Georgette Heyer Read online

  By now, Georgette’s eyes had turned to a gray-blue (later gray), though her nose was still a “dear wee snub.” She often sucked her thumb and loved her “eidy,” which she would cuddle when she was tired. Sylvia let her have her first walk out of doors when she was eighteen months old and enjoyed watching her little daughter toddle about the garden. Georgette was fascinated by the world outside the house, with its myriad things to see and touch and endless new words to learn, as she gradually expanded her horizons and explored the world of Wimbledon and beyond.

  Wimbledon was a pleasant place in which to raise a family. A prosperous suburb, it was popular with affluent middle-class professionals who liked its country charm and close proximity to London, just seven miles to the northeast and easily reached by train. Georgette grew up in a world where wooded lanes, hedgerows, and fields of wild flowers were part of every daily walk and where the great expanse of Wimbledon Common offered an imaginative child unlimited opportunity for adventure. Her home was not grand, but comfortable and well run, with at least two servants to manage the day-to-day cleaning, cooking, and serving of meals. Her father’s salary was modest, but in those days a man did not need a vast sum to afford a decent house and domestic help.

  The Heyers’ house was a pleasant redbrick, three-story, end-terrace, with steps leading up to a panelled front door beneath an arched portico. A typical middle-class Victorian house, it had its living rooms on the ground floor, bedrooms and the nursery on the first floor, and an attic room with a gable window at the top for the servants. Woodside was a quiet street, leading east off Wimbledon Hill Road, conveniently close to the shops in the High Street for Sylvia and within pleasant walking distance of King’s College School for George.

  Georgette did not spend all of her babyhood in Wimbledon, for Sylvia’s mother lived in south-east London and George’s parents lived in Worthing, on the Sussex coast. When she was two months old her parents took Georgette on her first outing to her maternal grandmother Annette Watkins’ home, at Lee in Lewisham, near Blackheath, to be christened. The service, attended by both sides of the family, was held on 2 October at the Lewisham parish church of St. Peter’s. This was the first of many visits to “Grannie” Watkins. Georgette came to adore her grandmother and Sylvia noted that even as a baby she would “go on anyhow” whenever Grannie came to visit.

  The Watkins family was in commerce and well-to-do, and Georgette’s Grannie lived at Fairfield, a grand Victorian house set in a large garden at 52 Eltham Road (demolished in 1961 to make way for flats). Sylvia had been born at Fairfield in 1876, and her three unmarried sisters, Cicely, Ellice, and Josephine, still lived there with their mother. Sylvia was very fond of her sisters, two of whom, Ellice and Cicely, were nine and ten years older than she was and had helped to raise her. She was also close to Josephine, the youngest of her three sisters and just three years older than Sylvia. Jo, a redheaded beauty, had a strong independent streak. Like her sisters, Ellice and Cicely, she never married. There were also three older brothers, and another sister who had married and moved away when Sylvia was still a child, though she still kept in touch. When Georgette’s mother was a girl, Fairfield had accommodated her parents, their eight children, her mother’s sister, a live-in cook, parlormaid, housemaid, and a nurse. Grannie Watkins remained at Fairfield until her death in 1914.

  Sylvia’s father, William Watkins, had died in 1900, just two years before Georgette was born. He was a tugboat owner, the son of John Rogers Watkins who, in 1833, had founded the first company in the world to run a fleet of tugboats. William and his brother John joined the firm in their teens and over the next three decades helped to build it into a successful business. By the time Sylvia was born, the company was named for her father. William Watkins Limited was one of the leading tugboat operators in the world, with an international reputation for long-distance towing and salvage. Watkins’s tugs held records for the world’s longest tows, having tugged ships from places as far apart as London and Cadiz, St. Helena and Southampton, and Cardiff and St. Petersburg. In 1878 it was the Watkins’s tugboat Anglia that brought Cleopatra’s Needle up the Thames to its new home on London’s Embankment and it is a Watkins’s tug, Monarch, that is depicted towing the grand old ship in Joseph Turner’s painting The Fighting Téméraire Tugged to her Last Berth to be Broken. Years later a Watkins’s tug would be the first to evacuate troops from the beaches of Dunkirk.

  The Watkinses bought Fairfield in 1875. It was a happy home. Years of family photographs show that the girls’ parents had indulged their daughters’ passion for dogs and that the house had been home to a steady stream of small dogs of different breeds. Sylvia’s own pet had been a dachshund which had shared her adolescence. After Georgette was born, Sylvia made sure that dogs were a part of her daughter’s life, too, and there is a delightful photograph of Georgette and her brothers with a handsome Pekinese taken when Georgette was in her teens.

  Like the Watkinses, Georgette’s paternal grandparents, George and Alice Heyer, had also lived in the Lewisham area. They had moved to Eltham from Highgate in London when George was ten and preparing to start at King’s College School. The Heyers lived in a house called “The Chestnuts” in Court Road which was named for the magnificent chestnut tree in the garden into which (legend had it) the Black Prince had once nailed a horseshoe. In those days, the Heyer and Watkins families lived only two miles apart and both families attended the parish church of St. Peter’s in Courtlands Road. It was probably here that George and Sylvia first met, although as a twelve-year-old schoolboy George may not have taken much notice of five-year-old Sylvia Watkins. Several years later, in 1895, the Heyers moved into Tudor House, a large property next door to Fairfield, the Watkins family home, where George would have been a frequent visitor. When they did eventually marry, twenty years later, on 10 August 1901, the wedding was at St. Peter’s.

  By the time Georgette was born her Heyer grandparents had left Lewisham and retired to the seaside town of Worthing in Sussex. Although visits there were less frequent because of the distance, when the family did go to Sussex it was usually for several weeks. Georgette’s first big trip away from home was to Worthing when she was just four months old. On Christmas Eve 1902, George and Sylvia took her to the seaside town by train. They spent nearly a month with “Grandpip” and “Grandmim” at their house in Broadwater Road.

  Georgette’s grandfather, George Heyer, was a Russian émigré with a white beard and a thick foreign accent that he never lost. He spoke several European languages fluently and on regular family trips abroad enthralled his children with his ability to switch effortlessly from one language to another each time they crossed into a new country. He ensured that his daughters Inez, Ilma, and Alice, as well as his son George, learned French and German and insisted on clear enunciation whenever they spoke English. Father and daughters were all musical and young George grew up in a home where an evening’s entertainment might include duets from Il Trovatore, a classical recital on the piano, or the family singing Russian folk-songs together.

  George Heyer was a passionate man and an affectionate father who was described by his daughter Alice as being “full of little pithy stories told in a purposely exaggerated broken English and very witty.” He also had what his granddaughter described as a “Russian Fatalism” tempered by a sense of humor which frequently found expression in all sorts of pranks and practical jokes. He loved to play tricks on unsuspecting friends and family members, and create havoc by introducing people to each other using made-up names. A passion for words often led him to invent outlandish names for everyday things and, in later years, he would tell his grandchildren that he had been picking “ganzoolias” (marigolds) in the garden. He also loved to tell Georgette tall tales about how, as a nine-year-old, he had escaped from one of the Tsar’s pogroms riding on the buffers of a train—at a time when the Russian railways were still in their infancy and the only established line was between St. Petersburg and Tsarkoe Selo.

  Born in 183
2, Georgette’s grandfather actually emigrated when he was twenty-seven, leaving Kharkov in southern Russia in 1859. He was a fur merchant born in the village of Kremenchuk, the son of Augustus Heyer, also a merchant, and the family does appear to have been Jewish. This would have made life hard at times, especially for those from towns and villages such as Kremenchuk which were inside the Pale of Settlement—the area within which Jews were allowed to reside permanently and into which they were frequently forced to move after being expelled from cities or provinces within the Russian empire. In 1859, however, Tsar Alexander II had eased many of the restrictions on Jews, making it easier for them to travel. There was a brutal pogrom in Odessa that year and George Heyer seized the opportunity to leave Russia and begin a new life in England. After making the long and difficult journey from Kharkov to London, he found work as a warehouseman and, in 1863, successfully applied for British citizenship. By then, George Heyer had pulled himself up the ranks, improving his status and his income, by rising from the position of warehouseman to that of foreign agent for a large woolen wholesaler. Three weeks after his citizenship had been granted, he married Alice Waters at St. Luke’s Church in Holloway and moved to a new address at 10 Penn Road Villas in Islington, North London.

  If George Heyer was Jewish, he chose to divest himself of both his ethnic and his religious heritage and to integrate into British society as quickly as possible. His wife was an English girl from an old Norfolk family and their marriage in the Anglican Church and their new house in a fashionable middle-class neighborhood were all part of his transformation from Russian immigrant to prosperous English businessman. The family surname “Heyer” was also anglicized from its original Russian pronunciation which would probably have been either “Geyer” or “Khyeyir” (the latter being a phonetic spelling as there is no letter H in the Russian alphabet). In its original form the surname was pronounced “higher” but during the First World War Georgette’s branch of the family changed their pronunciation of it to “hare.”

  When his longed-for son was born in 1869, George Heyer appears to have dispensed with the Russian patronymic tradition (in which a son is given his father’s first name as his second name) and given him just the one name, “George,” having long since dropped his own second name of Augustus. (A second son, Hubert Claude Heyer was born in 1875, but died in infancy.) In actively distancing himself from his heritage in this way, Georgette’s grandfather may also have unconsciously succumbed to the xenophobia common among the British middle- and upper-classes in the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries and set a precedent for a similar stance among his descendants.

  Thus, Georgette’s family background was mainly middle class and she came from a long line of forebears who, with every new generation, had worked to better themselves and their family’s social and economic status. Her father was raised with the expectation that he would become an English gentleman. With this in mind his parents sent him first to a boys’ preparatory school on Highgate Hill and then to King’s College School in the hope that from there he would gain entrance either to Oxford or Cambridge. He was a bright child with an excellent memory and a gift for recitation that enabled him to perform entire chapters of Dickens by heart. George did well at King’s, excelling in mathematics, Greek, French, and literature. In 1888 he fulfilled his parents’ wish by winning a place at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, as a Sizar student. Sizar students were those with limited means who were admitted to their College at a lower fee, did not have to pay for food and tuition, and were given lodgings at a reduced rate. Originally required to undertake certain domestic duties in return for these allowances, this practice was largely obsolete by the time George went up to Cambridge.

  George spent the next four years at Cambridge studying for his Classics degree, writing poetry and making a name for himself among the literary set. He made many friends and, according to a classmate, achieved the distinction of becoming “one of the most popular men at Sidney Sussex College.” He had originally wanted to be an archaeologist but in the early 1890s his aspirations were frustrated by a downturn in his family’s finances, and on leaving Cambridge he was compelled to earn his living as a teacher.

  Georgette’s mother was from a wealthier background but the Watkinses, like the Heyers, were in trade. Without a fortune they were limited in how far up the social ladder they could climb. Sylvia was given an education suited to a well-bred young lady of some means, and her love of music was fully indulged by her parents with lessons on both the cello and the pianoforte. When she was nineteen, they allowed her to audition at one of Europe’s most prestigious music schools: the Royal Academy of Music in London. In September 1895 she entered the Royal Academy to begin three years of intense study and musical practice. Supported by her family, who paid the eleven guineas per term tuition, she studied the cello under William Whitehouse, singing under R.E. Miles, and took weekly classes in harmony and counterpoint, sight singing, and musical dictation. Her parents arranged for her to move into rooms in Osnaburgh Terrace near the Academy and Sylvia gained a new sense of independence living in central London.

