch not only with her own siblings but also with Horne cousins in Aberdeenshire.14

  Even these family ties were weakening, though: in 1907, when Bessie was eleven and coming to the end of her primary schooling, her maternal grandfather, Josephine’s father Peter Horne, died. Like Colin’s father, he was in his seventies and had worked in a manual profession, moving across Scotland for work. A studio photograph of Peter and his wife Jane shows a more formally dressed man than John MacKintosh had been: a stern-looking figure with a long white beard, a very much neater beard than the wild MacKintosh look, teamed with hair neatly brushed back from the forehead and wearing a dark jacket, trousers and waistcoat.15 Peter Horne’s wife, Bessie’s grandmother Jane Ellis, stands behind her husband, with her hand supportively on his shoulder. While Peter looks directly at the camera, every inch the upright religious man of strong moral principles, Jane, in her turban-style hat, scarf and gloved hands, looks more reflective. When she was widowed, Jane was also in her seventies, but she continued to live independently in their house at 53 Crown Street, supported by her family.

  Peter and Jane’s six children, including Josephine, were now established in work and marriage. Their professions give a glimpse of a world that has now died: alongside Peter jnr, the Printer Compositor, eldest son George was a Coach Painter, while younger son Alexander started out as a Gunsmith’s Messenger Boy.16 When Peter Horne died, it seemed to end not only a link to Bessie’s wider family, but a link to the past. The world he had known was going to be swept away by the events of the twentieth century, and Josephine, Colin and their three daughters were now looking firmly towards the future. The move to Inverness had been a good one for both the Horne and MacKintosh families: the town was thriving, with the wide new streets and tall buildings representing prosperity and possibilities, and Colin and Josephine were taking full advantage of what was open to them. Bessie MacKintosh was to have a very different life to her mother and father, and a vastly different life to that of her grandparents.

  Chapter Three

  Secondary Schooldays, up until 1914

  In 1909, Bessie MacKintosh was thirteen years old, and going into the secondary stage of her education. Another family photograph taken around this time shows a change from the early childhood photos.1 Bessie is taller, with the gangly look of a teenager. The strong features, especially the large nose, of her mother’s family seem almost too big for her face (as an adult, she broke her nose in an accident, which explains some of the difference in how she looks as a child). Standing close behind Josephine in the photo, the similarity between mother and d
aughter is very strong, especially around the eyes. Bessie the teenager, who hated getting her photo taken, has rather sad-looking eyes, while Josephine, very smartly dressed in a sailor-style blouse with a bouffant hairdo, is clearly looking at the photographer with pride in her little family. At some point in her schooling, Bessie, or Beth, as she started to be called, discovered that she needed to wear glasses because she was short-sighted. She never wore the glasses for any posed photo, and they were a source of some resentment as they nearly spoilt her career choice.

  On the other side of the photo, Jean too has something of a teenage, sulky look, and stands almost apart from her family. She comes across as a sometimes difficult middle child who didn’t always fit in with her two sisters or her parents and went her own way, though, unlike Bessie, there is never any hint of sadness about her expression; she, like Etta, always shines with confidence. Etta is still very much ‘The Kid’, standing in front of her father’s knee, with Colin’s arm around her. There is little left of the earnest young man in Colin; he is very much a successful businessman, with his shirt and tie, waistcoat and chain.