AMERICAN FRIENDS
The purchase of Houghton House meant the sale of 16, Chalcot Gardens, but for his London studio Rackham now acquired 6, Primrose Hill Studios (close to the first home of his married life). At Houghton his studio was a thatched converted barn.
Rackham’s country neighbours proved a congenial mixture of farmers, artists and retired colonels. There were tennis parties on slow erratic grass courts; boating parties up the Arun backwaters; fancy-dress dances in gardens decorated with fairy lights and Chinese lanterns. On summer weekends, when Mrs Rackham was well enough, Houghton House was often filled with artist friends from the London days. It was a primitive house by modern standards, with a well in the wash-house, no main water, candles instead of electric light, and rats scurrying up and down the hollow walls at night.
The inconveniences were cheerfully accepted by Rackham, who had no liking for modern inventions. While he admitted to an affection for the bicycle, it was a favourite assertion of his that the fall of man began with the invention of the wheel. He would never have become a motorist if his wife, increasingly a semi-invalid, had not discovered a passion for being driven round the countryside for thirty miles a day at thirty miles an hour in the back seat of an open car. Reluctantly compelled to use ‘that infernal machine the telephone’, he considered photography, the cinema and the wireless to be degradations of art, and it was as well that he did not have to reckon with television.
Although he appreciated good company and was drawn out by it into joviality, Rackham by nature was a quiet man with simple tastes and an abstemious, almost austere attitude to life. No doubt owing to his straitened circumstances in early years, he was unable easily to spend money on pleasure. For him, however prosperous he became, the only really legitimate excuses for spending were health and education. He firmly believed in the essential rightness of working and saving for the fundamentals of existence.114
