Others’ observations about Kittie Calderon are rare (except for George’s in letters, of course). It was with great pleasure, therefore, that I heard recently from the film critic John Pym that he had come across several mentions of Kittie in his father Jack’s letters of 1929-30; and I am most grateful to him for allowing me to quote some now and reproduce the photographs of his parents below.
Long-term followers of this blog will remember John Pym’s exceedingly generous contribution of family images, information and text to Calderonia between 2014 and 2015. Those who have joined more recently might like to access these by searching on Foxwold, the Pym family home at Brasted Chart where Kittie and George were often the guests of their great friends Charles ‘Evey’ Pym and his wife Violet (née Lubbock). On 29 November 1914 the Calderons attended the christening at Brasted of Elizabeth Pym (1914-2002), to whom George was a godfather, and they spent their last Christmas together at Foxwold (see my post for 23-31 December 1914).
Jack Pym (1908-93) was Evey and Violet’s eldest child and featured on day one of this blog, 31 July 1914 (2014), as he was on holiday in the Isle of Wight with his brother Roland (1910-2006) when George joined the family there.
In 1927, Violet died at the age of forty-five, leaving four children. After the funeral, Kittie stayed at Foxwold for three weeks; in April she helped at Foxwold for five weeks; she had the Pyms’ son Jeremy (1919-81) and his nurse to stay with her at Petersfield; and she was always available to Evey for advice about the children’s health and well being. In fact, when I researched my final chapter, ‘White Raven’, about the last twenty-seven years of Kittie’s life, I concluded from Foxwold’s Visitors Book and Kittie’s letters to Percy Lubbock postponing at short notice her planned visits to him in Italy, that in the late 1920s Kittie found her ‘family’ with the now motherless Pyms in Kent.
This is graphically borne out by Jack Pym’s letters to his intended, Diana Gough, in 1929. The couple were still at university and both of their widowed parents were apprehensive about them marrying so young. Kittie seems to have played an important part in persuading Evey not to oppose the engagement. In particular, it was arranged that Kittie should already be at Foxwold when Diana and her mother Lady Gough visited in April and again in August 1930, and that she should stay on to give counsel afterwards. Jack Pym twice described Kittie in letters as ‘a sort of mother’ to the family, and the marriage of Jack and Diana eventually took place in London on 17 December 1930.
John (Jack) Pym, 1930, and Diana Pym, née Gough, 1930s
The first mention of Kittie in Jack Pym’s letters to Diana comes on 4 August 1929 and is fascinating:
We argued all about Epstein [the sculptor] last night at dinner. I think I shall retire from this artistic controversy, it never gets anywhere and merely leads to most frightful wrangles. We have an Irish aunt staying here who is extremely charming and a sort of mother to us all, but she is a fair one for argufying […].
Kittie was not Irish by nationality, she was a daughter of the Anglo-Irish landlord John Hamilton, who has been described as doing ‘more for his tenants than any other landlord before, during and after the [Potato] Famine’ (Dermot James, John Hamilton of Donegal 1800-84: This Recklessly Generous Landlord, Dublin, The Woodfield Press, 2010, p. ix). She spent much of her childhood in Ireland, possibly spoke with a slight Irish accent, but otherwise with received pronunciation. She was used to and enjoyed ‘argufying’ about topics, because George loved igniting discussion and expected her to argue back!
On 14 December 1929 Jack Pym characterised Kittie again in a letter to Diana:
She is Irish with all the attractive qualities of that race and practically none of their disabilities. But she has a boring little dog.
This was the rather humanoid, and very long-lived, Cairn terrier Bunty, who can be seen in the photograph accompanying my post ‘Watch this Space’ of 20 April 2016. After the visit by Diana and her mother in August 1930, Kittie stayed on for two more days and on 14 August Jack wrote to Diana:
Aunt Kitty departed on Wed., her dog smelling to the last like a public lavatory, it had rolled in something and had to be washed with Jeyes [Fluid].
Bunty always seems to have made an impression on people.
For the archive of posts since 31 July 2015, please click here.
How nice to hear that a “sort of son” (as Jack implies) sees Kittie as “extremely charming” and with “attractive qualities”. So she is not just good to him personally, but is someone who in general can be liked and admired. Your excerpts from Jack’s letters added a lot for me.
(I enjoyed the dog description too, probably because we have a Jack Russell terrier. Bunty is a dog to irritate visitors at times, but with enough character to get a mention.)
Foxwold – the house that Kittie visited in 1930 to advise my grandfather Evey on the marriage of his eldest son – was a home dominated by dogs: in iron-fenced outdoor kennels, in the kitchen, in the billiards room and in many of the spacious bedrooms. Some were quite respectable creatures, especially a succession of intelligent black Standard Poodles. But many were of doubtful parentage and a few were highly unpredictable: Willy the unprepossessing black ‘kitchen dog’ was one of these – though in old age he promoted himself from the kitchen and was allowed to sit beside Evey’s chair in the evening, where like all the other dogs he received his daily ration of three chocolate drops. The dogs’ habits were all known and tolerated – and it was assumed that even the smallest child knew which dog to steer clear of. They were all loved in a distinctively offhand English manner. No one seemed to mind unduly when they misbehaved or ran away (they usually came back of their own accord). ‘It is very good for a baby to be licked by a dog,’ Evey’s daughter Elizabeth said with authority, and no one said this was madness. One poodle, quite forgetting itself, consumed twelve portions of brown bread and smoked salmon laid out on the dining table just before the lunch-time guests sat down. The story of this incident was told with a smile for at least thirty years. Foxwold smelled of many things: linseed oil; lavender; dust on leather; apples; cigarette smoke; peat smoke; paraffin; beeswax; ladies’ soap; damp flannel sheets; the outdoors blowing in through an open window; old tennis rackets and broken lacrosse sticks – but above all it smelt of dogs, or so I remember it as a child in the 1950s. Kittie’s Bunty must have been a very singular companion indeed in a house full of free-spirited and sometimes frenzied dogs to have merited two references in my father’s letters. (Oh, and the rather primitive bathrooms of the house also of course smelt of Jeyes Fluid.)