A kind of easy-going panache

From Priscilla Napier's A Late Beginner, available directly from Slightly Foxed. "Priscilla Napier grew up in Egypt during the last golden years of the Edwardian Age - a time when, for her parents' generation, it seemed the sun would never set upon 'the regimental band playing selections from HMS Pinafore under the banyan tree.'"

Recounting her visits home to England in the early teens of the last century, when she would have been three to six years of age, she offers this recollection of those magnificent servants of the crown; a more positive (and probably more deserved) judgment than has been the fashion of late to offer.

Not all Edwardian men can have had such very long legs: possibly it was one's viewpoint that gave one this impression. Their far up faces, above unaccountably deep collars, seemed always to be breaking into laughter. Their salient characteristic was their relaxedness, a kind of easy-going panache glossing theirs words and actions. Their legs in narrow trousers carrying them inexhaustibly up hill, or thrown, in gleaming leggings, over a horse's back, moved with an unhurried and purposeful elan. Their voices, heard in mockery, affection, or sternness, rang always with that confident buoyancy that was to sink for ever in the mud of the Great War battlefields, with that unquestioning sense of the rightness and fitness of the Pax Britannica and of their place within it. They basked in what they imagined to be its high noon, in what were in fact its last rays, in the sun never setting upon the regimental band playing selections from H.M.S. Pinafore under the banyan tree. Consciously Christians, of a sort, they fought the good fight against an excess in drinking, smoking, or spending; against paying insufficient regard to mothers-in-law or dull old relations. They believed in practically everything except Father Christmas and votes for women, and it made for great peace of mind. Straddling the world, with their graceful wives and their strangely over-dressed babies, they believed in marital fidelity and in kindness to animals which included their rapid despatch when they were being shot, hunted, or fished for. They believed in right and wrong, with a strong line drawn between. They were listening without self-consciousness to the last faint echoes of Roland's horn. They said family prayers, and made endless practical jokes, and tipped one golden half sovereigns. To later critics they could be said to have lived in an innocent, callous, enjoying dream, in some ways perhaps never quite growing up. But they were true to their ethic, and remained, even to people who were not their relations, curiously lovable. Their self-mastery, and not only or mainly in sexual matters, was truly adult; and when the appalling calamity of World War I avalanched over them, they confronted it without self-pity. From their loss we all still suffer. In their rare and more perspicacious survivor, Churchill, we all rejoice. There was something marvellously entire about them.