A Country House Christmas Read online




  A COUNTRY HOUSE CHRISTMAS

  A COUNTRY HOUSE CHRISTMAS

  Treasure on Earth

  Phyllis Elinor Sandeman

  Dream of childhood far away,

  Hear the old world calling;

  Try to paint the golden day

  Now that night is falling—

  Lone in echoing play-grounds seek

  For a vanished throng—

  Strive in halting words to speak

  Of a finished song.

  Foreword

  I AM DELIGHTED to have been asked to write a foreword to the new edition of my aunt’s charming book, Treasure on Earth. It is a fascinating account, beautifully illustrated by herself, of Christmas at Lyme in the first decade of this century, when she was a little girl.

  A generation later, in 1925 when I was just ten years old, I, too, spent an unforgettable Christmas at Lyme. Nine of us in the party of sixteen were children so the fun we had was indescribable! That year, as seemed to happen more frequently in those days, there was a white Christmas and I vividly remember the excitement and almost ecstatic delight of sliding on the frozen lake, tobogganing in the park and having snowball fights with my numerous cousins. In the late afternoon, as it became dark, we would return to the house, accompanied always by the boys’ fox terrier, Mike, eat a colossal and delicious school-room tea and then play ping-pong in the Long Gallery. Later we would play games such as Charades and Dumb Crambo in the Hall, which was warmed by an enormous fire and embellished by a magnificent Christmas tree. How we laughed and talked and argued! In those days there was no silent watching of a television screen.

  My family and I tremendously appreciate the welcome and kindness shown us when we visit Lyme. We are made to feel as if our roots are still firmly there and that we are in no way outsiders. The links with the past are still apparent and this was brought home to me at my husband’s funeral in June 1992. I was deeply touched when a lady came up to me at the tea-party, which had been so kindly arranged for us at Lyme after the service, and told me that she had been at my husband’s coming-of-age celebration at the house in 1936.

  He loved Lyme profoundly and that is borne out by the fact that, as a young man, he spent many hours taking photographs of the house and processing and enlarging them in his dark room. He was also very proud of the manual skills taught him as a boy by various employees with whom he greatly enjoyed working in the holidays. In this way he acquired a useful knowledge of carpentry, electrical work and plumbing. Although unable latterly, due to ill health, to visit his old home very often he was tremendously pleased to know it is being maintained and loved as it so richly deserves.

  I am certain that this book, about a way of life that will never again be experienced, will give pleasure to many people, both old and young. I hope also that it may, in some measure, illustrate the very deeply held affection felt for Lyme by so many members of different generations of the Legh family.

  Priscilla Newton, March 1993

  Since the foreword was written, Priscilla, Lady Newton has remarried and is now Mrs F C H Fryer.

  KEY to the real identies and place names

  For VYNE PARK read LYME

  For VAYNE OR VYNE read LEGH OR LYME

  For SIR THOMAS VAYNE read 2nd LORD NEWTON

  Treasure on Earth

  1906

  IN THE NORTHERN HALF OF ENGLAND, IN A GREAT HILLY park bordering on three counties, stands an Elizabethan mansion, high amongst its hills on a tableland of lawns and terraces, stone-built round a central courtyard with a long, almost unbroken frontage and three rows of windows looking down the valley. Great stone buttresses support it on one side where the ground falls steeply and at their feet lies an Italian garden. Behind the house the ground rises again to the uninhabited moors.

  One Christmas Eve, well before the First World War, a fine layer of snow already covered the slopes of the park and the sky was heavy with more to come. Not far from the house, in a wooded hollow beside a mill pool, deer were feeding from bundles of hay. Passing through this wooded valley, rising in serpentine twists and bends, a carriage drive wound its gradual ascent to the house, but cutting across it, running straight up the steep hillside, a narrow footpath gave a direct approach. Up this a little girl was climbing. She wore the black stockings and button-boots of her generation, an obviously home-made coat and skirt, and a hat secured by an elastic under her chin.

  It was late afternoon.

