Chapter Two - Switzerland 1909

When we were left standing by Geoffrey’s party on the train platform at Visp, my sister Helen turned to me with a droll expression, rolling her blue eyes, and said, ‘Un coup de foudre pour vous tous les deux . There will be no living with you.’ I found myself blushing hotly. She took my arm, while Jack looked at us quizzically. He had no French, and very little of anything else.
‘Are you implying I fall in love a the drop of a hat?’ I challenged her. To my chagrin, they both laughed.

‘Well there was cousin Francesco di Brazza,’ Helen murmured in her rich, opera-singer’s voice, but she patted my arm at the same time.
‘And Younghusband,’ Jack said, wickedly, winking at Helen. He got me: I rounded on him.
‘That’s a disgusting thing to say! He’s old enough to be my father!’ It was a bad choice: people were staring now at this huddle of tall blonde English and their wild emotions.
‘But you did swoon over the ice-axe,’ Jack went on, relentlessly, grinning.
‘I did not.’

They laughed at me again, and Helen only said ‘Come along and we can sit at the café and have a smoke before our lunch, since we’ve missed ours thanks to your fascination. They can’t throw us out if we’re outdoors.’ We had intended to take a picnic to the hillside, but because George and I had spent our time fiddling with my watch we missed the last call for luncheon hampers; thus Helen’s ‘love at first sight’ remark. I could see I was going to be twitted about this for a long time.

We went out of the station gate and up along to the high street, which was crowded as it was a brilliant day, and the late end of the long lunch-hour when the Swiss resolutely abandon their banks and offices and nothing of a business nature can be accomplished by foreigners. We did sit outdoors for our lunch, conspicuously English in woollen climbing clothes and nailed boots – my sister and I in shirt-blouses (I was actually wearing one of my brother Harry’s shirts), long jumpers or loose old coats with the sleeves cut off, and short skirts just below the knee which came off at a moment with press studs, leaving climbing knickerbockers beneath, and gaiters. It was a cumbersome lot and trousers would have been much preferable – Jack was wearing short trousers and a knitted waistcoat and how I envied him! – but convention at the time would permit nothing else. We couldn’t even get away with jodhpurs in public! Afterwards, we went for a long walk above the town, far above the rail line where the steep Alpine meadows are dotted with sheep.

I was still not used then to making an ‘entrance’ and being stared at everywhere, for I was only twenty and hadn’t really grown into being taller than most men I met. There are photographs of me as a child, which I find charming now, as they look like the Victorian postcards they are. I think that I was a pretty child. But I was not vain when I was twenty. How could I be vain with a horde of brothers and sisters forever knocking down my ego? Any evidence of vanity – time spent too long affixing a brooch or fussing with one’s hair – was met with quick derision, even when my brothers were the ones fussing. Was I pretty then? Striking perhaps, with the blue eyes and curly fair hair of the Sanderses, but too long-limbed and bony to be pretty in the accepted sense. I had only just got over the girlhood podginess, - very rapidly in growing seven inches in a year – so I was very self-conscious in any case. I was aware that people – men – looked at me, but counted it off to the height and to the clothes, for we dressed very well in those days. Later on my sisters and I managed to live on what had been our yearly dress allowance, which may give an indication of just how posh we were; the dress I wore to my coming-out party came from Worth, the famous Paris couturier. I hadn’t scads of them, but most of our glad rags were of that ilk.

But in those days, and long before I was born, it was the common expectation. When my father whisked my American mother off from New Orleans to be married in Trinity Church, her gown came from Worth’s. They came back from a horseback ride, having met a few weeks before, to announce their engagement. Riding in New Orleans then was for women not such a usual pastime as it was in the North, partly because the Creole girls were too lazy, and partly because on that swampy ground there were only two places to ride. However my mother was a first-generation American and not yet infected with the Creole languor. It was typical of her, I always feel, to have got engaged on horseback. And then nothing would do for that masterful creature, Mr. James Sanders, but that they should get married forthwith.

