The Surprising Life of Constance Spry Page 2

  Norman Wilkinson, a successful theatre designer, had been asked to design the shop. It was something he had never done before and it amused him to flout the Edwardian stuffiness of shop interiors and go for fantasy and indulgence, delicacy and surprise. Wilkinson wanted the floral displays in the four windows to hold centre stage. Above all they must possess romance, sophistication, originality and class. They should be flowers done by a lady, but a lady of quite uncommon gifts. His friend the artist Keith Henderson recalled: ‘Wilkinson’s designs for that exquisitely tranquil yet astonishing shop in Bond Street naturally impelled him to be eagerly on the lookout for someone of equal originality, who should be responsible for bringing them even more vividly to life with flowers. He found her. He told me about her. Her name was Constance.’

  Constance Spry was forty-three years old when Norman Wilkinson found her. Yet it was the first creative challenge of her life. Indeed, life before Atkinsons’ Perfumery and the numerous commissions that followed its remarkable success had been lived in quite another world – so different that it is hard to imagine how this curious, dumpy little figure could have gone on to reach such glamorous heights. Only someone with gritty determination, huge enthusiasm and a passionate desire to create something of beauty could have climbed out of the cold, grey world of her youth to conquer English society in all its complexity.

  ‘You have no idea’, Constance wrote, ‘how wonderful it is to come out of the dark frustration of being unable to crystallize such visions as you may have, and to find suddenly a possible medium of expression.’

  ONE

  Dark Frustration

  1886–1900

  Our nurse would not come nettle hunting. Mary [the cook] would, and, what is more, she made and doled out the nettle beer. It was lovely to think that whole beds of nettles were entirely yours to do as you liked with and that, literally, no one cared if you picked the lot.

  Old-fashioned mushroom recipes for pickling and ketchup take me back to feverish nights when I was afraid to go to sleep in case I slept beyond the appointed hour of 4 a.m. In retrospect, the fields are white with the magic fungi, and only in retrospect do I realize that we must have been trespassing.

  From the few tantalizing autobiographical clues scattered like small gems in her flower books, Constance Spry reveals an irrepressible romantic streak. But her fleeting images of a wild child running free in the lush flower-filled countryside are conjured out of a childhood that was anything but carefree. From her birth on 5 December 1886 in one of the redbrick terraced houses that crammed the backstreets around Derby railway station, Connie Fletcher was caught in a tense battle between her father’s passion for education and self-improvement and her mother’s narrow frustrations and desire for social advancement.

  George Fletcher had left school at fourteen and started work as a printer’s devil, then became a telegraphist with the Midland Railway Company. His hunger for knowledge drove him to night classes at the Derby Technical School, where he gained a qualification in electrical engineering. Not content with that, he attended a range of courses in arts and sciences run by lecturers from Cambridge University – ‘Studies for the History of Art’, ‘Sound and Music’, ‘Plantlife’ and ‘The Forces of Nature’. Connie’s father always came out top in his examinations, with distinctions and whenever he had some spare time he painted in watercolour and wrote poetry. George’s insatiable appetite for knowledge and his delight in everything he learned he passed on to his growing family, imbuing in them the same joy and sense of liberation that learning had brought to him.

  Whereas George was tall, fair, handsome and genial, his wife was in every respect his opposite. Henrietta Maria – ‘Etty’ – was small, dark, pretty and sharp-tongued. She was two years older, came from a family of shopkeepers and believed she had married beneath her. Etty’s fierce social ambition filled the family with tension and unhappiness. It now seems hard to understand her kind of snobbery, to appreciate the marginal, but to her very real, social differences between a shopkeeper and a railway telegraphist. Certainly, life for Etty in the early years of the marriage was very tough. They lived in a grim little back-to-back house with a tiny back yard. Some of the men filled their leisure hours nurturing prize dahlias from seeds from two-penny weekly journals. But for the women there was the endless war with the dirt and smoke from burning raw coal, the back-breaking grind of daily life and constant pregnancies.

