A PRESENT FROM DORLAND HALL

Evening Star, Issue 22881, 12 February 1938, Page 3

A PRESENT FROM DORLAND HALL

{Written by Panache, for the ‘ Evening Star.’] When I was told that my present was coming from Dorland Hall I was none the wiser. In my time I had wandered in many halls and would have known what to expect had a gift been winging its way to me from Tammany Hall or the Hall of Mirrors. I knew that gages had strewn the vast floor of Westminster Hall, and that in some of the basements, dignified by the name of servants’ hall, swarmed cockroaches innumerable. But, standing aloof in giant ignorance, I could not even dream of Borland Hall. Then someone gave me a programme, and I read that in Dorland Hall, Lower Regent street, London, S.W.I, was held, last November, the fifth annual book exhibition organised by the ‘ Sunday Times.’ At this National Book Fair each of the leading publishers had a stand, and visitors could saunter in Booksellers’ Bow, or experiment at marbling paper, or, compleat’ anglers fish for books with rod and line. For the fortnight that the exhibition lasted there were three daily talks, when the curious bookworm or the lion hunter might sit at the feet of authors and celebrities in the literary world. On one Tuesday afternoon an ordinary human being could listen to and gaze on A. J. Cronin, Hugh Walpole, and James Agate; and, if not shattered by such a juxtaposition of success, urbanity, and wit, could return the next day to be entertained by Marjorie Bowen, B. C. Sherrifi, and the Bengal ' Lancer.

Saturday was children’s day, when to Borland Hall came Scruffy, the film dog, with his trainer, as well as Sabu, the Elephant Boy. On Sunday the visitor would be advised to rest that he might be prepared on Monday for the impact of Laurence Housman taking all the parts in one of his Queen Victoria plays, and Beverley Nicholls talking on ‘ Publicity,’ and A. P. Herbert on ‘ Libels For All.’ And on the second Saturday, instead of an elephant boy and a film dog, could be seen together on one stage two literary lions, two living poets, W. H., Auden and Day Lewis. This Borland Hall,. then, sounded a very desirable place, and a present from Borland Hall must be a hook. It came. I gazed on' its, name, ‘Pepita,’ and on the drawing on the dust jacket actual size of the sole of one of Pepita’s shoes. I lifted the cover. I swooned. In a few seconds I came to, having had an inkling of what it was to see Shelley plain. Almost I knew what a small boy feels when he gazes on a football that Craven’s sprigged boot has touched. The book was a signed copy. There across the flyleaf was “ Sackville-West,” the initial rather like the hook of an oldfashioned hook and eye. The book had been autographed by the author at the Hogarth Press stand at Borland Hall. V. Sackville-West, the daughter of a hundred'earls, used a fountain pen. There was something most warming in the thought. She was the heroine of ‘ Orlando,’ and here she was the author of a straight biography of her grandmother and of her mother. In a copy that the ignorant could have mistaken for the author’s own I read of the fantastic series of events that made her the descendant of one of England’s , most historic houses and of a Spanish grandmother who' had pedalled old clothes. “ In 1896,” she writes, “it became legally expedient for my grandfather’s solicitors to take the evidence of a number of people in Spain who, some 40 years earlier, had been acquainted with the principal characters involved. The point, in short, was the necessity of proving whether my grandmother, Pepita, had ever been married to my grandfather or not. Several issuqp were at stake: an English peerage and an historic inheritance. With these important issues the solicitors had to deal. They dealt with them in their usual dry, practical way, little foreseeing that the body of evidence collected in 1896 from voluble Spanish peasants, servants, villagers, dancers, and other theatrical folk would in 1936 be reread in stacks of dusty typescript by someone closely connected, who saw therein a hotch-potch of discursiveness, frequently irrelevant, but always fascinating.” ' The hotch-potch has been turned by the someone closely connected into the . romantic story of Lord Sackville, English peer and diplomat, and Pepita, the Spanish dancer. In the first part of the boob, Pepita, the Star of Andalu4a. dances through a crowd of extraordinarily picturesque and sometimes disreputable people. In the second part, Pepita’s .daughter, the late Lady Sackville, entertains us with her charm and her prodigality. The English section is no less exotic and incredible than the Spanish, Pepita’s daughter no less romantic than the dancer, and Knole in Kent quite as fascinating as the House of the Royal Peacocks in Granada. Pepita’s daughter was not, we are told, a static person. She disliked set meals, and would eat her dinner from a tray in the garden by artificial light, while large snowflakes drifted on to her plate. If Nature failed her in her flower-beds she would stick in delphiniums painted on tin. She “ attracted ” money, and had an immense capacity for getting rid of it. A friend left her £150,000 in his will, and she could leave £I,OOO in notes in a taxi. She disliked paying income tax, and wrote a fair, 1 reasonable protest to Bonar Law about it, just as she wrote to Lord Kitchener when he conscripted the dozen workmen necessary to keep in repair the five acres of Knole buildings. V. Sackville-West assures ns that she has altered nothing and invented nothing. Her handling of the facts has made a story full of glamour and poetry and humour She writes of her immediate family and effaces herself. Admirable, too, is her appreciation of those twg widely different characters.

her father and her mother. The two were frequently in active opposition, but the daughter, loving both, does not need to take sides. *‘ Pepita ” is a lovely book, and the moment ypu finish reading it you will be unable to decide whether to- go straight to ‘ The Edwardians ’ for the description of Knole in the first chapter or back to ‘ Orlando ’ to search for glimpses there of the lovable and disconcerting Pepita and her daughter.