  She was a fine musician and the only female cellist in her class to receive a Silver Medal in her second year at the Academy, and the only female cellist to obtain a Certificate of Merit in her final year. Sylvia played regularly with the Students’ Orchestra and the Students’ Chamber Orchestra, performing pieces by Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Saint-Saëns, Dvorák, Rossini, Schumann, and Grieg. She loved being at the Royal Academy and for a time dreamed of a career in music. In the late-Victorian era this was not impossible, but it would have been unusual, especially for a female cellist. Sylvia would never be a concert pianist for her hands were too small to stretch further than an octave and her voice, though lovely, was not strong enough for an opera singer. Like most women of her class and time she was also constrained by society’s expectations that her career would be that of wife and mother. Three years after leaving the Royal Academy, Sylvia married and abandoned her ambition to be a professional musician. A year later she had Georgette.

  Georgette was born into a home in which class and breeding were taken for granted as indicators of a person’s worth and social acceptability. In the Victorian and Edwardian eras every section of British society was profoundly hierarchical and throughout her childhood Georgette was constantly exposed to the idea of a distinct social order. She knew from personal experience what it was like to be waited on, to have the house cleaned and the food cooked by servants. As a child she quickly absorbed the differences between how people responded to family and friends and the way in which they spoke to the cook or housemaid. As she grew older she also began to understand the various rules and protocols attached to one’s own position in the social order and how these affected one’s behavior in different situations.

  She was an observant child with an ear for language and a growing ability to discern the subtleties of behavior that enabled her to recognize the differences between individuals within the various classes. There were innumerable rules for knowing and establishing one’s place within the social pecking order and Georgette’s perception was that this was particularly true among the servant class, which she quickly discovered could be the most rigidly hierarchical of all. One domestic servant who was known to every well-bred Wimbledon resident, and whom Georgette likely encountered in her childhood, was Roberts, a roving butler whose services were employed across Wimbledon by hosts and hostesses to assist with their dinner parties, dances, garden parties, suppers, and soirées. His presence ensured the smooth running of any occasion and, as one Wimbledon resident recorded, he was “most amusing, sympathetic and competent.” Many of his characteristics match those of the iconic butler who would eventually appear in Georgette’s novels.

  It was not only Georgette’s daily interaction with servants that emphasized ideas about class and breeding, but also the books and popular magazines she read, many of which took for granted concepts of racial and class superiority, the i
mportance of heritage, breeding, and bloodlines, dislike of the foreigner and the Jew, the right of men to rule, and the importance of romantic love for women—all of whom apparently wanted to find a husband and live “happily ever after.” Georgette would have been unusual if she had not absorbed many of the ideas promulgated by the stories she read and heard from her infancy. As well as books by Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, William Thackeray, and Shakespeare, Georgette also grew up reading the novels of Mrs. Gaskell, Charlotte Yonge, Harrison Ainsworth, Ouida, Stanley Weyman, May Sinclair, Jeffery Farnol, Ethel M. Dell, D.K. Broster, and Baroness Orczy, among others. Two of her favorite childhood stories were The Shepherd’s Fairy by Darley Dale and The Red Deer by J. W. Fortescue.

  Georgette was given The Shepherd’s Fairy as a ninth birthday present and never forgot it. It tells the story of a French Comte who is so consumed with jealousy at the birth of his baby daughter that he persuades his brother, Leon, to take the child to England until his wife can be less “obsessed” with her newborn. Leon sails to England and orders a crewman to give the baby to a shepherd’s family. Returning to France, Leon’s ship sinks and he is drowned. When the Comte hears of the wreck he assumes that the baby has also perished.

  The child, named “Fairy” by the shepherd’s family on account of her dainty appearance, grows up with the shepherd’s three sons, and although they know nothing about her origins it is “obvious” that she is of good, even noble birth. Consequently, they see that she is educated in the parson’s home and do their best to meet what they perceive to be the needs of a better-born child. Fairy, too, gradually becomes aware of the apparently inevitable differences between herself and the shepherd’s family:

  As she grew older, Fairy began to realize that there was another difference between her and her foster-parents, besides the difference of education, for she was a lady in thought and feeling as well as by birth and, thanks to Mr. Leslie, by education. Not that there was anything to jar upon her feelings in John Shelley or his wife; for, simple, honest folk as they were, there was nothing vulgar about them; and it is vulgarity that jars against a refined mind.