Free My Autobiography by Charles Chaplin Page B

I remember those large, blue, hothouse grapes that ornamented the sideboard in the dining-room and my feeling of guilt at their mysterious diminishing, looking more skeleton-like each day.
    The household staff consisted of four women: the cook and three maids. In addition to Mother and me, there was another guest, a very tense, good-looking young man with a cropped red moustache. He was most charming and gentlemanly, and seemed a permanent fixture in the house – until the grey-whiskered Colonel appeared. Then the handsome young man would disappear.
    The Colonel’s visits were sporadic, once or twice a week. While he was there, mystery and omnipresence pervaded the house, and Mother would tell me to keep out of the way and not to be seen. One day I ran into the hall as the Colonel was descending the stairs. He was a tall, stately gentleman in a frock-coat andtop hat, a pink face, long grey side-burns and a bald head. He smiled benignly at me and went on his way.
    I did not understand what all the hush and fuss was about and why the Colonel’s arrival created such an effect. But he never stayed long, and the young man with the cropped moustache would return, and the house would function normally again.
    I grew very fond of the young man with the cropped moustache. We would take long walks together over Clapham Common with the lady’s two beautiful greyhound dogs. Clapham Common had an elegant atmosphere in those days. Even the chemist’s shop, where we occasionally made a purchase, exuded elegance with its familiar admixture of aromatic smells, perfumes, soaps and powders – ever since, the odour of certain chemists’ shops has a pleasant nostalgia. He advised Mother to have me take cold baths every morning to cure my asthma, and possibly they helped; they were most invigorating and I grew to like them.
    It is remarkable how easily one adapts oneself to the social graces. How genteel and accustomed one becomes to creature comforts! In less than a week I took everything for granted. What a sense of well-being – going through that morning ritual, exercising the dogs, carrying their new brown leather leashes, then returning to a beautiful house with servants, to await lunch served in elegant style on silver platters.
    Our back garden connected with another house whose occupants had as many servants as we had. They were a family of three, a young married couple and their son, who was about my own age and who had a nursery stocked with beautiful toys. I was often invited to play with him and to stay for dinner, and we became very good friends. His father held some important position in a City bank, and his mother was young and quite pretty.
    One day I overheard our maid confidentially conversing with the boy’s maid, who was saying that their boy needed a governess. ‘That’s what this one needs,’ said our maid referring to me. I was thrilled to be looked upon as a child of the rich, but I never quite understood why she had elevated me to this status, unless it was to elevate herself by inferring that the people she worked for were as well off and as respectable as the neighbours next door. After that, whenever I dined with the boy next door I felt somewhat of an impostor.
    Although it was a mournful day when we left the fine house to return to 3 Pownall Terrace, yet there was a sense of relief in getting back to our own freedom; after all, as guests we were living under a certain tension, and, as Mother said, guests were like cakes: if kept too long they became stale and unpalatable. Thus the silken threads of a brief and luxurious episode snapped, and we fell again into our accustomed impecunious ways.

four
    1899 was an epoch of whiskers: bewhiskered kings, statesmen, soldiers and sailors, Krugers, Salisburys, Kitcheners, Kaisers and cricketers – incredible years of pomp and absurdity, of extreme wealth and poverty, of inane political bigotry of both cartoon and press. But England was to absorb many shocks and