  Rabbits, looking almost black in the fading light, sped to their snowy burrows on either side of the path. A cock pheasant rocketed up almost from the child’s feet and made for the cover of the woods. Without pausing, she continued on her way. Excitement was mounting in her as she climbed. So short a time to wait now before the curtain rose on a drama of infinite delight—a gradual crescendo of bliss. To-night a large party of visitors was arriving, and from to-morrow for a whole fortnight one pleasure would succeed another.

  There might, if this weather held, be skating or better still tobogganing, for which the slopes of the park were so well suited—but the weather did not matter. How could it, with a house full of delightful visitors and such a house to play in? There would be the Christmas tree with all its presents; games in the drawing-room, music and dancing in the hall, private theatricals in the Long Gallery; hide-and-seek all over the house, with people chasing each other in delicious terror the whole length of the long corridors; wonderful meals in the dining-room, dinners as well as luncheons even for little girls, and all the time everybody, particularly the grown-ups, happy, good-humoured, joking and jolly, ready at any moment to romp and play the fool.

  This heavenly drama was just due to begin, and nothing short of some utterly remote possibility, severe illness or sudden death, could prevent it from happening—but quite rightly such a possibility never entered the child’s head.

  At the top of the slope, where the footpath emerging from behind a row of old lime trees joined the drive just in front of the forecourt, the house was folly revealed. Lights shone in some of the windows glowing warmly behind red blinds. The Tudor mullions had been replaced by sash windows in the time of Charles II and the only portion of the façade still in its original state was the gate-house in the centre. Two small guard houses with barred windows and surmounted by couching lions flanked the wide-open gates of the forecourt.

  The main approach to the house was a continuous ascent, the ground on the right hand falling away to wooded declivities, on the left rising in stretches of open country to a panorama of distant hills. Above the tree-tops in the middle distance rose a bare conical hill, its summit crowned by an ancient grey stone tower.

  Suddenly the air was filled with the clamour of an army of rooks. The whole western slope of the hill was black with these birds, which every evening assembled here and, remaining for a few moments silent, as if in prayer, then dispersed to their roosting places in the lime trees near the house.

  Still thinking of nothing but the coming delights, the child turned in at the forecourt gates. To her the house seemed to possess a living soul of its own and to be now waiting in a state of happiness that matched her own to take the arriving guests into its loving old heart.

  From a mediæval manor standing in a royal forest it had been enlarged to its present dimensions in the time of Elizabeth, but ever since its origin and the grant of land by Edward the Black Prince to Sir Piers Vayne it had known no other owners but his direct descendants.

  Each successive generation had left its impress on the place, adding to, altering and embellishing the original structure in lavish expenditure of material means and tender devotion, till it had become what it now was—a palace, but lived in and loved as a home.

&n
bsp; The big central doorway led straight into the cloistered courtyard round which the house was built. Opposite, across the courtyard, another door led out to the terrace and gardens. But the child was bound for the housekeeper’s room, which opened off the cloisters, a very pleasant place to visit before going upstairs and where a warm welcome was always assured. Now, bursting in as usual, she found her friend Mrs. Campbell in best black dress and lace cap seated in her chair by the fire. The curtains were drawn and the table laid for tea for at least a dozen people.

  Mrs. Campbell exclaimed at her appearance: “Good gracious, Miss Phyllis, you’ve never been out in all this cold in only that thin jacket! And where are your snow boots?”

  “Oh, there’s hardly any snow yet; it’s all right. I want to find Jim Bowden and ask him to make us something for the play. Have you seen him? He’s not down at the workshop—I’ve just come from there.”