This was a thunderbolt to her family, and Aunt Abby was horrified at such haste- genuinely distressed I think at letting her little sister go so far away, for good, with a man they had known so short a time. And what was to be done about the trousseau? – a bride’s outfit could only be had in Paris. Fortunately, Marie had been in Europe on a tour only the year before – seeing the Grindelwald Glacier and other mountain wonders, which pleased her much more than any capitals; she had had some dresses made at Worth’s, and they had kept her toile, the pattern of a client’s figure cut out in calico or thick muslin, which Paris dressmakers preserved from year to year to fulfil long-range orders. So it was fairly simple for her guardian aunt Mrs. Slocum to write to Paris for a sumptuous outfit to be made ready with all speed.

I have a couple of those long-ago trousseau dresses still; one of the deepest red Lyons silk with a huge pattern of blazing parrot-tulips – I contrived to annex this when I got married myself, and had it arranged to fit me; as a robe de style it was immensely decorative, and went on forever. Many years later, when Peking Picnic and its successors had made it possible to get clothes from Worth’s myself, I took it to Grosvenor Street to show Mr. Jacques Worth; he was greatly entertained to find one of the firm’s productions still being worn, after nearly seventy years.

I realise that such things as old dresses are trivialities, but in a way they bring me strangely close to my mother’s marriage – these and a photograph of Aunt Abby’s house, down the steps of which she went to her wedding, in the dress of white poult-de-soie trimmed with scores of tiny bows and enriched with some most lovely Duchesse lace which one of my sisters still has. And then she sailed away to England, only to return once in all her life to New Orleans, and the home in New England which she loved so well.

While I not always so careful of dress as what would now be called a tomboyish child, I was always interested in loveliness, of whatever kind, be it music or lace or the roseate sunset over the garden wall at Porters in Hertfordshire where I was born, in 1889.

It was an idyllic life, gilded in the earliest of a child’s memories, but truly so also, for my older brother and sisters remembered in the same way. My father’s railway investment business was expanding even faster than the nurseries; he once told my husband that during most of the time that he was at Porters his income was seldom less than £80,000 a year. This with income tax at under a shilling in the pound! No wonder that my mother had a free hand in the garden. One thing that she created there sticks in my mind, because I remember it. This may seem impossible, since we left the place six weeks before my second birthday, and I never saw Porters again till the late 1930s, when it was being built over and I was middle aged. Long after I was married I said to my mother that I seemed to remember rolling over and over down the smooth grass paths of a hollow full of red roses; paths intersected the rosebeds fanwise, and converged on a round grass-plot at the bottom, where my fat little body came to rest. Could this be true? And if so, where was it? My mother smiled delightedly. Yes, she had had an old hollow full of rubbish cleared out at Porters and planted it with beds of crimson roses.

I have another example of the same sort, going even further back. My mother often told us how frightened I was of the turkey-cock at Porters, till I was sick of hearing about the shameful incident in the farmyard, when the great bird came strutting and gobbling towards us with outspread tail and wings brushing the ground, all his wattles aflame with the engorged blood, and I fled to her in terror. One Christmas during the first World War – we were at the Holt in Godalming, and Patrick was not yet born, so it must have been 1917 – my mother was staying with us and Yah, our old nurse, was looking after my oldest child while her own nurse was away, and the two old ladies fell to recalling the past, and this tale of the turkey gobbler came up.

I said to my mother, ‘It’s a curious thing, but you know whenever you tell that story, I see the place, as plainly as anything, the farmyard is cobbled, and lies on quite a steep slope; there are buildings round the lower sides, but not at the top, and there are two gates, not in the middle but rather high up, on each side. There is a pump down in one lower corner, too.

‘I can see Grace too. She is wearing a little navy-blue coat, of some rather knobbly woollen stuff, trimmed with grey lambskin; and she has on a little navy-blue bonnet trimmed with lambskin to match, turned back in the corners behind the ears.’
Yah pricked up her own ears at this – anything to do with clothes always thrilled her.
‘They had those coats new that winter, Ma’am, Miss Grace and Miss Cottie; we had to let them down next winter when we went to Eastbourne.’ Her peasant memory had it all taped out. The two ladies worked it out; I was only two in the second week of September that year. Turkey cocks began to strut and droop their wings and gobble as early as February. Grace would not have been wearing that coat later than the first week of May. Putting the estimate at the lowest, I had here conclusive proof of an exceedingly sharp visual memory going back to a moment when I was at most a year and seven months. Such proofs must be surely rare – anyhow I find the fact interesting.

