The Surprising Life of Constance Spry Read online

  Every Saturday afternoon Etty Fletcher sent the children to dancing class, where the girls were expected to pirouette about in accordion-pleated dresses while the boys were made to dance with the ‘directress’, a short, stout lady ‘who looked ridiculous whatever she did’. Connie remembered being made to curtsey, while her reluctant brother Arnold would ‘fling an arm across his thin little middle as he bowed in a sort of angry abandon’. They were expected to take the lady a bunch of violets, a much-begrudged offering bought from a flower shop nearby; ‘I often think that after I had unwrapped, smelt the flowers and rewrapped them a dozen times, they must have looked part-worn by the time the directress had graciously accepted them.’

  Connie and the two older boys were once sent to stay with their aunts and were told to find a suitable present. With only a penny a week pocket money, they went to the penny bazaar and found an enormous and floridly ornate pot-holder; ‘all pink and yellow and tricked out in bits of gold – it was guaranteed to put any plant in the shade,’ Connie recalled. Proudly they presented the monster to the aunts and for a long time it served to house a succession of plants ‘totally inadequate in size for such a fortress of a container’. Even at this young age, Connie was becoming aware not just of flowers, but of the right choice of pots and vases in which to display them.

  Their father always made life and learning fun. He had an innate genius for making the world seem wonderful; even a bleak, snowbound winter day was a source of joy and investigation. Sent outdoors muffled up to their eyes in restrictive clothing, they would be quickly joined by their father who would rush excitedly from the fusty warmth of the breakfast room to romp with his children in the luminous softness. He showed them the fine tracery of frost that hung on twigs and seed-heads and explained about snow crystals and how they were formed. With George, there was always something fascinating to learn and understand. For little Connie and her brothers, ‘His enthusiasm and goodness shone out and wove a golden thread in our lives.’

  Whenever there was an excuse for an outing, such as the half-protege Georgeholidays given to celebrate the reliefs of Ladysmith and Mafeking in 1900, off they went on what Connie called ‘a ploy’. George would take them out into the country where they could range the fields and hedgerows like gypsies, gathering blackberries, sloes or mushrooms, and nettles when the plants were young and tender. They spent the days exploring and learning: ‘without killing ourselves, we sampled leaves and berries, and would have been enchanted on return to take our full share of the kitchen end of the business had we only been allowed.’ Unfortunately for Connie, it was not done for a well brought up English schoolgirl to help in the kitchen or in the task of stocking the storeroom with jams, pickles and preserves or to brew the beer from their hard-won nettles. But ‘you got praise for your trepidation in picking and sympathy for stings’, and later could enjoy the mild sweet drink. The important business of preparing and cooking their gathered plants, however, which in later life would be so important to Connie, remained out of bounds.

  Good food and where it came from was always a source of great interest to Connie. The growing of fruit and vegetables was to her as important as cooking them properly. She had read The Wide, Wide World by Susan Warner, a novel about a young American girl living in the 1840s who described the communal preserving that took place in the autumn, when the pig was killed, salted and smoked and all kinds of fruits and nuts were dried or bottled. ‘How I envied her share in those periodic “bees”,’ Connie wrote ‘and though I didn’t understand all of what they were doing . . . I thought the whole thing sounded grand.’ In her own Garden Notebook, written in her mid-fifties, she wrote about the pleasure that she derived from such feasts of the senses: ‘It is nice to be old enough to say lovely flowers, sweet scents and delicious foods all in one breath like that, and without apology.’ In her childhood it had been considered rather coarse and unbecoming, by her mother at least, to express appreciation of food, because it might seem greedy. ‘In those days no one could have confessed to any taint of greediness and held his head high.’ The curious contortions of social propriety were particularly hard for children to comprehend: Connie could not see why you could say grace for good food ‘but not mention flowers’, or why it was not seemly to praise food in conversation at table.

  Once at a party I remember so far forgetting myself in an outburst of enthusiasm as to say I loved strawberries, and the voice of an adult from the end of the table, raised so that no one failed to hear, brought blushes from my very toes: ‘Constance, I hope you don’t love food, my dear; that is not the way to speak of food.’ Of course I hastily denied anything so gross, but alas! I lied. I loved strawberries quite a lot. Ripe and melting and smothered, as was the fashion of the day, with icing sugar and cream.

  George Fletcher continued his meteoric rise from lowly beginnings. The final thrust into the respected higher levels of education administration came in the autumn of 1900, when he was promoted to the post of Chief Inspector of Technical Education in Ireland. The family were off to a new life, in Dublin.

  TWO

  Ireland

  1900–1910

  If I am to tell truly my own garden story, I shall have to go a long way back to the old Irish garden of my childhood, which seems in retrospect always to have been bathed in sunshine and filled with flowers.

  Connie was already fourteen when the Fletcher family moved to Dublin. But Ireland was no idyll. On the contrary, these were in many ways the bleakest and most difficult years of her life. She often wrote of Irish memories in her books, and in keeping with the many other veiled half-truths about her she never discouraged the popular misconception among her admirers that she was Irish or of Irish origin. Her naivety and unconventional approach to everything she did were often put down to her ‘Irishness’. Her clear, slightly lilting speech was probably more Derbyshire smoothed out by her mother’s attempts to make her ‘talk nicely’; but to many it evoked an Irish burr – more romantic than Midlands England – which Connie was happy to retain. She never bothered to develop a cut-glass accent in order to ingratiate herself with upper-class clients. Indeed, more than one person would later note how the gentle tones in Connie’s speech required one to stop and listen, even to admire the woman for her firm but quiet manner. It is not surprising that Connie so often drew on her fifteen years in Ireland, for they were critical in forming much of her thinking and attitudes. It was here that she developed her own version of her father’s liberal and practical approach to education, here that she began to acquire her very individual taste in flowers and design, and here that she first learned to associate with people from very different levels of society.

  The Fletcher family went to live in Ireland only fourteen years after Gladstone’s Liberal government had failed to bring Home Rule to the country. Since then a succession of Conservative administrations had tried to keep the lid on Irish terrorism, while seeking to prevent the country from becoming divided between the Protestant Unionist North and Catholic Nationalist South. In the long run these efforts would fail; sectarian splits would surface just before the First World War and divide Ireland in 1921. However, there was also a middle strand of official thinking which tried to steer clear of politics and instead to find the solution to Ireland’s problems by improving the economic and educational condition of her people. In particular, the Anglo-Irish Conservative MP Horace Plunkett, an agricultural reformer, advocated ambitious plans that aimed to foster the development of Irish agriculture through cooperative schemes similar to those he had seen in the United States.

  Plunkett had earlier organized a system of cooperative creameries among the Irish peasantry. While technical education among the English working classes was inadequate, in Ireland it had been nonexistent until Plunkett forced the government at Westminster to pass a Bill which led to the formation of the Irish Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction. The question was, though, whether the Irish peasant would take instruction from English teachers. Typi
cal of his time, Plunkett nevertheless sent to England for his staff. A brilliant young educationalist called Robert Blair was appointed Assistant Secretary in charge of the new Department’s technical instruction, and Abney, now Sir William, again recommended his protégé George Fletcher as its Chief Inspector.

  Many Irishmen, seeing well-paid new appointments going to the loathed oppressor, deeply resented the attentions and interference from England. George Fletcher, however, was one of the very few English administrators who came to be accepted. As a boy from the backstreets who had come up from small beginnings, he knew how to inspire them with the confidence to aim through education for things previously thought unattainable. Successive English administrators had pronounced the Irish peasantry ineducable; George Fletcher and Robert Blair were keen to prove this was not true. ‘Education cannot succeed without the interest and goodwill of the country as a whole’, Fletcher wrote in one of his reports, ‘and the keen enthusiasm of the individual himself.’ He visited all the local authorities in the country searching for instructors in carpentry and metalwork, often resorting to crash courses to bring them up to standard. ‘It was not the perfect method,’ he wrote, ‘but the only one possible.’ There would be technical schools to take boys from the potato patch into workshop or factory and domestic science schools for girls which, although they offered no more than basic training for domestic service, gave them a certificate which afforded a better chance of a good job and higher wages than their sisters sent straight to ‘the Big House’.