  Clicking her tongue, the housekeeper wondered for the hundredth time why Lady Vayne, her mistress, did not bother more about the child’s clothes. Who would have thought that the parents of this poorly clad little figure were the owners of Vyne Park! But it was an age when the children of the upper classes were not as a rule much cosseted or even very well dressed, a strange whim or fancy obtaining amongst the richest and most privileged set of people in the civilised world. By this time many children of very rich parents without much tradition might be seen disporting themselves in Hyde Park and Hamilton Gardens arrayed like exotic birds in velvets and furs. Amongst them flitted the children of the English aristocracy, clothed, as if simplicity were not enough, often in shabby, outgrown garments, the discards of their elder brothers and sisters. In the adult world, too, extreme comfort mingled with austerity. Many, of whom Sir Thomas Vayne was one, took cold baths throughout the year; even in the rigorous climate of northern England short tweed jackets were worn out of doors in winter, boots lined with lambswool were unknown, fur coats were reserved for carriage wear and fur jackets for children were not approved of, for the cult of the child had not yet set in.

  Mrs. Campbell, however, thought differently, and Phyllis had to repeat her question before she received an answer.

  “Jim! He’ll be messing about on the stage in the Long Gallery I expect. Come and get warm, dear; you look half perished with cold.”

  “I thought they finished putting up the stage this morning.”

  “So they did according to Mr. Truelove, but Jim would be there when he’s wanted elsewhere. There’s a handle off the chest of drawers in the Oak Room where Mr. Blunt’s going, and what he’ll think I don’t know.”

  “Where’s Alethea going to sleep?”

  “Why, in one of the tower rooms, of course.”

  The tower, two-storeyed and cube-shaped, behind the pediment on the Palladian side of the house, had been added in the early nineteenth century by a Vayne with more money than taste who wanted extra room to house the servants of his guests. Mrs. Campbell slept in it, as did the visiting ladies’ maids, and occasionally when the house was very full the children of visitors. There was no water laid on and every drop had to be carried from the floor below up a narrow, twisting staircase. Before the purity of the south front had been marred by this addition there had stood another tower, octagonal in shape, with a pointed roof, which figured in early pictures of the house. This was removed to make room for the new tower and, the craze for follies being at its height, re-erected on the edge of the moors behind the house; and here ‘the Lantern,’ as it was called, still stood.

  People coming to Vyne for the first time were always struck by its two outstanding features: the extraordinary setting—a palace and gardens on the edge of the wilderness—and the strangely harmonious marriage of two widely different styles of architecture, Elizabethan and Palladian.

  From the north one entered by the Tudor gatehouse (experts had pronounced it to be pre-Elizabeth) passed into the Italianate courtyard, with its massive pillars and arches, through a wide and deep arcade and emerged under the pillared portico of the neo-classical south front. To the right the house’s western flank verged on a sheer drop of forty feet to where the Italian garden lay beneath the supporting walls. To the left the ground rose in a series of terraces with wide flights of steps. In front beyond the stretch of lawn lay a tree-bordered, islanded lake fed by a rushing, tumbling little hill-stream; beyond this a lime avenue leading upwards to a wood of larch and fir; beyond this the moors.

  It was the embodiment of a poet’s dreams—Arcadian idylls, faery lands forlorn; and once seen was not easy to forget. With his genius for spending money both unprofitably and disastrously, the builder of the tower had conceived the idea of draining the moors, with the result that, never again clothed in the purple of heather, they remained dun-coloured throughout the year, and the once-plentiful grouse also departed. Even so, he had been unable to destroy the beauty of the hill-girt horizon as seen from the house.

  Thawing comfortably before the fire, Phyllis pursued her train of thought: “I wish Alethea could sleep with me instead of in the tower.”

  “It’s her Ladyship’s orders, dear.”

  It was remarkable that for all practical purposes the running of the huge house and the comfort of its inmates depended solely on the three upper servants, butler, housekeeper and cook. When visitors were expected Lady Vayne said who was coming and where they were to sleep; this very capable trio did the rest. Truelove the butler—or steward as he preferred to be called—might be said to form the base of the triangle, but whereas the other two parts were equal to each other, neither was quite equal to him. The friendliest relations existed between Truelove and Monsieur Pérez, whom the steward did not regard as a rival. Temperamental like most artists, the chef seldom left his great kitchen, preferring the privacy of his cubbyhole partitioned off from the kitchen proper and furnished with a writing-table and two easy chairs. Here Truelove would sometimes visit him, and sometimes, but more rarely, the chef visited the steward in his panelled sitting-room, also opening off the cloisters and known, as distinct from the housekeeper’s room, simply as ‘the Room.’

