We had a telegraph office in the house, which was worked by Mrs. Tudgay. It was a fascinating instrument, rather like a typewriter with two dials and little steel keys round one of them, and the alphabet was the real alphabet and not the Morse Code. It was convenient having this in the house, but one of the results was that so many jokes were made with it, and so many bogus telegrams arrived, that nobody knew whether a telegram was a real one or not.
Mr. Walter Durnford, then an Eton House master, and afterwards Provost of King’s, in a poem he wrote in the visitors’ book, speaks of Membland as a place where everything reminded you of the presence of fairy folk, “Where telegrams come by the dozen, concocted behind the door.”
Certainly people enjoyed themselves at Membland, and the Christmas parties were one long riot of dance, song, and laughter. Welcome ever smiled at Membland, and farewell went out sighing.
As I got nearer and nearer to the age of ten, when it was settled that I should go to school, life seemed to become more and more wonderful every day. Both at Membland and in Charles Street the days went by in a crescendo of happiness. Walks with Chérie in London were a daily joy, especially when we went to Covent Garden and bought chestnuts to roast for tea. The greatest tea treat was to get Chérie, who was an inspired cook, to make something she called _la petite sauce_. You boiled eggs hard in the kettle; and then, in a little china frying-pan over a spirit lamp, the sauce was made, of butter, cream, vinegar, pepper, and the eggs were cut up and floated in the delicious hot mixture. A place of great treats where we sometimes went on Saturday afternoons was the Aquarium, where acrobats did wonderful things, and you had your bumps told and your portrait cut out in black-and-white silhouette. The phrenologist was not happy in his predictions of my future, as he said I had a professional and mathematical head, and would make a good civil engineer in after-life.
Going to the play was the greatest treat of all, and if I heard there was any question of their going to the play downstairs, and Mr. Deacon, my father’s servant, always used to tell me when tickets were being ordered, I used to go on my knees in the night nursery and pray that I might be taken too. Sometimes the answer was direct.