I remember little of that interregnum between Hertfordshire and Surrey, except that at Eastbourne I first began to be taken to church. We went to Holy Trinity because the parson there, Mr. Bathurst, was acceptably low-church; I enjoyed the hymns, because for them my Father always lifted Grace and me up to stand on the seat on either side of him; he had a theory that children could sing praise to God better if they were not muffled and stifled by stout adult backs. This was most agreeable; we piped as loud as we could, and looked round on the congregation at the same time. But in this position we could not only see but be seen, and seen we were by members of my husband’s family. His grandmother lived in Eastbourne. We did not know them then, nor they us, but twenty years later one of my sisters-in-law told me how clearly she remembered the two little girls who used to stand on the seat during the hymns, one on each side of a tall blond man. We were stamped on her memory, she said, by the beauty of our clothes: pelisses of thick cream corded silk and ‘Victorian bonnets’ to match. She described these to me minutely, and on old photograph with an Eastbourne firm’s name on the back corroborates her. My mother-in-law had neither as much dress-sense, nor, I suppose, as much money as my mother, and her daughters greatly envied us our pretty outfits.

The house at Enfield Green is the first home I remember clearly and continuously. A child really only remembers the things that were important to it – in the case of a happy child, as on the whole I was, this means mainly the things that brought it delight. It meant nothing to me that the house itself was externally monstrous: red brick and mock timber-and-plaster, with balconies, porches, bow-windows and flat leaded roofs in all directions; I thought it nice that there was hardly a bedroom from which one could not step into the open air in one’s nightgown, and on the leads outside the room where for a long time I slept with Patty, the second nurse who gave me my nickname, I was able to make my pet snails creep races along the cold grey surface towards the lettuce-leaves which I spread out enticingly some feet ahead of them.

A great source of pleasure was the river. The house stood on a spur of hill four hundred feet above the Thames; from the terrace, flanked with roses surrounding it, we looked out on one side to Windsor Castle through a gap in the high line of beeches which fringed the lawn, on another across the flat blue Thames Valley to Harrow Hill, with its twin spires. Immediately below us ran the Thames, full and gentle between flat grassy fields and hedgerows – only a few minutes scamper down Priests’ Hill by the shortcut through the wood to Haines’ boat-house – but oh what a long pull up again, burdened with the picnic-baskets. There we learned to row, to scull, and to handle the Canadian canoe, the first to reach England, brought over by my father’s railroad crony Mr. Ross. In the spring and summer when my elder sisters Therese and Cora, then at Oxford, were home we spent long afternoons on the quiet water, going ashore to have tea or pick cowslips. At weekends, when my father was at home, we had out the randan and went much further – downstream as far as Staines or Laleham, or upstream through Datchet with its houseboats to where Windsor Castle stood up quite close at hand across the Home Park. My elder sisters rather disliked these expeditions in the randan, with my father drilling everyone about feathering and keeping in stroke, but I enjoyed going so far afield. We were taught to love the outdoors. Victorian children may have been under the watchful eye of governesses and nannies, in our set, but we were scarcely cooped up, and we had a freedom which is astonishing by comparison to the life of the average public-school child of today.

Sunday afternoons were good, under my mother’s auspices. The place where she conducted her activities – this was at Ridgemead, to which we moved just before I was ten – was called the Moorish room, because carved wooden harem-shutters enclosed the fireplace and panelled most of it. In the bow-window stood a heavy mock Jacobean oak desk at which she dashed off her innumerable and rather illegible letters. There was a lovely squashy divan covered with sapphire-blue velvet inset with squares barbarously cut from silken Isfahan rugs, and many saddle-bag armchairs; we were allowed to pull out all the cushions, collect carriage rugs from the oaken chest in the hall as roofs, and behind the divan create ships or royal dwellings or smugglers’ caves at our pleasure. We constantly shouted out accounts of who we were and what we were doing, and received encouraging confirmation.

