A Victorian Childhood

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 938, 2 August 1957, Page 12

A Victorian Childhood

recordings of her sessions to make them feel at home; with the recitation of a Dunkirk anniversary poem; with notice of a bazaar or collection for some good work; or, with an account of the achievement of a friend, often a public figure. After this Aunt Daisy gets down to the hard, economic basis of her session and her livelihood-the plugs. Advertising a dozen or so products a day, she carries to the listener her own conviction that each is a highly desirable object. Useful or ornamental, tasty or simply hygienic, each is worth every penny of its price. There is none of what advertising men call "knocking copy." Nothing is held to be the best, but everything she recommends is among the best. It is simply good, very good, or excellent. Aunt Daisy sells by talking most of the time as if she were not advertising at all. She is the fellowcustomer sharing the tips on her shopping list; never the professional "pushing" a product. But every advertiser knows that Aunt Daisy’s conviction carries weight. Even before her session ends people will walk into shops asking for products mentioned only a minute or two before. Half an hour after she finishes speaking a host of shoppers are converting her words into goods for themselves and hard cash for the makers. If the morning session opens to the tune of "Daisy Bell," it closes to a merry jingle for

cash-register bells. N her time, Aunt Daisy has been given many titles. Canada knew her as The Mighty Atom. At home she has been called the First Lady of Advertising and First Lady of Radio. These honours have come to her relatively late in life. When young she was commonly admonished, "Daisy, don’t talk so much! Daisy, don’t get so excited!" In an age when children were to be seen and not heard, she made herself seen-in spite of her lack of inches-and extensively heard. Exactly when these early attempts to stifle Aunt Daisy’s childhood chatter were being made is difficult to discover.

a She is a capable actress, and the inquirer after birthdays will be treated to a delightful imitation of a woman suffering from loss of memory. Some years ago she reduced the producers of Portrait from Life, a broadcast profile, to declaring that she was born a very long time ago. Her entry in the New Zealand Who’s Who gives no date whatever up to 1930-the year she joined the Radio Broadcasting Company of New Zealand. However, as she puts it herself, "By reading this, people will know jolly well what the times were-when I talk about Gladstone and people like that." Mention of Britain’s famous Liberal Prime Minister is not out of place, for Aunt Daisy was born in London, the youngest of four children born to Robert Taylor, an architect, and his wife Elizabeth. Her father was already ailing with his last illness and did not attend the christening. But it was the period when the famous tenor Sims Reeves was singing "Come Into the Garden, Maud," and Elizabeth Taylor left for the church with instructions that her newest-born was to be named Maud. She obeyed. It was an age when women did. Never- theless, when the water dried on her forehead, the baby was not simply Maud Taylor. She was Maud Ruby Taylor. Perhaps because the decision was taken in haste; perhaps because Elizabeth was a changeable, volatile womar, even the name Ruby did not stay long in favour. Almost from the beginning Maud Ruby was called Daisy, and only

on the most formal occasions since has she been called anything else. This name, too, had its literary origins. A trilogy of popular books at the time were titled Melbourne House, Daisy, and Daisy in the Field. "They were more or less religious books," says Aunt Daisy, "but there was a lot of fun in them, too." The description, as well as the name, fits well the person Daisy was to become. HE dominant figure of the world into which Daisy Taylor was born was the ceeply mourning "widow of Windsor," Victoria, a Queen trying to rule according to the wishes of her dead husband. Later her reign was to burgeon into its full imperial glory, but at that time she was neither amused nor pleased. Gladstone was her chief Minister, and Gladstone she distrusted. Disraeli had been her favourite, but Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, had been ousted from office and died a year later in 188]. The Queen yearned for times past, when the brilliant Jewish-born courtier had both pleased and amused; had made ‘her emerge at times. from her unpopular seclusion and enjoy the warmth of her people’s affection. She was not alone in her yearning. One of the earliest songs Daisy Taylor learned at home was a political ditty: We’ll_all wear the shamrock on St Patrick’s ay, We'll wear the rose and thistle when all England’s gay, But while old. Mother Earth still a primrose flower can yield, We'll wear it for the sake of dear old Beaconsfield. , But nostalgia apart, England was near the zenith of her power. The Bank of England, with some help from the British Navy, directed the affairs of nations; and the middle-classes, into which Daisy Taylor was ushered, (continued on page 14)

