– a field and trees almost black in the fading light, a house barely adumbrated with a glimmer in one window, above them a sky of palest green deepening to darkest blue above and one star shining. He let the little girl buy this at a nominal price with her savings and then gave her another – a fiery red afterglow reflected in pools of water. On another occasion when the little girl came to see him he asked what she would like for a present. Her swift and unhesitating answer was ‘A knob.’ Later on Mr Clifford gave her a lump of chased silver with a holein it, the head I should think of an old cane, and she was perfectly satisfied with her knob.
Another of the charms of his drawing-room was prisms of all shapes and sizes which dangled in one of the long windows. Sometimes we were allowed to wrench one off and take it with us and then we walked happily home, passing it from hand to hand, seeing the familiar objects fringed with red and yellow and violet. There was always preserved pineapple at Mr Clifford’s house, and while we ate it we strolled round looking at pictures. He had a peculiar gift for copying Burne-Jones’ paintings so that my grandfather himself could hardly tell the difference. Two in particular I remember in his drawing-room, Merlin and Nimue, and Green Summer, both indistinguishable from the originals. He lived with a very tall friend whom we knew simply as ‘the giant’. Clifford is dead now, with his funny affected voice, his strange mixture of romantic snobbism and religion, his kindness and capacity for friendship. I do not know who has the old house, but the giant’s sister lived, not so many years ago, in a house on the south side of the Square, opposite.
Almost next to Mr Clifford lived Vernon Lushington, a very early friend of my grandfather’s. When the old Greyhound was cruelly pulled down and rebuilt as a commonplace gin palace, the two headless stone greyhounds were bought by the Lushingtons and put one on each side of their front door. The little Maid of Honour cottages just across the road from the Lushingtons have been pulled down after sinking to sad depths of dirt and neglect, and I suppose the old house with its snowy pear-tree will soon be sacrificed for the convenience of one of the big shops. Women have much to answer for. When I look at the idle jostling crowd of females (of which I am myself a part), which makes Kensington High Street impassable between eleven and five, I feel that my charming sex is perhaps at the back of all the destruction of Old Kensington. Lovely houses and gardens have had to go so that women may come up from Ealing and Hammersmith and Fulham and across from Notting Hill and Bayswater to ‘look at the shops’.
On the west side of the square a white house with bright window-boxes was the home of Mrs Patrick Campbell. My parents and grandparents loved andadmired her, and to us she was ‘Auntie Stella’. My father had made a special translation of Pelléas et Mélisande for her. We were all much in and out of each other’s houses then. She would descend upon Young Street with a swish of silk and a froth and fluff of lace demanding nursery tea, or suddenly require a bed in a darkened room as it was impossible for her to rest in her own house. Sometimes I was sent for to keep her company in the curtained room. She dressed her little Stella, who was not much older than I, like a fairy princess, and I used to inherit pinafores made of the finest silk woven with gold and frocks of shimmering stuffs.
Going to her house was always an adventure because you never knew who was there or what might happen. Auntie Stella might receive me in bed with curtains drawn, lamentably moaning that she was an old woman and would never be nice to look at again. Or she might be trailing about the house in a longtailed lace wrapper alternately scolding and caressing whoever came within reach, lavishing affection on Pinky Ponky Poo, her adored dog, companion for many