  Etty harboured her feelings of refinement and longed to move up and out to the wide Georgian streets on the edge of town with their grand houses and views of the open Peak country beyond. She struggled to keep her children clean and neat, never allowing them to play with the neighbourhood children. She can have had little contact with her husband, who was at work all day and at classes all evening, his head in his books late into the night at home. She would, though, sit on the committee of Derby University Students’ Association when George became its vice-president, and she sometimes accompanied him on geological trips to the Peak District and heard him read papers to the Derby Archaeological and Natural History Society. Etty was no doubt happy to appear publicly as the proud wife, and her fierce social ambition drove him on. But if she believed in his abilities it is unlikely that she then saw in them the hope of betterment or escape.

  Escape, however, was just around the corner. The instructors at the Derby Technical School were so impressed with George’s aptitude and passion for education that soon after Connie’s birth they invited him to join the staff. By 1891 he had become headmaster and principal science teacher at a salary of £200 a year – a middle-class income at that time. It was the beginning of a long upward progress. The family of five – Connie and her two brothers, Arnold and baby Kenneth – was able to move into a house a mile nearer the centre of town. Surely now life would be so much better. The air would be cleaner, the neighbours nicer, there might be a garden where the children could play. Everyone would be happier.

  Connie remembered this house, but her memories were not cheerful ones. It was a three-storey terraced house with a few shrubs in front and a yard behind, surrounded by endless streets of other redbrick houses. Some of them, though, had gardens, and for the first time Connie began to notice the common shrubs and other plants that would remain favourites – lilac, philadelphus or mock orange, dark glossy laurel, buddleia and evening primrose. Hoping to ‘escape the eye of authority’, she used to climb over a wall into a neglected building site to pick evening primroses. ‘It was worth risking quite a deal of punishment’, she recalled, ‘to see its moonlight colour and to smell its heavenly scent.’

  She wrote later about how small a part gaiety played in her young life, about the clumsy, ugly dresses and boring walks around the grey, dirty streets. There was very little to satisfy her hunger for ‘something pretty’. On the daily city walks as she tried to keep up with her mother who was striding ahead pushing her brothers in the pram, Connie could never resist stopping to inspect a flower, however small or insignificant, growing out of a wall or a crack in the pavement.

  Once, as they marched briskly through some railway yards, Connie snatched up a little posy of wild marguerites and buddleia which she offered to her baby brother. Before he could take them, their mother grabbed the flowers and flung them away, shouting that they were dirty things and now they would have to rush home and wash their hands.

  They could not afford a maid, but after they moved to the new house an old Derbyshire countrywoman was hired as a nurse and took the children for walks into the countryside. Walks suddenly became wonderful experiences, as they searched on the edge of town for all kinds of flowers that the nurse identified with their old names – eyebright, ladies’ bedstraw, traveller’s joy. One day they stopped to chat to a woman standing in her front garden. Connie loved to listen to tales of country life, of the wild flowers that grew in the hedgerows and cottage gardens filled with bright colours and scents. The woman picked a spray of lady’s locket. ‘I think this might be nice for a little girl,’
she said, and gave it to Connie with a warm smile. For little Connie it seemed like a miracle. She never forgot this first proper bunch of flowers – picked and given, not snatched or stolen. The woman told her it was also called ‘lady in the bath’ and showed her how, when the two pink outer petals were gently pulled apart, the white inner petals looked like a delicate little figure.

  The children spent long winter days in the nursery. Here they did their lessons and read all the books their father brought home for them. Sometimes they would sow wheat in saucers of damp moss and put them in a dark cupboard for ten days, then bring them out into the daylight to marvel at the slender green blades that grew on for several weeks like emerald hair.

