Introduction

A dozen or so of the earliest extant letters of KM’s are those sent to Sylvia Payne, who kept them all her life, thus providing us with a unique record of KM as a schoolgirl in London. Sylvia and her older sister, Evelyn, were the daughters of (Joseph) Frank Payne, a prestigious London physician and medical historian, whose mother, Eliza Dyer, was the sister of KM’s maternal grandfather, Joseph Dyer. Frank and KM’s mother, Annie, were therefore first cousins, and KM and the Payne girls second cousins. It was through the recommendation of Frank Payne that KM and her sisters were sent to Queen’s College in Harley Street to be educated, since the Payne sisters (and, coincidentally, Ida Baker and her sister) had all gone to Queen’s College junior school, and then on to the main college. Evelyn had left Queen’s College in the summer of 1903, not long after the Beauchamp girls arrived, in order to study at the all-female Oxford college, Lady Margaret Hall. Towards the end of her life, interviewed by Antony Alpers, she ‘recalled Kathleen, with cousinly good humour, as impossibly conceited and perfectly detestable’.

KM developed a rather unusual attachment to Sylvia, who, by all accounts, was a strange girl, with long red hair and wire spectacles. Since the Payne family lived just one street away in Wimpole Street, Sylvia was a day girl at the school, not a boarder, and thus her friendship with KM, as Baker notes, ‘was mostly expressed in letters’. She left Queen’s College in the summer of 1905 but returned to attend some lectures during 1906. Both girls were members of the ‘Swanwick Society’, the College’s poetry-reading circle.

Ida Baker explained KM’s attraction for Sylvia, noting her intelligence and artistic sensibility but also her high spirits and general naughtiness: