We have been working on Lucy Boston blocks for several
weeks now, and, I thought you might like a little information about Lucy
herself.
Lucy Maria Wood was born Dec. 10, 1892 in
Lancashire, England. She was the fifth
of six children with two older brothers, two older sisters and one younger
brother. In her own words, from her
memoir Perverse and Foolish, Lucy
describes her home life as “a typically solid and affluent middle class
Victorian family of committed Wesleyans.”
Lucy’s father, James Wood, was an engineer and
sometimes mayor of Southport. He was a
bit of an eccentric, but Lucy adored him and very much admired him. He was a small, dynamic man with a great
sense of humor, very religious, and 20 years older than his wife. Supposedly, Lucy bore a striking resemblance
to him.
Lucy’s mother was only 20 when she married
James. She was one of seven daughters of
a Wesleyan minister, and the marriage was more of an arrangement to get one of
the daughters married off than a love match.
Lucy described her mother as extremely sensitive and delicate. She bore a child every year as was expected
of a dutiful Victorian wife, but had very few maternal instincts. Lucy always felt her mother should have been
a nun – she was very gentle, but extremely rigid in her religious views and in
the inerrant truth of Scripture.
Prior to their marriage, James had a house built for
the family he intended to have. It was
quite a house with religious friezes and Bible verses painted in every room. The “triumph of his eccentricity” was the
study. James had visited the Holy Land
and brought back many things with the idea of creating “a holy and uplifting
room.” The walls of the study were
painted in a continuous frieze of the landscape along the road from Jerusalem
to Jericho. From the ceiling hung lamps
similar to those that would have hung in Solomon’s temple. Recesses in the
walls were divided with Moorish onion dome arcades. Glass fronted cupboards held beautiful brass objects
and other rarities. It didn’t look as
garish as it sounds, but was more like the gentleman’s room of a near lunatic
according to Lucy.
What a strange couple they must have been. James, passionate and highly religious but with
an appreciation for the aesthetic side of life, and Lucy’s mother with her
devout, abstemious ways. In her role as
wife of the mayor, Lucy’s mother would have been expected to do a lot of
entertaining -something that must have been very difficult for her especially
since her idea of food was that it was a sad necessity. Apparently after her husband’s death, she began
to think it wasn’t even necessary and there were many times when the children
went hungry. As Lucy grew up she seems
to have inherited the passionate side of her father’s nature as evidenced in
her own passion for art, music and nature, while much of her development into a
young woman seems to have been partly driven by a need to cast off her mother’s
repressive influence.
Lucy’s father died when she was only six and his
death marked a huge change in the family fortunes. Laws of the day left the widow with only
enough money to keep the house together while each of the children was left
with a small fortune to be spent on their education. Consequently, all the children were sent to
school.
His death also resulted in the family’s move to the
countryside. The move was supposedly made
for her mother’s health, but whatever the reason, the children loved being out
of the city. The new house was on an
estuary of the river Kent where they were free to wander woods and fields
exploring the cliffs and coves of the river.
And so it was that at an early age Lucy developed an awareness of plants
and gardens that fueled her passion for developing the beautiful gardens of the
Manor at Hemingsford Way later in her life.
When her schooling was complete, Lucy enrolled in
college to become a nurse, but left the University of Oxford after only two
terms to work in a military hospital in France during World War I. She was great with the wounded soldiers, but
almost lost her job when the American charge nurse became outraged to see her
sitting on the bedside of one of the patients!
Lucy married her cousin’s stepson, Harold Boston,
who was a flying corps officer, in 1917. After the war they lived in Cheshire
where Harold was the director of the family tannery. Their only son, Peter Boston, was born in
September of 1918. The marriage ended in 1935 after 18 years.
After the divorce, Lucy left England to study
painting in Austria. With the outbreak
of World War II she returned to England and rented rooms in Cambridge where her
son Peter, who was now 19, was an undergraduate. When she heard the house was
available, she purchased the Manor, Hemingsford Way, which is near
Cambridge. With Peter, who had become an
architect, she slowly restored the decaying house and gardens with a passion
that she likened to falling in love.
She lived at the Manor for over 50 years until her
death at age 97 on May 25, 1990.
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