There was one other peculiar feature to our Sundays. Owing to my father’s sabbatical ideas all food had to be cold, except for tea and coffee, and potatoes baked in their jackets. A healthy child is normally rather greedy, and it is natural that food should figure largely in its memories; though physically fragile – in the winters I had asthma and ‘glands’, bronchitis, I think –I was perfectly healthy otherwise and extremely greedy. I remember our food at home vividly. As a period picture, a piece of social history, the side table at breakfast time on a Sunday morning at Ridgemead is perhaps worth recording. It stood in the bow-window with the doors opening onto the terrace through which I escaped on my idiotic flight to Windsor at age ten, put out by some injustice or schoolroom sling. On it were ranged, week after week, the following: a ham, uncut; a glassed tongue mounted on a round spiked wooden slab, to ensure easy cutting; a pate de fois gras six inches across; a lump of glazed pressed beef and, according to season, a pasty of either lamb, mutton, or venison. For luncheon and supper there were similar but larger cold joints, with cold birds and cold pies.

I was actually responsible for introducing a new form of pie: after reading in Pepys about the ‘Turkey Pie’ which he so relished, I coaxed my mother to have one made. Wattie, our stately Scottish cook, who could make anything, launched herself with enthusiasm on this unknown dish – it was quite as good as Pepys had said, and thereafter we had it often. My mother had almost as many cookery books as books about flowers and birds. There was one called Crefydd’s Family Fare, of which I have a copy still, and I still follow its recipes for preserves – such as using red-currant juice in the making of strawberry jam so that it shall set. The very word pectin was unknown in good old Crefydd’s day, still less could town-dwellers buy it in packets to set their jam with; but currants are full of pectin while strawberries contain almost none, and both my mother and the Welshwoman knew empirically that to get firm jam, strawberries must be allied with currant-juice.

Such joyous housewifery I reacquired only on having a house of my own later, for when I was fifteen, in 1904, we moved from Surrey to London in one of those reversals of my father’s affairs which should have been ominous but was not. It was an awkward, bad age anyway. It was that year I grew so much and began to develop something of a figure, which I hated, not only because it meant submitting to the indignity of corsets which though now straight-lasted and not painfully curved, still had to be worn; one’s clothes were cut to them and would not fit otherwise. I hated the whole business of burgeoning womanhood, and skulked away on river walks, climbed trees and hid in the attic scribbling poetry – much of which was published in London penny papers later – and was thoroughly miserable.

The move to London ushered in the one really unhappy period of my girlhood. It filled me with despair and though my mother said nothing about it, I knew that she hated it too. Once more she had to leave a garden which she had made beautiful just as it came to perfection. Oh yes, she was in despair and so was I, exchanging my childhood’s idyll for London with its grime and murk, and horizons pricked with chimney pots, after our ever-changing views over the Thames Valley, and of Windsor Castle through the beeches that bounded the lawn.

We moved to another ugly but extremely comfortable house; ugly comfortable houses seemed to be almost a speciality of my father’s. This was that large lump of dark sooty red brick which still stands by itself in Elm Park Gardens, fronting on the Fulham Road. I believe it is now turned into flats, but we filled it to overflowing, diminished as our establishment was. It was a general winding up and drawing in which Providence in a way completed when my brother Bobby died of meningitis two or three years later.

My mother understood perfectly what leaving Ridgemead, the only home I had really known, meant to me and did some very percipient things about it. For one thing, she let me help about the move. She took me up to London with her to go over the empty house, allocate the rooms, and measure walls for our furniture; crawling about the dusty floors with an inch-tape and a note-book, feeling for the first time the chemical unpleasantness if London’s dirt on my skin, I nevertheless had the comfort of being useful – comfort she had learnt to value herself, so long ago as an orphan child.

She gave me a pretty bedroom with a big bow-window looking west, from which I could watch London’s sunsets down the rather drab vista of the Fulham Road; there was a plane-tree outside, so that I could hear the rustle of leave at night, harsher and more metallic than the rustle of country leaves, which carried no mineral burden of soot, but much better than no leaves at all. For my lessons she allotted me a charming little room at the back of the house leading out of the drawing room; it was nearly all windows, with a wide low window seat, and overlooked the lawns and shrubberies extending down the whole length of the Gardens to the line of plane-trees at the farther end. On autumn evenings, with bonfires burning and the blue dusk filling the enclosed space, I could almost believe myself in the country.

