QUAINT FIGURE

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 71, 25 March 1938, Page 20

QUAINT FIGURE

PEPITA'S DAUGHTER

ECCENTRICLADY OF KNOLE

SPENT A FORTUNE

In the autumn of 1852 a young English attache named Lionel SackvilleWest met in Paris a Spanish dancer called Pepita, professionally known as the Star of Andalusia, writes Charles Wairne in "John o' London's Weekly." He was the fifth son of the fifth Earl de la Wan\ and was later to inherit Knole and the Sackville peerage; she was the daughter of an old clothes pedlar, and had conveniently mislaid a husband. They spent a week together in Paris, and at the end of it he was writing her letters beginning "Mon ange, bien aimee de mon coeiir. . . ."' The romance lasted until her death in 1871,. and during these years she bore him seven children. The pair seem to have taken no specialprecaution to keep their liaison secret, yet Lionel Sackville-West continued to enjoy Queen Victoria's favour until 1888, and then" it was a political indiscretion that ' brought about his downfall. After the birth, of:their third child in 1865 Pepita gave up her career as a dancer and settled down to a life of domesticity at Arcachori, near Bordeaux. .There is little to indicate that Sack-ville-West was a dashing V l6ver, apart from an incident at Malaga in 1365, when he tried to marry Pepita big'amously, and was frustrated by the prompt action of the British Consul, who locked him up in a room for three whole days and then packed him off by steamer. Miss V. Sackville-West, his granddaughter, who .tells his story in "Pepita," remembers him as a reserved old man of nearly 80, who' used to "slam his tweed cap down on. to the settee on the way to the dining-room, stumping along towards luncheon without speaking a word—for he was without exception the most taciturn man I have.ever known." CAPTURED THE HEIR. Her attempt to bring Pepita to iife is riot wholly successful. There is a flatness about the first half of the book, which is based on the dossier assembled to disprove the claim to the Sackville peerage brought by Pepita's first-born son. But "with the entry of Pepita's daughter, Victoria, the flatness disappears. This is a portrait built upon personal recollections, arid it is so vivid that it has the effect of dimming the earlier pages altogether. Perhaps Miss Sackville-West did not anticipate this' danger. It looks, as though she found herself in the position of the novelist who' sees with mixed feelings that a character he had cast for a secondary role has insisted on usurping the lead.' ... ' .'.; '...'.: Pepita's daughter had no. lack .of suitors.' If she had not met her first cousin—another 'Lionel Sackyille-West —she might' have married, ah ardent French marquis. But fate ordained that she should capture the young heir of Knole, who was then 21—five years her junior..* ':'. , , '".'. She was," of course, quite, unfitted to rule over Knole, and its stately, magnificence could not mean'to her what it meant to an inheritor of the Sackville traditions. Humorously and v affectionately Miss Sackville-West makes clear how sadly lacking her mother was in reverence for these traditions. One of the ideas she conceived was a charity called the Knole Guild, and when she found that her friends could be perv suaded to buy articles at double their value she proposed to set up a shop with that name, in London for the benefit of her private pocket. She was genuinely hurt when her husband told •her that she could not continue to call it the Knole Guild! . ' WRITING MOTTOES. However, she was soon comforted by her own ingenuity\ in inventing ' the name Spealls, an anagram composed from the name of her first—but"not last—manageress. "Spealls" proved a nightmare to everybody, connected with. it. -."'■' '' . ■ '■• *. No one could leave Knole without being loaded'with notes and parcels for distribution in London "to save postage"; every piece of brown paper and string which came into the house had to be saved; arid anyone'who was suspected of any hidden talent was pressed into service .. . I found myaelf set down with a pair of scissors, a pot .of paste, and a pile of horrible little notebooks, which I was expected to cover in .silk or chintz. '■.'; " :.' ". A worse ordeal was in, store for her. She had once written a verse on the death of a canary, and this suggested a way in which she. could make herself useful:— ' ' • . . My mother was very fond of mottoes and epigrams. "Never complain, never explain,"' was a favourite, and so, was "A camel can go for nine days without' water, but who wants to be a camel?" ."Do right, and fear no man; don't write; and. fear no. woman," was another •, which particularly pleased her. If I could write verses on the death of a canary, I could surely turn out such gems of neatness and wit by the dozen? ..... I tried. I really did. I spent anguished hours trying. ' How I envied the artist • who composed the. mottoes of Tom Bgown's Christmas crackers! How: I regretted that my literary inclination?, refused to bend themselves in that direction! ..■',.., ' • WOULD CUT UP STAMPS. Lady Sackville was both prodigal and parsimonious. She went the length of cutting' up, used stamps and piecing them together so'that'no post-, mark appeared,- but she was quite capable' of tipping a waiter five-pounds (not always, out of her own pocket!) if she discovered that he had a sick Wife or an ailing child: She patronised a Ma'yfair stationer, but her. letters were often written *on the backs of catalogues. . Miss Sackville-West quotes -one. of the letters her'mother wrote to' Lord Kitchener, during, the war. She began by protesting that he' had taken all her menservants from her: , "I do not complain about the footmen, although I must say that I had never thought I would see parlourmaids at Knole! .. '. Dear Lord X., I am sure you will sympathise with me when I say that parlourmaids are so middle-class, not at all what you and me are used t0..:. .Do you not realise, my dear .Lord X., that you are ruining houses like ours?" One of the late Lady Sackville's many fetishes was fresh air. Regular meals in the dining-room had always bored her, so she hit on the idea, of having her meals brought to her out of doors on a tray—even in the depth, of winter! . ' The arrangement entailed heavy fur coats which prevented any free movement of the arms; hot-water bottles piled on one's knees; a horrible fur rug terminating in a foot-muff which gave me claustrophobia; and a variety of tickly woollen things, like mufflers and mittens, which my mother ;kndttedi(herself j (out oS/, Cp.&ti scraps of wool) and insisted on my wearing in spite of my protests. SOLD WORKS OF ART. She would occasionally find herself short of money, and the obvious method of raising it was to sell works of art.' In two years she got £45,000/ from these sales. But she did not keep it long. Miss Sackville-West records that she once left £1000 in notes in

