Basil Street Blues by Michael Holroyd Read Free Book Online Page B

Corbet girls, with their waspwaists and prominent busts, their bright eyes and lilting voices, seems to have bewitched Fraser after the invalidism of The Links, the heavy male world of Uppingham and his worrying time at Cambridge. Though apparently penniless, these Corbets were always laughing. My grandfather was enchanted by their happy-go-lucky ways.
    He had been introduced to them by a new friend Stephen (nicknamed ‘Nipper’) Anderson who was to become a partner in the Magor family’s tea merchant company. ‘Nipper’ Anderson was on the verge of being engaged to the beautiful Alice Corbet and would take several years advancing to the verge of marrying her. When Alice came over from Ireland to see him, she brought with her a selection of her sisters: Iley, who played the piano so delightfully; Ida, who had escaped from a convent and gone on the music hall stage; Lizzie, the jolliest of the lot of them, famous for her punctuality (she once turned up for a train half-a-day early, fell asleep in the waiting-room, and missed it); Lannie, who would one day emigrate to Australia; and the very pretty and petite Adeline.
    Their parents were both dead. If you spoke to Ida she would tell you that their father Michael Augustus Corbet had been a dedicated physician, and how her mother had died transporting medicines on horseback through the snows of winter. If you questioned Adeline, she would whisper of their father’s unmitigated brilliance as a poor professor at Cork University. Each sister had her own story; and all relished the others’ repertory of stories. On Adeline’s birth certificate – she was born at 6 Lower Janemount in Cork on 13 July 1876 – her father’s profession is given as ‘Traveller’ which means neither gypsy nor hedge scholar, but commercial traveller.
    The eldest of these Corbet girls is Minnie. She has married the huge and friendly Tom White, director of a pharmaceutical company, and lives in Bray, County Wicklow. They have no family of their own but act in loco parentis to Minnie’s unmarried sisters, the delicate Atty, the mysterious Sloper and others. But these sisters are rapidly getting married. When ‘Nipper’ Anderson hurried over to Ireland soon after Fraser’s father’s death to meet the rest of Alice’s family, he took Fraser along with him. It was a holiday he needed. There were picnics by the sea and sunny days at the races, trips up to Dublin, walks around the magical waters of Glendaloch, and always the congenial company of this tumultuous family teeming with enjoyment.
    Alice, as we know, is to be engaged to ‘Nipper’ Anderson. Lizzie has recently married and, as Mrs Parsons, gone to live in Bristol. Ida’s career as a singer in the music halls is being brought to an end by some passionate love letters from an older man, William Temple, whom (despite the disapproval of his mother, ‘old Lady Temple of Leeswood’) she suddenly marries. Even the youngest sister of all, Lannie, will soon be engaged to a champion cyclist and billiards player. Romance is in the air and there seems no time to lose. Fraser’s attention is caught by the next youngest sister, Adeline, a slip of a girl with a sensuous curving mouth and elaborate, altitudinous hair. She is called ‘Bang’ by her sisters: Fraser they call ‘Josh’.
    Bang and Josh were married on 4 April 1899 from Lizzie’s new home in Bristol (her husband acting as one of the witnesses). Bang took only one year off her age (making herself a romantic twenty-one instead of twenty-two) on the marriage certificate, and gave her late father’s profession innocuously as ‘Gentleman’. There is no evidence that she went to Eastbourne and saw The Links which was being sold that summer. She was soon pregnant and living in her new home, the Red House, at Datchet, near Windsor in Buckinghamshire. They had chosen Datchet because her sister Ida now lived there.
    On 7 January 1900 Bang and Josh’s first child was born – a son whom