After I took my exams for Oxford when I was seventeen, I began reading Italian History with Greta Robertson, and at my mother’s insistence put up my hair and began to go about -- with very little enthusiasm at first. But she knew better than to encourage my morbid scribbling tendencies. I could closet myself away for whole days writing stories or poetry or journals. Grace had come out, and then I was rather alone; Jack was at Wellington; Cora and Helen both at Oxford, Therese ‘slumming’ as it was called, at the Lady Margaret Hall Settlement in South London, doing after-care for the Lady Almoner – then a very newfangled appointment – at St. Thomas’ Hospital; Harry, whom I adored, was at Father’s office all day and dined out practically every night – something my poor father extremely disliked. Grace and Jenny were the only two permanently at home besides myself, and they were also out a great deal. They were both beautiful dancers, and at that stage cared more for dancing than anything else, and there were among our circle of acquaintance plenty of friendly married women to chaperone them to dances night after night.

This had its repercussions on our social life. Young men might be brilliant or worthy, they might speak with tongues of men and of angels, but if they danced badly it profited them nothing, as far as my two sisters were concerned. So it was the young men who dances who were most often invited to the house; I still came down to dinner, which had now been postponed to seven-fifteen, and I found the company in London less interesting than that in Surrey, where dancing had not been a necessary qualification. My mother was not at ease in the milieu either; it was something quite outside her experience that girls should dance with men whose parents were not lifelong friends of their parents. Such a thing was not done in New Orleans. True, she had danced and ridden with my father, and though I am sure she never admitted the thought, it seemed to have led to this. But the sons of her old friends in Hertfordshire did not dance really well, and though they came to the house occasionally, as partners my two sisters spurned them.

By some accident of heredity, my sort of people were her sort of people and we could enjoy them together. When Jack and Helen and I began climbing seriously when I was sixteen and had our own circle of mountaineering friends she was exceedingly fond of most of them, like E.F. Bradby, George, Geoffrey and the rest. In the holidays, when Jack was home, we all skated at Princes, which I immensely enjoyed; there I met boys and girls of my own age, Enid and Ivar Campbell, and the young Gibbses and Trotters; it was a healthy, normal outlet. But in the terms I had to find my own things to do.

Whenever we could, be went down to Richmond Park or Kew or Hampton Court to nourish our eyes with the sight of green things growing, when I wasn’t dragging my governess Miss Metsch to the art galleries or the picture-shows, to see the flowers in bloom even though in gardens not our own. If there was not time to go so far afield we took rugs and cushions, boarded a bus outside the door – buses in those agreeable days stopped where you wanted them to, not at fixed points for their own convenience – and got off at Brompton Cemetery. There, between the railway and that central space bounded by hideous cloisters we found a quiet spot where trees overhung a few neglected tombstones; we spread our rugs on the grass and passed a quiet hour or so in the green shade, almost oblivious to the roar of traffic down the Fulham Road.

I lived for the summers in Switzerland. We seldom went for less than three months. We settled down – at Brunnen and at Mürren- and were joined gradually by the American relations in force: little Aunt Jane, Aunt Sally T. and her widowed daughter Louisa Townsend with her boy, Idanna di Brazza and her father Detalmo. The Day cousins, E.C. and Uncle Bob, and some of the Glennys as well. Again the Southern accents flowed musically, again, the ‘Day girls’ enjoyed their anecdotes and jokes. There was usually one English contribution to this family gathering, and only one – Charles Masefield, whose eldest brother Reginald had married my cousin Doll Sanders, one of my Aunt Isabel’s many daughters. He took to attaching himself to us for his summer holidays.

It was Charles Masefield who first wakened me up to the fact that men could be interested in me as well as vice-versa. I was fifteen that summer at Brunnen, very tall and gangling, thin as a rake, and I came into the hotel lounge still damp from the lake looking for my mother to beg some money for an ice-cream as I had forgotten to take my pocketbook. Barefoot, in a damp jersey bathing costume with short sleeves and drawers above the knees, and summer-gilded hair streaming in seaweed tendrils down to the elbows, I hardly presented the picture of a proper young lady.