The Aunt Daisy Story (continued from page 12) directed the affairs of England. Those middle-class families, she says now, were of strong personality. "Each member of them was determined to become somebody, special. The main emphasis was not on children at all. Yet we were never Conscious of frustration or repression, as some people nowadays would have us believe. We felt security and a lot of love-but not a demonstrative love. We were very happy in that simpler life-a guided life-reading the books chosen for us and absorbing the atmosphere of politeness and good manners and orderliness in which we lived. I remember the books of J. M. Barrie, The Little Minister and A Window in Thrums. And, of course, the Royal Family belonged to us all. We knew of everything they cid. And we knew all about the

British Navy and the soldiers of the Queen-Tommy Atkins-and of all the Highland regiments, the Kilties, and the Campbells are coming, and was Mr Gladstone right or wrong about home rule for Ireland." HROUGH the child’s eyes the great institutions of London took on added size and crama by contrast with her diminutive self. St Paul’s and. Westminster, the Bank of England and the Mansion House, inspired awe as much by their overpowering size as by their architectural grandeur. The Changing of the Guard was pageantry comparable in New Zealand only with widescreen spectacle, in brilliant colour and stereophonic sound. The Tower of London was memorable for the gleaming lustre of the Crown Jewels, and for the dark and narrow staircase leading up to where the little Princes were smothered in their sleep. Drama of the Shaftesbury Avenue kind was not for the children. Daisy listened entranced to the conversation of her elders about Gilbert and Sullivan and about musical comedies like Dorothy, Faust Up to Date, and Carmen Up to Data, all shown at the Gaiety Theatre between 1886 and 1890. But she saw none of them. The pantomime, however, was permitted. "In those days," she remembers, "it had the lovely transformation scene. A gauze curtain come down and everything was done behind it in light. At the end there was the Harlequinade, with Pierrette and Pierrot

and the clown and endless strings of sausages. Sausages have always been considered funny for some reason." If the children did not go to the theatre, they managed to bring the theatre to themselves. Piano arrangements of light operas like The Bohemian Girl and Maritana were plentiful and cheap, and all girls and most boys: of the middle classes could play the instrument. The theatre thereby came to them. Each summer, too, a wider vista of England opened. With her brother Bertie, and her sisters Minnie and Katie sitting up very primly and correctly in a four-wheeled: carriage, the family would drive across London Bridge to one of the great railway termini, en route to the seaside. Usually it was Brighton or Eastbourne. or Bournemouth; seldom Ramsgate or Margate. They were considered a trifle ‘"common."

"But wherever we went," she says, "we children loved it. There were entertainments on the sands-we didn’t say beach, we said ‘sands’-nigger minstrels and donkeys and donkey chaises and goat chaises. And a man would take photographs or tintypes of us riding in a goat chaise. And we’d watch the fishing boats come in and we’d buy soles and take them home for the landlady to cook." Just as the beach was the sands, so swimming was bathing. Daisy never did learn to swim. But she bathed daintily in a neck-to-knee costume; "not quite prehistoric," descending the- steps of a bathing machine drawn into the water by horses. Not till later, ‘in the free and easy Colonial town of New Plymouth, was she'to bathe without benefit of this contraption. Holidays away from the sands were rarely quite as carefree. Daisy spent them for the most part with two elderly great-aunts of her mother’s who lived at Chichester, in Sussex. "They marvelled to see us," she says. "Those great-aunts had really brought up my mother. She had been orphaned as a baby. And here were her children! "But they were very strict indeed, and their only idea of a treat for us was to take us to all the services in the Cathedral." HEN Daisy Taylor went to ri Ae England was engaged in overhauling her navy, and the Great Powers in partitioning tropical Africa between