  Hampered with inadequate finance from the Department, Fletcher and his team had to find suitable buildings in which to hold classes. Fletcher’s geniality and down-to-earth nature were received far more willingly than the typical English administrator with his aloof public-school manner. He persuaded town councils to adapt disused fever hospitals and jails and took advantage of waning Protestant congregations to grab unwanted chapels. In one town they adapted an old water tower and in another contrived to create a technical school inside a disused water tank.

  Etty Fletcher’s own ambitions for life in a Big House were almost, if not yet completely, realized. Their new home was Dawson Court in Blackrock, a smart suburb of Dublin. It was a rambling old house, full of charm and, more important to Connie, with a walled garden. Here she remembered the ‘blue hedge’, a ceanothus with its ‘misty haze of blue, patterned with hundreds of orange butterflies and noisy with bees’; box-edged flowerbeds planted with traditional pinks that scented the summer air, a pink May tree whose arbour shape offered a lovely haven for playing ‘house’ and hiding from Authority, and a Siberian crab-apple that blossomed like a wedding bouquet. Connie remembered old-fashioned rose bushes which would later become a garden passion for her. In mild winters these roses often bloomed right up to Christmas Day and, wonder of wonders, there was the lovely old bridal rose ‘Niphetos’, ‘so white, so rich-looking, so full of romance’.

  But Connie was to have little time to enjoy this garden. As soon as they arrived in Ireland, she was sent off to Alexandra College for Girls in the Dublin suburb of Milltown. Connie was happy there; she could escape from her mother’s chilling shadow and make new friends. The College was founded to provide formal education beyond the age of fourteen for girls of ability. Most of the lectures were given by professors of Trinity College, Dublin, although there was no possibility that the girls might gain a degree from the university itself. But for Connie, there was one marvellous and novel thing about the school: it had a garden.

  The Principal, Miss Henrietta White, who was well known in horticultural circles, invited Frederick Moore, Curator of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin, to give classes in horticulture. Connie was his most ardent and appreciative pupil. At last she was able to learn something she really cared about – the growing of flowers, their names and their characters. School visits to the Botanic Gardens and to private gardens around Dublin were a particular delight.

  George Fletcher became a close friend of Miss White and her colleague Miss Mulvaney at the College’s junior school. They shared a common interest in improving the skills and general education of the rural populations of Ireland. In 1906 Sir Horace Plunkett, Fletcher’s boss at the Department, would revise its programme to include a course in cookery for girls and gardening for boys. It came to be known as ‘Nature Knowledge’ and was fairly rudimentary. In a letter to the journal Irish Gardening the Department claimed: ‘When the girls have learned, in our domestic science economy classes, how to cook and preserve the vegetables and fruit the boys have learned to grow in these gardens, something will have been done towards improving the now wretched and mind-and-body depressing dietary of the bulk of our people and towards increasing the happiness of their lives at home.’

  But for Connie, who would one day write a book extolling the need to know and understand how food is produced, ‘Nature Knowledge’ was not available. She was middle-class now, a pupil at the top-drawer girls’ school. Gradually she was acquiring an ability to move easily between the social strata at a time when class differences still mattered. It would be a critical factor in Connie’s success and popularity in later life.

  A fellow student at the College remembered Connie as a lively girl with a bright humour. She was quite fashion-conscious and made her own clothes. She always loved hats and at this time sported the fashionable wide-brimmed, shallow-crowned picture hat which she bought with saved-up pocket money. Connie could never have been described as physically attractive – she was neither pretty like her mother, nor tall like her father – but her sharp-featured little face was often suffused with laughter, her eyes bubbling with fun, though her mouth was sometimes fixed in a stubborn, even fierce, line.

