massive wooden affair painted shiny black. It was too short to lie on and you could only sit on it in an upright position, as if you tried to lean you hit your head against the high back. It was upholstered in yellow-brownvelvet of such rich and excellent quality that it stuck to one’s clothes, making it impossible to move about, and the unyielding cushions and rigid bolsters took up more room than the unlucky users. Each bedroom was provided with an oak washing-stand of massive proportions and a towel-horse conceived on aesthetic lines but sadly wanting in stability and far too apt to fall heavily forward on to a small child, smothering it in bath towels. As for pre-Raphaelite beds, it can only have been the physical vigour and perfect health of their original designers that made them believe their work was fit to sleep in. It is true that the spring mattress was then in an embryonic stage and there were no spiral springs to prevent a bed from taking the shape of a drinking-trough after a few weeks’ use, but even this does not excuse the use of wooden slats running lengthways as an aid to refreshing slumber. Luckily children never know when they are uncomfortable and the pre-Raphaelites had in many essentials the childlike mind.
Opposite our parents’ room was Uncle Phil’s room. It was one of the passage rooms betweenthe two houses. You entered it from the brown staircase and found a window on your right and another door immediately opposite, a trap to the unwary as it opened directly on to three steep steps leading down to the studio in the other part of the house. The long window looking on to the grassy courtyard where the ilex grew was another of the minor discomforts of pre-Raphaelite architecture. The not unpleasing original sash window had been removed and a number of what were apparently casement windows substituted, but instead of opening outwards or inwards they moved sideways in grooves and invariably stuck. You know how a badly made drawer will open in jerks, first at one side and then at the other till it sticks in a crooked position and wall neither open nor shut. So it was with these windows, except that the crooked opening was from top to bottom. On a sweltering August day one had to wrestle with a window that would not open more than three inches at the bottom, or two at the top, or at Christmas when one wanted to keep out the south-west gale, the window would refuse to budge and a piercing shaft of cold and wetwould devastate the room as one madly pushed the unyielding frame.
Uncle Phil, my grandparents’ only son, my mother’s elder brother, had many gifts and great depths of affection, but he was a very unhappy man. He could have been a distinguished painter and would have been one under a luckier star, but two things told fatally against him. He never needed to work, and he was cursed with a sense of diffidence and a feeling that whatever he did would be contrasted unfavourably with his father’s work. If he had had to depend on himself and had worked in his own way, I do not believe that what he feared would have happened. He had a genuine gift for landscapes and had made a style of portrait painting which was peculiarly his own, using canvases about 30 inches by 20 and painting his sitter in three-quarter length. The portrait of his father which is now in the National Portrait Gallery is the best possible example of his gift for these little likenesses. My grandfather is standing in his white studio coat working at a large canvas with the look of patient concentration that cameupon him when he was creating. The likeness is perfect and the whole atmosphere of the painter is reproduced with loving mastery. If Uncle Phil had never done more than this one portrait he could claim his place among those who have truly loved and followed art. His kindness of heart was unbounded and yet he could wound most cruelly and deliberately. There was on his mother’s side, coming from her mother’s family,
Opposite our parents’ room was Uncle Phil’s room. It was one of the passage rooms betweenthe two houses. You entered it from the brown staircase and found a window on your right and another door immediately opposite, a trap to the unwary as it opened directly on to three steep steps leading down to the studio in the other part of the house. The long window looking on to the grassy courtyard where the ilex grew was another of the minor discomforts of pre-Raphaelite architecture. The not unpleasing original sash window had been removed and a number of what were apparently casement windows substituted, but instead of opening outwards or inwards they moved sideways in grooves and invariably stuck. You know how a badly made drawer will open in jerks, first at one side and then at the other till it sticks in a crooked position and wall neither open nor shut. So it was with these windows, except that the crooked opening was from top to bottom. On a sweltering August day one had to wrestle with a window that would not open more than three inches at the bottom, or two at the top, or at Christmas when one wanted to keep out the south-west gale, the window would refuse to budge and a piercing shaft of cold and wetwould devastate the room as one madly pushed the unyielding frame.
Uncle Phil, my grandparents’ only son, my mother’s elder brother, had many gifts and great depths of affection, but he was a very unhappy man. He could have been a distinguished painter and would have been one under a luckier star, but two things told fatally against him. He never needed to work, and he was cursed with a sense of diffidence and a feeling that whatever he did would be contrasted unfavourably with his father’s work. If he had had to depend on himself and had worked in his own way, I do not believe that what he feared would have happened. He had a genuine gift for landscapes and had made a style of portrait painting which was peculiarly his own, using canvases about 30 inches by 20 and painting his sitter in three-quarter length. The portrait of his father which is now in the National Portrait Gallery is the best possible example of his gift for these little likenesses. My grandfather is standing in his white studio coat working at a large canvas with the look of patient concentration that cameupon him when he was creating. The likeness is perfect and the whole atmosphere of the painter is reproduced with loving mastery. If Uncle Phil had never done more than this one portrait he could claim his place among those who have truly loved and followed art. His kindness of heart was unbounded and yet he could wound most cruelly and deliberately. There was on his mother’s side, coming from her mother’s family,
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