them. But little of this penetrated the halls of the Academy for Young Ladies, or the skulls of its industrious pupils. The young ladies wore gloves and were very proper. So also did the teacher, Miss Hellier, a kind of charming woman whose insistence that manners makyth man was surpassed only by that of the fourth Earl of Chesterfield. The curriculum included much needlework, fine needlework. It was an age when one woman might say to another, in tones of horror and reproach, "My dear, all her baby clothes were machine made!" So the girls learned to sew by hand a straight seam of tiny, meticulous back-stitching-exactly like a machine. "You had to pull up the gathering thread," says Aunt Daisy, "and then stroke the gathers with the needle. I remember in Little Women, which was one of the great books of those days, Jo was ‘stroking gathers so energetically that a row of slits followed her pin.’ I have nearly done it myself." Other subjects, similar methods. \In their copybooks the young ladies wrote exquisite script--Vere Foster’s scriptthe hand used by the Civil Service to make its beautiful phraseology crystal clear. Demonstrating, Aunt Daisy rummaged fora ball-point pen-‘After my advertising that it’s free flowing and never stops, don’t let it stop now!" Education neither began or ended with the Young Lacies’ Academy. Daisy’s mother, Elizabeth Taylor, had lived always among cultured people, She had a discriminating, well-stocked mind, unhampered by excess of formal learning or by the uniformities of mass communications. In an age of conversation, she had picked up and could hand

on to her children something of the history and customs of many lands, of their books and especially their music. Young Daisy’s question, "Mama, tell me .. ." seldom failed to bring a flow of information. Not only that, but Mrs. Taylor was still young, an attractive, gay and volatile widow, whose. company was sought by men and women alike, but perhaps more earnestly by men. Besides their admiration for her, these people brought to the house a climate of music and conversation which the precocious and in-

satiably interested little Daisy soaked up through her pores. The family lived in a_ solid, brick house, set back from the road and with a semicircular carriage drive connecting the front coor with the two front gates. The garden enclosed by this drive was often the scene of evening parties in the summer. A German friend of Mrs Taylor’s, a wine merchant, provided bowls of sparkling Rhenish wine, with strawberries afloat in them, and a group of friends would gather to converse and recite and sing. From the nursery window Daisy

and her elder sisters and brother would lean far out to catch the strains of the zither, and the clear tenor of one of the company, Elizabeth Taylor’s fiance, lifted in Schubert’s "Serenade." At Christmas, too, the children were taken to one of the German hospitals, and in the white wards beneath a candle-lit Christmas tree, sang. the lovely German carols, the most famous of which is perhaps "Stille Nacht." From the children of their friends they learned other German words,. too, but their liking for things German remained

limited. "This gentleman my mother was engaged to," says Aunt Daisy, "was not liked. As I remember, he was a really arrogant, bossy man. None of us children liked him, and that was why it never came to anything. And what a good thing it was that they never married! Because no doubt we'd have had to go to Germany, and no doubt he would have been a Nazi, and we’d have been on the wrong side. It would have altered the whole course of our lives." At that time a woman was considered on the shelf if not married by the age of twenty. Elizabeth Taylor had married at eighteen, and in Aunt Daisy’s childhood she was still a young woman. "I remember her." said Aunt Daisy, "as slim and dainty and tiny, with deep blue eyes with long lashe§ and pink cheeks. Of course, no such things as lipstick or rouge were even thought of by nice people. And she had brown hair. She had read all the fine books, and all the lively ones, too,‘and she was, oh, so full of fun, so gay, and so ready for any adventure." It is said that if you wish to know what kind of woman a girl will become you must look at her mother. Aunt Daisy bears out the saying. She became blonde, not brunette, but she remained tiny (four feet eleven and a half inches, the same height as Queen Victoria) into adult life, and "if she was at first a trifle precocious, talkative and dominant for so small a child, she went out to meet life with the same excitement and zest with which her mother illumined her childhood. (Another long instalment of "The Aunt Daisy Story" will be printed next week.)