a taxi", never to be recovered. She stopped short of organising a flag day for her own benefit, but she thought nothing of inventing a fund called the "Roof of Friendship" towards the cost of repairing one of her houses. Everybody she knew was asked to give her enough to buy at- least one tile, and she was furious when William .Nicholson,- the painter, sent her a real tile done up in a brown paper parcel! A woman of Lady Saclcville's charm naturally attracted a wide circle of friends. None was more devoted to her than the late Sir John Murray Scott—a truly gorgeous character. Here is Miss Sackville-West's picture of him: "An enormous man, six-feet-four in his stockings, he weighed over twentyfive stone, and for all my efforts as a child I never could get a five-foot measuring tape to meet round the place where his waist ought to have been. There was something monumental about him, which made everyone of normal size look mere friskers around him.' Perpetually flapping a large silk handkerchief to keep away the flies, he rolled and billowed along on disproportionately tiny feet. If. we ever mislaid him in an unfamiliar town, we could be pretty sure of finding him gazing wistfully at the cakes in the windows of a pastrycook, with a crowd of', little boys lost in admiration of that colossal back. "SEERY'S" DINING-ROOM. He was known as. "Seery," an allusion to the difficulty French servants had with his name. He owned an enormous house in Paris, stored with the furniture which is now in the Wallace collection, and there he was often host to Lady Sackville and her daughter. Miss Sackyille-West writes of the vast dining-room that it was "a place where people might linger, delighting in" the pleasures of the mind, the palate, and the eye." ' On the table stood a bowl as large as. a foot-bath, which was filled daily with out-of-sea-] son flowers—until the "little Spanish j beggar" suppressed it as a needless luxury^ This was quite in keeping with her. tastes and character—years later she cheerfully replaced the delphiniums in her garden "at Brighton \vith imitations of .painted tin! But whatever she did Seery's devotion to her never wavered, and when .he died, worth over a million, he left her £150,000 and the contents of his'house in Paris. I