  Friendly relations also existed between the chef and Mrs. Campbell, but between her and Truelove nothing more than an uneasy neutrality and all the suspicion and jealousy which two strong personalities both highly competent could engender; but whereas the housekeeper never interfered in the steward’s domain, he could and did frequently interfere in hers.

  “I’m having a very pretty dress for the play,” Mrs. Campbell’s young visitor, now sprawling at ease in a chair on the opposite side of the hearth, remarked. “It’s pale blue satin, long, right down to my feet, with a waist high up under my arms.”

  “Yes, dear, I saw it to-day in the workroom—Miss Pont showed it me.”

  Pont, Lady Vayne’s maid, was an accomplished dressmaker. To see her fitting a skirt with at least half a dozen pins in her mouth was to know one was watching a crafts-woman. Nevertheless, it was useless to pretend that a coat made by Pont was the same as one made by a tailor—even a local one.

  “Alethea’s dress has a bright red skirt and a velvet bodice with spangles, lacing up like a pair of stays, only in front,” continued Phyllis. “And she’s to wear a handkerchief on her head. I’ve got a straw hat with little pink rosebuds. Mama’s going to have a great curly white wig and Lettice too. Hilda’s to have two dresses; isn’t she lucky? I think I know all my part perfectly except the long bit at the end. I wish I hadn’t got to sing though. Wasn’t it awful that time when I was quite little and started in the wrong key?”

  “I don’t remember that, Miss Phyllis. You always did act beautifully and sing, too, even as quite a little girl. How we all enjoyed it last year! Her Ladyship looked so beautiful. She might have been trained for the stage—she acts so natural.”

  This was true—Lady Vayne and her brother were the star performers in the Vyne Theatrical Company.

  Phyllis was warm again and ready to go upstairs.

  Her hat hanging by i
ts elastic on the back of her neck, she paused on her way to the door to survey the decked tea-table, where a lavish assortment of scones, crumpets, sandwiches, cakes and jams was set out.

  “Do tell Anna not to send up that cherry cake for our tea again to-day. I hate cherry cake. Can’t we have a seed one?”

  “You and your old seed cake! There’s nobody but you and Sir Thomas as ever touches it!” The housekeeper was scornful but indulgent. “You’d better be quick then and tell Anna at once; your tea must be just going up. Oh—and as you’re going up, dear, ask Sarah to come down and speak to me a minute; she’ll be in the housemaids’ cupboard.”

  Skipping into the conveniently adjoining still-room, Phyllis found Anna the still-room maid and George the hall-boy in the act of loading his tray with the school-room tea, including the hated cherry cake. Poor George was the servant of the servants, and besides waiting on them he frequently did their work as well as his own. Mrs. Campbell seated beside her fire, a full coal-scuttle within reach, would not hesitate to ring her bell summoning him from his work at the opposite end of the house to make up the fire for her. Yet no ill-feeling was aroused. The victim accepted it as being quite in order, for the upper servants had all been through the same mill. If he managed to grow tall enough he would in time become a footman, perhaps eventually attain to such a position as Mr. Truelove’s.

  Quickly setting them right over the cherry cake, Phyllis proceeded up the back stairs, also conveniently adjoining the still-room. In the days of Elizabeth, even service staircases were beautiful. This was of dark oak throughout with newel posts topped by pierced finials. Strong oaken planks running the length of each flight took the place of balustrading.

  Halfway up in the ‘cupboard,’ which was really a fair-sized room and always smelt of yellow soap and beeswax, Sarah, the head housemaid, was singing at the sink, beside her a large array of brightly polished brass hot-water cans ready for the visitors’ bedrooms. She knew better than to disregard the housekeeper’s summons, and started immediately downstairs whilst Phyllis continued up. On the top floor the staircase ended in a long corridor lit by windows looking on to the central court and running round three sides of the house. The fourth was occupied by the Long Gallery.