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The View from Downshire Hill: A Memoir
Elizabeth Jenkins . Michael Russell, £15.95
Elizabeth Jenkins’ slender memoir is so delicate, so sensitive
and tender, so full of those small perceptive moments of truth that
come from an indomitable literary life.
And the fact that its mere 174 pages leave you gasping for an encore.
At the end, you will inevitably demand another act. Alas, a sequel
is most unlikely to follow. The novelist and biographer who spent
more than half her life living in Downshire Hill, Hampstead, is
100 in October, and the hand of the frail lady writes no more.
It is time to be thankful as, encouraged by her family, she has
been persuaded to tells us some of the tantalising tales of the
past in 13 fleeting episodes, all compelling in their fascinating
evocation of the past century.
It sounds such a long time. It is. From the girl born in Hitchin,
Hertfordshire, the grand daughter of Ebenezer Jenkins, one-time
missionary in India, we are soon into the world of words, history,
academia, obsessive murder and naturally worrying impecunity. And
all displayed with such self-deprecating manners from a bygone age
of gentility that sustained her enduring years.
At Cambridge, she was not a student of Dr Leavis’s lectures
– “the sort of study they required of you was above my
head, and the little of his writings that I did understand seemed
to me to demand a sort of grinding that took the excitement and
joy out of poetry,” she succinctly observes.
University gave her an introduction to the Sitwells, though much
of Edith’s poetry “was obscure to me,” she reveals.
But then she gives us Edith’s explanation of how, like Dante,
she used the sensation received by one sense to describe the sensation
received by another.
Dante spoke of “a place of dumb light” and Elizabeth recalls:
“I was reminded of this many years later as I read of Dom Perignon’s
exclamation, when he had invented sparkling champagne – ‘I
am drinking stars!’”
The fizz is all there throughout.
She moved into a bed-sit in Doughty Street, the heart of Bloomsbury,
where Virginia Woolf reigned, and was invited to tea in Tavistock
Square.
Here she paints a powerful picture of a tall, angular woman with
silver grey hair, and adds: “It was an era when skirts were
very short, and her extended legs were exposed, stretched out, long
and fragile, like stems of old fashioned clay pipes…”
She met Victor Gollancz, who published her first novel, Virginia
Water, which, she discovered later, Virginia Woolf had described
as “a sweet white grape of a book”.
By this time she had become the senior English mistress at Hampstead’s
avant garde and co-educational King Alfred School.
In 1939 her father bought for her No 8 Downshire Hill, one of a
pair of white stucco houses with a castellated frontage built in
1832, she says, with “the last flicker of Regency architecture”.
Here she lived, according to her friend, the novelist Elizabeth
Bowen, in “rather threadbare elegance”, and she admits:
“I had this beautiful but shabby eight-roomed house to myself,
except that, in the early days, I occasionally let the first floor;
and I had a constant stream of visitors.”
At one time, she did have the extravagantly eccentric Theodora Benson
living next door, along with her chickens in the garden.
Of the highly strung Elizabeth, she writes: “She was highly
sexed herself, and attractive to men. You could scarcely explain
this impression since her behaviour was always decorous, but she
bore about her the aroma of passionate experiences.”
She says virtually nothing about her own escapades throughout an
unmarried life during which her blue-eyed beauty captured many hearts.
Her friend AL Rowse described her as being “so pretty she could
have married 20 times over,” yet, when they were together researching
Alfred the Great, Rowse declared: “It would never do for us
to see too much of each other: we should kill each other.”
There is so much else, including how Agatha Christie came to write
The Mousetrap, though one personal disappointment is that she tells
us comparatively little about lovely Hampstead itself and its changing
self over the evocative decades she lived there.
“I have put down what I hope may interest other people,”
she tells us.
Indeed, she has, and it is all written with a polite elegance, best
expressed in her epilogue, where she complains to a Catholic priest:
“Everybody belonging to me is dead.”
Then she recalls a poem by Henry Vaughan that says: “They are
all gone into the world of light.” To this she poignantly adds:
“A great many people do not believe this. I do not want to
contend with them. I will add nothing.”
Brilliant.
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