  Although Connie was happier at Alexandra College than she had been at Birmingham, she was discouraged by her failure with her studies and painfully aware that she was a disappointment to her father, who believed so strongly in the value of a good education. She knew she had some sort of abilities, but what were they? And why did no one value them or find an outlet for them? Her mind was filled with a miscellany of knowledge from her father, with the mysteries of science and the natural world, and the photography, painting, music and poetry that he loved so much. But she always feared criticism and was terrified of exams. Throughout her life she disliked all forms of competition.

  It must have been particularly galling that her now five darling brothers were turning out to be both confident and clever: Arnold, Kenneth, Donald, Gilbert and even little Lynton who was born soon after they arrived in Ireland, seemed to be moving effortlessly through school and seemed destined for careers in science, medicine and administration. George Fletcher had enrolled his two youngest, Gilbert and Lynton, at the junior school at Alexandra College, despite its being a girls’ school. Here the little boys were petted and indulged. Lynton recalled being sent to Miss Mulvaney for some boyish crime. Instead of punishment she took him off for a wonderful afternoon at Dublin Zoo.

  Thinking that Connie might have artistic talents, George arranged for her to have drawing lessons. These, too, proved a failure. Her hands, which were very dextrous with the needle and when working with flowers, could not draw a line. She did, however, hold strong views on art, and when told to copy a sinuous frieze of convolvulus in the Art Nouveau style she retorted: ‘I don’t like flowers made to do that.’ This incident, recalled years later in her book Favourite Flowers, meant that ‘Father’s artist manqué was in the dog-house.’ Her father subscribed to The Studio magazine and Connie loved to look at its drawings and reproductions – garden sketches, water-colours of herbaceous borders, and flowers painted in delicate, bright colours. In particular she sought out Flemish and Dutch still-lifes: lavish cornucopias of glowing fruits and massed displays of flowers with attendant butterflies and bees, all minutely and perfectly observed. In one issue of The Studio she found a reproduction of a highly stylized painting of King Richard II standing in a parterre filled with exquisite flowers with the red rose of Lancaster in h
is hand. Connie was entranced. Perhaps this was the mysterious red-black rose that her old nurse in Derby had told her about?

  In June 1904, after Robert Blair had been appointed as the first Education Officer to the London County Council, George Fletcher took his place as Assistant Secretary in Ireland. He was now the boss of his own show. Popular and well liked both in Dublin and on his extensive travels around the country, he became known as ‘Fletcher of the Department’. Connie recalled that when her brothers got into minor trouble with the police, as they often did, they were let go as soon as it was discovered who they were.

  Renting property in Ireland at that time was relatively cheap, and with George’s promotion the family could at last move to a proper Big House, a vast Dublin Georgian mansion in fashionable Pembroke Road with numerous bedrooms, several staircases and a staff of five (poorly paid) servants for Etty Fletcher to command. She was at last in heaven, and her ambition to become a leading Dublin hostess could be fulfilled. She blossomed into a lady with charming manners and a flair for collecting interesting people. Her parties were beautifully done, and always successful. What no one knew about was the unhappy tension that prevailed outside the drawing-room. George Fletcher, though naturally hospitable, was uncomfortable with Etty’s lavish displays and worried about her extravagance. The children were always on show and made to recite, sing or play the violin. The two younger boys were invited into schoolfriends’ homes in the free and easy Irish way, but would never invite them back home because their mother would make an occasion of it, embarrassing them with special food and best behaviour. The public display of attending church was a particular trial; as they progressed upwards, Etty had changed the family church to the more fashionable religious denominations: Presbyterian in Derby, Methodist in Plymouth, Congregationalist in Moseley, and now in Dublin the Church of Ireland.