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Topsy lingered over
Little Women,
the boys moved on to the manly novels of G. A. Henty (these appeared at the rate of three or four a year until the industrious author expired in 1902). Henty fostered the heroic ideal of the Briton dining in black tie in the Punjab or raising his hat to a compatriot in the murderous heat of the Nullarbor Plain, and the boys ate it up. Their appetite for the outdoor life was stimulated by a diet of
Treasure Island, The Swiss Family Robinson,
and
Around the World in Eighty Days,
as well as the sensational new
Jungle Book
and its sequel. After tea, the children sang songs in the parlor with their mother. Nan, a talented musician, was often at the piano with one of a succession of pet jerboas—furry rodents with large ears and long hind legs—listening on her shoulder. (“Oh,” Nellie Terry wrote to her passionate admirer George Bernard Shaw in 1896 during a difficult period, “all the time I was just dying to go away to some quiet place—to you, or to hear some music from Nan Finch Hatton….”) All three children had inherited her musical ability, and there were frequent family concerts with guest appearances from Terry and Nan’s other theatrical friends. Denys was surrounded by strong, artistic women in his childhood, and their influence persisted in his adult relations. The family revolved around Nan. Remembering the tensions of her own childhood, she was determined that her children should always know how much they were loved. “She was so unselfish,” her desolate husband wrote after her death, “that everyone who knew her loved her dearly.”
    London had its attractions, but the hearts of the Finch Hattons remained in Lincolnshire. Between Priory tenancies everyone boarded the train and rattled up to Sleaford, where they were met by the Haverholme brougham and conveyed to the one home to which Denys felt a lifelong emotional attachment. A crenellated extravaganza with thirty bedrooms, the Priory was Victorian mock Gothic of the purest order, and hideous. Despite a row of delicate arches that lent the ground level an ecclesiastical aspect, the overall effect was warlike; there were slits through which teams of imaginary archers could aim their bows, and the pargeted chimneys jostled cowled shoulders against the watery fen sky. The house was surrounded by a low, balustraded stone wall that formed a rectangle, and the whole lot had been plonked in the middle of the flatlands like an overdesigned toy castle resting on a tea tray. But its poetry absorbed its absurdity. It was said locally that the Priory was the model for Chesney Wold in Dickens’s
Bleak House.
It looked bleak, though it warmed up when you got within the low wall and considered it from close range. Then the texture of the stone and the scope of the architectural detail softened the façade. Inside, a touch of the monastery lingered. Even on the brightest days the rooms were dark, and the long corridors lined with marble busts of Roman emperors were positively stygian. The cold, high-ceilinged drawing room was silent save for the sound of great clocks all ticking together, and the interminable journey to the nursery, dimly lit by flickering oil lamps that brought suits of armor to life, was peopled in the children’s imagination by a phantasmagoric cast of monks, knights, and fairies. Once in bed they listened for the resident ghost, a Gilbertine canoness whose footsteps could be heard on the path under the tower window.
    For the children, the park was paradise. They played in the monks’ burial ground and near the pigsties and among the watercress beds by the old river Slea. Wherever they went, it was windy. Cricket stumps had to be drilled deep, and blankets and rugs securely weighted by members of a familiar tribe of outdoor servants. Indoors, only the cook, Mrs. Rook, had equal status with the butler. A monumental square-jawed figure with the physique of a wrestler, Mrs. Rook was permanently swathed in acres of