ROGER FRY: A Biography. Virginia Woolf
as she walked along the road, the street boys had jeered “Quack! Quack!” at her. Very shy and sensitive, the effect of such an upbringing was permanent. Always she seemed to live between two worlds, and to belong to neither. Thus it was no wonder that when her second son was a child, her eyes remained firmly yet uneasily shut to many of the sights that were to him objects “of a much more sincere worship than I was at all able to give to ‘gentle Jesus’ “—red poppies, red engines, and green flower-buds with little pieces of scarlet silk showing through the cracks between the sepals. And yet he respected her; and was “drilled to implicit obedience”.
The garden in which he received this first lesson in the rudiments of botany was surrounded by other gardens. Below it stretched Ken Wood, then belonging to Lord Mansfield; and Ken Wood merged in the heights of Hampstead. Highgate itself was a village; and though, as Sir Edward Fry said, the murmur of London stole up the hill, access to the great city was difficult. Only “an occasional omnibus” connected the two. The “villagers” were still isolated and exalted. They still considered themselves a race apart When Roger was a child, the old hair-dresser who had cut Coleridge’s hair was still cutting hair and recalling the poet’s loquacity—“He did talk!” he would say, but was unable to say what the poet had talked about. Local societies naturally formed themselves. There was a chess society and a society for literary and scientific discussion. A reading society met “once in three weeks to read aloud selections from standard works … Tea is handed round at 7, and sandwiches and fruit at 10 … and if any unfortunate lady, through ignorance or want of thought, put jellies or cream on her supper table she was sure to get a gentle rebuke for her lawlessness.” Sometimes the society met at the Frys”; and the leading spirit—Charles Tomlinson, F.R.S.—an indefatigable and erudite gentleman whose published works range from The Study of Common Salt to translations from Dante and Goethe with volumes upon Chess, Pneumatics and Acoustics, and Winter in the Arctic Regions thrown in—would drop in of a Sunday evening and listen to Sir Edward reading aloud Paradise Lost or George Fox’s Journals or one of Dean Stanley’s books to the children. The reading over, Mr Tomlinson would talk delightfully, if incomprehensibly, to the children. And then he would invite them to tea with him. He would show them all the marvels of his “den”. The small room, as befitted the multiplicity of its owner’s interests, was crowded with fascinating objects. There was an electrical machine; musical glasses; and Chladni’s clamp—an invention by which sand, when a violin was played, formed itself into beautiful patterns. Roger’s lifelong delight in scientific experiments must have been stimulated. But science was part of the home atmosphere; art was “kept in its place”; that is the Academy would be dutifully visited; and a landscape, if it faithfully recorded the scene of a summer holiday, would be dutifully bought. Thus it was through Charles Tomlinson perhaps that he first became aware of those aesthetic problems that were later to become so familiar. As the author of a Cyclopaedia of Useful Arts Mr Tomlinson had access to certain factories, and he would take the little Frys with him on visits to Price’s Candle Factory, Powell’s Glass-making Works, and a diamond-cutting factory in Clerkenwell. “And these factory visits”, wrote Roger’s sister Agnes, “raised questions of a fresh sort; what made good art and bad art, what ornament was justified, and whether diamonds were not better used for machinery than for necklaces. He was very strongly of opinion that they were—a brooch, he told us, might be useful, but lockets were an abomination to him.” Roger’s opinion, as to what made good and bad art, was unfortunately not recorded. It was again thanks to Mr Tomlinson, who was on good terms with the head gardener, that they went every spring for a walk in Lord Mansfield’s strictly private woods—that “earthly Paradise which we could see all the year from our own garden, which we passed almost daily in our walks, and which for one delightful morning in May-time seemed to belong to us”. So Agnes Fry described Ken Wood; and Ken Wood, as appears from another fragment of autobiography, had its place in Roger’s memory too. But his memory was not of walking in spring woods; it was of winter skating.
One day in January 1929, he says, he was dozing when
suddenly I had a vivid picture of my father skating. It must have been somewhere in the 70’s about ‘74 I should guess and the place was one of the ponds in Lord Mansfield’s Park at Kenwood which is now public property but was then very private. Only when the ponds bore, the privileged families of Highgate of which we were one were allowed in by ticket. It was a beautiful place with beechwoods standing a little back from the pond’s edge and that winter all beflowered with long needles of hoar frost which glittered rosy in the low winter sunshine. And there was my father with a pair of skates which was old-fashioned even for that date. Low wooden skates with a long blade which curled up in an elegant horn in front, skates exactly like those one sees in Dutch pictures. We half despised them because they were old-fashioned, half revered them as belonging to my father. He was passionately fond of skating—it was indeed the only thing approaching to a sport that he cared for. He was passionately fond of it though he skated rather badly at least it was an odd style or absence of style, the way he scuttered along with legs and arms and long black coat tails flying out at all angles and the inevitable top hat to crown it all. He loved skating indeed so much that though he was a Q,.C. in big practice he sometimes managed an afternoon off in the middle of the week so terrified was he of the frost giving before Saturday. It was the only interruption he ever allowed in the routine of his work. So there we were, my mien and I and Porty my elder brother six years my senior and a great swell to us, in various stages of scrambling along on skates in already gaining confidence. My father after two or three turn of the pond would return to us and help us very cheerfully giving a hand and a turn across the pond to those that were sufficiently advanced, for he was a I way» in high spirit when there was skating and even more kind than usual, anyhow more lively more talkative and less alarming. More and more alarming he was destined to become as we grew older and became separate individuals and more unwilling to fit in to the rigid scheme of Victorian domesticity. But on those days he was all laughter and high spirits and there seemed no danger of suddenly finding oneself guilty of moral obliquity which at other times seemed suddenly to be one’s situation without knowing exactly why or how it occurred, for the moral code was terribly complicated and one didn’t always foresee where it would catch you tripping over some apparently indifferent and innocent word or deed. And when it did my father’s voice was of such an awful gravity that one shrunk at once to helpless self-condemnation and overpowering shame.
There was one dark or doubtful spot in the picture—the skates. We were a large family and those who like myself came in the middle had generally to make what they could of discarded skates of the elders. These were made of blades of doubtful steel set in wood with a small screw which went into the heel of one’s boot. These screws had always lost most of their thread and used suddenly to come loose from one’s feet in the middle of an exciting race or when one was just beginning to cut an eight. The worst of these imperfect skates was that in the last resort they delivered you into the hands of the wretched men who hired chairs and fitted on skates. Our relations with these men were strained and painful.
First of all we were brought up to the absolute conviction that all men not in regular employment and receipt of a fairly high salary were morally reprehensible, that in fact the world was so arranged that wealth and virtue almost exactly corresponded, though every now and then we were allowed to despise some parvenu whose mushroom fortune had grown so quickly as to throw a dubious light on the theory itself. Such indeed was the owner of the upstart Kenwood Castle which thrust its gimcrack Gothic brickwork belvidere up into the midst of our own private view from our garden and who seemed actually to want to rival the splendours of Kenwood House which Lord Mansfield filled with his hereditary and long established dignity and actually allowed us to skate on his ponds.
This theory, then, of money being a coefficient of virtue made the pond loafers with their big red noses and big red neckerchiefs who stamped about blowing into their ugly hands altogether foreign beings infinitely remote from us like some other species, almost like the criminal species of man of which we heard now and again.
It is impossible to exaggerate the want of simple humanity in which we were brought up or to explain how that was closely associated with the duty of philanthropy. To pay these poor men who after all were trying to do a piece of work—to pay them a decent tip was truckling to immorality because a casual