As I stepped into the room, Charles looked up from his reading beside the sunny front window. He started and coloured vividly, which drew my attention, and something in his intense, stricken gaze set my heart thumping in terror. I had been a moment before a carefree child – now I felt like something else, a quarry. I knew exactly how a deer in the woods felt when cornered by the hunter. My mouth went dry and all my limbs loose. I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t fall on the floor. There was no one else in the lounge at this hour, the middle of the day, but I felt terribly conspicuous and that the room was too small. I had done something wrong, I sensed, but didn’t know what. Confused and really terrified, I backed up a step, unable to speak, and was mortified when he sprang up and came near.

‘Miss Sanders, are you quite all right?’ He asked and made to take my arm. I was taller than he. He was a pleasantly handsome man with large brown eyes, and an expansive forehead, somewhat pale, as if he spent too much time with books; his fingernails were manicured, and he spoke softly and with Oxbridge accents – withal, nothing to be frightened of. But he was too near, too present, too... something. No one had ever called me Miss Sanders before either. His hand, on my arm, shook a little. He was very pale indeed now.
‘I was looking for my mother,’ I burst out, tripping over the words in haste. I looked at his hand on my arm, wanting to shake him off but too frightened to move.
He breathed again then, and the colour came back into his face. ‘Dear girl,’ he murmured. ‘Shall I help you find her?’ Something in his tone, so soft and inviting, galvanised me.
‘No no no!’

I tore myself loose from him and ran outdoors again, running all the way down to the lake where Jack and Harry were playing battledore by the water’s edge, diving onto the rug beside Jenny under our umbrella and curling up in a little ball.
Harry laughed.
‘What’s got into you, Cot? You look as if you’d seen a ghost.’ He swatted the shuttlecock back to Jack nonchalantly.
‘Nothing,’ I mumbled into my knees.
Jenny squinted askance at me. She was reading a ladies’ magazine, cool and prim and pretty in a white linen lingerie dress, all lace and embroidery, her brown hair in carefully casual abundance beneath her straw hat. She was plump and lovely, all pink and white. Perfectly ladylike. I now felt gauche and stupid. What a ninny Charles Masefield would think me!

‘What happened?’ she whispered, too low for the boys to hear.
‘I went in looking for Mummy, and Charles looked as if he’d have me for supper.’
A little smile twitched in the corners of her mouth. ‘Did you go that like?’
‘Yes,’ muttered sullenly.
‘Well, it’s no wonder!’ She put down her magazine. ‘You can’t fly about like a child any longer, you know. It gives men ideas.’
‘What ideas?’
‘Ideas,’ she said primly.
‘Like your dancing young men who want to take you to dinner?’ It was the only thing I could think of.
‘Much more dangerous than that...’ Jenny, flirt and gossip, paused with a sense of drama. ‘Motorcar rides, picture-shows... all sorts of things.’
I had held her gadding about and her young men in contempt for two or three years, but plainly she knew something I didn’t about men.
‘What should I do?’
She smiled at me now. ‘Not running about coltishly would be a start.’
I was outraged. ‘I’m supposed to sit and sew?’
Jenny laughed outright. ‘That I should live to see it! No. But understand that men will see you as a young woman from now on, and not a girl who reads Latin and collects leaves and frogs and climbs up rainspouts. They’ll see you as grown up, even though you’re not.’ She leaned over with an affectionate smile and pulled my hair.
‘I hate men,’ I declared. But it wasn’t quite true. I didn’t hate Cousin Francesco, for instance.

It was the same the next year in the Alps. We went to Interlaken and Zermatt and I climbed the Breithorn and the Monte Rosa and Castor and Pollux, and met Geoffrey Young and Francis Younghusband. The first time I saw Geoffrey he was coming down the Gorner glacier from a climb, behind his guide and friend Joseph Knubel, and was whistling something from Wagner, which caught my attention. He was beautiful, and when he passed where we stood resting, he looked up, then looked again at the tall girl with the long gold plaits, his expression thoughtful.
At dinner he came to our table and presented me with a poem in an unsealed envelope, saying to my mother,
‘I hope you will allow the liberty. Mrs. Sanders. I’m Geoffrey Young –‘
‘We know who you are, Mr. Young,’ my mother said with a smile.