  All her life Connie adored the exciting rituals of Christmas. Nothing could spoil the magic of making Christmas decorations – the ‘gewgaws’, as she called them. The nursery curtains were drawn, the fire glowed, and the oil lamps cast a soft light on the table, littered with gaudy tissue paper and saucers of homemade paste. Their old nurse showed them how to make hoops hung with old-fashioned ‘kissing bunches’. They cut ham-frills of coloured paper, ‘arsenic-green, magenta pink and wash-bag blue’. Kneeling up on chairs with paste-smeared faces and fingers they turned the frills inside out, stuck the edges together and bound them round a hoop. Bags of coloured tarlatan – a sort of coarse muslin – were filled with ‘unwholesome-looking candies, sugar bird-cages, pink and white sugar mice . . . everything gaudy and gay and deliciously tawdry’. But New Year celebrations brought a ‘sting in the tail’ with their mother dictating their resolutions, ‘an unmistakable reminder that the past year had been none too good and we had to improve’. They had to promise to be more punctual and attentive, air their beds before breakfast, keep their shoulders back and learn their French verbs. ‘We rebelled and all such resolutions went with the wind.’ Connie could remember the details several decades later.

  The nurse fired Connie’s imagination with a story about a red damask rose, so dark as to be almost black and with a heavenly scent. She wove nostalgic stories around this legendary rose – about its lustre, its beauty, its velvet blackness and musky scent – stories that Connie often recalled as ‘well calculated to intoxicate a child who found heady excitement in the few flowers that came her way’. The children used to search everywhere for this rose, bringing every red bloom they could find and asking: ‘Is it this? Could it be this, or this?’ But the nurse would turn up her nose and, with her familiar derisive sniff, reply: ‘No, no, don’t be so daft, don’t I keep on telling yee it were black, well nigh black?’

  The children accepted old wives’ tales like this with enthralled credulity until, Connie recalled,

  the day she broke our belief in her for always. She had a queer, possessive sort of jealousy and she looked at us not without a touch of spite . . . One Sunday evening, getting tired of her domination, we asked: ‘Where’s Mother?’ She replied, ‘Gone for a sojer [soldier]’. At this the smallest among us began to cry, whereupon she gave vent to her irritation in vehemently Derbyshire idiom with: ‘And don’t ’ee be a mardi-cadi.’ My mother must have been a little surprised at the unusual warmth of our welcome on her return from evening service . . . Well, that finished it. Out of the window went the myth of the old velvet rose together with other yarns concerned with the wild flowers of field and hedgerow; what you might devour or what would cause you to curl up and die; or tales of what would overtake you if you showed any great spirit of independence.

  But Connie did not forget the story and spent much of her life searching for the secret of the exotic black rose of her childhood. It was the first stirrings of an artistic sensibility in her, a desire for something that would fill her eyes with beauty and her heart with romance.

  As she grew up, relations between mother and daughter became increasingly difficult. Connie, the only daughter, was her father’s darling. She loved to receive his praise and encouragement. In her books her mother is always referred to as ‘Authority’. Connie hated the diet of snubs and coldness which years later she remembered so well when writing her books; they remained as painful as the day they were delivered, their sting still sharp and fresh. But Connie was a tough little girl full of laughter and natural wickedness. Her father gave her his life-enhancing enthusiasms and his sense of humour and she responded with a yearning to please him. But for her mother she reserved only a rock-like obstinacy and a hard, polite face.

  The tensions in Connie’s own personality, her headstrong energy and her creative drive, were an amalgam of both parents: her occasional sharp tongue, eye for detail and flair for unearthing beautiful objects came from her mother while her sunny optimism, her determination and passion for education came from her father. There was also a darker element of tension inherited from Etty which lay dormant, waiting to spring on her in later life.

  For three years the young headmaster with no more than night-school training enjoyed his job, gaining valuable experience in teaching and school administration. George would probably have remained happily enough in this good, comfortably paid position for the rest of his life had his achievements not come to the notice of an old acquaintance with whom he had shared an interest in photography.