‘Thank you,’ Geoffrey smiled in return then continued. ’Today on the glacier I saw a lovely creature whom I thought must be a Willi, but I found upon enquiry that she was this mortal girl, daughter of James Sanders, though hardly “mere”.’ He looked at me, with those large expressive pale blue eyes that ought to have made any girl swoon. ‘A vision, if a poet may say, Miss Sanders.’ He turned back to my mother. ‘I hope you will allow me to present a bit of verse to her? In thanks for the delight that vision gave, for I was just then far away in the Nibelung, and I wasn’t sure if she was real or not.’ He looked at me again, and I blushed and felt very hot, for he was famous even then and beautiful, and I didn’t know what to make of the attention; so I hung my head like a bashful child, I’m sorry to say.

‘Certainly Mr. Young,’ my mother said in her soft Southern voice. ‘Thank you for it.’
‘She is beautiful,’ he said to my mother. ‘I’d mind her.’
I looked up at this, and there was in Geoffrey’s expression, warmth and a knowing, but it was kind and avuncular and not ravenous, and I liked him.
‘I do,’ my mother said. ‘Thank you, sir.’ With that Geoffrey became my mother’s fast friend as well, and thus was inaugurated a lifelong friendship between us all.
Geoffrey bowed and went back to his table, meanwhile Jack and Harry each made to snatch the envelope from beside my plate.
‘Open it!’
‘Let us all read it!’ Harry managed to snatch it, being nearest. Helen just looked on it all with amusement, her arms crossed before her.
‘Now now,’ my mother said without agitation, taking the envelope from my brother’s fingers. ‘It belongs to Cottie. She’ll look at it later, and I’m sure will share it with us, won’t you dear?’
There was no question of going against that gentle injunction. I could share it or not, as I saw fit, but my brothers were not to harass me about it. We passed the rest of the meal in peace, though you may be sure at the end of it, Helen and I tore upstairs to fall on the bed and read the poem.

His handwriting was beautiful and spidery, with swirls amid the graceful lettering. A poet, indeed. The poem was very short, but rich:

Willi
Upon a mountain path, nigh unto the gate of heaven
stood the warrior maiden, resolute, with an angel’s face
her stainless being a challenge: are you worthy to pass
into the realm of great gods? I see into the hearts of men
Beware! Beware!
- GWY 23 July, 1905

Looking down into the valley that was Visp, with Helen and Jack on that warm and cloudless day, I remembered Geoffrey’s poem, tucked away in my box of treasures in the blue room in the Fulham Road, and shuddered. He had accorded me a knowingness I did not have, still did not have. He had it. I had become for him, I had the wit to realise, an icon. Could I live up to it? What did it mean?
What did it mean?

I could no more answer that than I could what it meant that George Mallory had appeared in my life. Geoffrey had brought both. I had trusted him for four years, beginning in that passing moment on the glacier a shy, then a firmer friendship rooted in the love of mountain ways. He understood, without words, how I felt within the recesses of my heart. And so did George, to a much deeper and more intimate degree. What did it mean? Where was it all going? I shuddered again in the warm day.
Helen looked at me lazily from where she was lying in the sun, her boots and stockings off.
‘Are you cold?’ She asked in a tone of concern. It was blazing hot.
‘No,’ I voiced distantly.
‘She’s bewitched by our friend Mallory,’ Jack murmured from his place down the hill a bit. I didn’t think he had been paying me any mind.

He was joking, twitting me, but I didn’t answer; I couldn’t, for it was true. George had shattered my pleasant, aimless existence by his ardent presence, and I didn’t know how to live. Mountains mattered to me, but now they were forever associated with him. How would I live, when I hardly knew more than his name? Was he too a figment, a wraith, as Geoffrey had called me a Willi? It was all so unreal. I didn’t know what to do.

Eventually, I warmed up again and in the lazy sunshine decided on the only thing I could do: write to Geoffrey and ask for George’s address. It was a bold thing to do – my mother would never approve – but it was the only thing I could do. He was my fate and I must follow.