  William Abney was by then chief of the Department of Science at the Board of Education in London. He came from a wealthy Derbyshire family; his father was the local vicar, and in his youth William had mixed easily with working lads from the parish who were interested in self-improvement. He and his father had a passion for photography; the vicar was a close friend of the pioneer photographer William Fox-Talbot, and together they encouraged a group of printers and telegraphists from the Midland Railway Company to set up the Derby Photographic Society. At some point George Fletcher joined the Society; photography was a particular ‘science enthusiasm’, as Connie referred to it later, which he pursued all his life. With the advantages of wealth and family connections, William Abney had left Derby for a military career instructing science and telegraphy until he was appointed Inspector of Science Schools with the Department of Science and Art in Kensington in 1877. In thirty years of work in education, he strove to improve the teaching of science in schools, waging an uphill struggle against the entrenched conservatism of the teaching profession and the dominance of the Classics-based curriculum. He kept in touch with his hometown and his fellow members of the Photographic Society, and when he heard of George Fletcher’s work at the Technical School he had no hesitation in appointing him Inspector for Science Teaching in the West Country. Thus in 1894 the Fletcher family were once again on the move, this time to Plymouth.

  It was a liberation for eight-year-old Connie, an escape from the grime of the Midlands and a new revelation. She described ‘the almost delirious happiness remembered to this day, that was mine when I was made free of the wild flowers of the West Country lands and fields. Picking mayblobs was a foretaste of heaven even if you did leave your shoes behind in the mud.’ At last she and her brothers could range over the countryside exploring. They picked white violets and hart’s-tongue ferns in the lanes and enjoyed the heady excitement of crushing strong-smelling wild garlic under foot. There were several grand houses locally with huge gardens lush with trees, shrubs and flowers, and she describes their own garden in Devon as ‘bathed in sunshine and filled with flowers’.

  Connie later complained that as a little girl she was never taught anything about gardening or botany. But, like her father, she was clearly adept at teaching herself. At the village school she endured endless tedious lessons, but during the holidays she was free to pick flowers, climb trees and eat fruit from the garden. ‘How valuable it would have been to me all my life if some of that time spent over lesson books could have been used to learn about gardens and plants,’ she wrote. Most of her ‘Saturday pennies’ were spent on seeds, at a penny a packet. But her early obsession with growing things often got her into trouble with ‘Authority’.

  The family could now afford a part-time gardener – Mr Fox. Connie fol
lowed him around closely observing him and asking interminable questions. On one occasion, having noticed how carefully Mr Fox guarded his own well-matured stack of stable manure, she decided to feed her Virginia stock seedlings with the same. She hid in a thick clump of elder bushes with a toy dustpan and brush waiting for ‘calling time’, when visitors came in horse and carriage up the drive: ‘I felt sure I should be able to salvage treasure trove from the roadway if I was quick about it.’ But as she made her dash into the road to collect her steaming treasure, she was seen by ‘a particularly unbending Authority, and what she had to say to me was enough to make me inhibited against the use of manure for the rest of my life’.

  ‘If only’, Connie recalled decades later, ‘my wise and understanding father had been at home . . . this horrible incident would have been turned into a wonderful lesson about plants and soils, and the comforting, cleansing processes of nature.’ But practical gardening was not a suitable subject for a young girl. She would simply have find out for herself, and for the rest of her life that is what she would do.

  *

  After two years in Plymouth another brother, Donald, was born and George Fletcher gained further promotion, this time as Science Inspector for the whole of the Midland division. The family returned to the Midlands, but this time to a pleasant house in the prosperous Birmingham suburb of Moseley where a fourth brother, Gilbert, was born. But for Connie it was the end of her idyll, of running free in flowery lanes. The country-loving girl was now ten years old and ready for proper school. She was sent to King Edward’s School, and later recalled with hatred the dreary lessons and teachers, the depressing drab colours in the schoolrooms and ugly uniform. Connie was not academic and she struggled with the work, trying hard to please her father.