When Nelly turned eighteen and at last met her guardian, he revealed himself as Richard Sheepshanks, a former ordained priest turned much-acclaimed astronomer. He was witty and dashing – everything a young woman might conjure up in her dreams – and she was intelligent and very pretty. Sheepshanks spoiled Nelly and adored her even more than she adored him. He connected her with the right people and placed her in the proper settings. Soon she found herself going to parties, the theater, and the opera, and traveling abroad. She learned several foreign languages, and developed into a cultured young woman, all under the watchful eye of her fairy-tale, doting benefactor, who at some point finally confessed to her that he was her biological father.
Sheepshanks made Nelly promise to destroy all of his letters to her, and it isn’t possible to determine whether his love as a father skirted the passion of a lover. Perhaps she knew very well what he was feeling and chose to deny it, or she could have been trusting and naive. But it must have been a shocking moment for him when Nelly joyfully announced in Paris that she was in love and was engaged to be married to an art student named Oswald Sickert.
Her father’s reaction was an outburst of rage. He wildly accused her of being ungrateful, dishonest, and unfaithful, and he demanded that she break off the engagement immediately. Nelly refused. Her father withdrew his generosity and returned to England. He wrote several bitter letters to her and then died suddenly after a stroke. Nelly never got over his death and blamed herself for it. She destroyed all of his letters except one that she hid inside an old chronometer of his. “Love me, Nelly, love me dearly, as I love you,” he had written.
Richard Sheepshanks left nothing to Nelly. Fortunately, his kind sister, Anne Sheepshanks, came to Nelly’s rescue and gave her a generous allowance that made it possible for her to support a husband and six children. Nelly’s desolate childhood and ultimate betrayal and abandonment by her father would surely have left their scars. Although there is no record of how she felt about her irresponsible dance-hall mother or the seemingly incestuous love of a father who had been little more than a romantic secret most of her young life, one assumes that Nelly would have suffered from deeply felt grief, anger, and shame.
Had Helena Sickert not grown up to be a famous suffragette and political figure who wrote her memoirs, it is safe to say that there would be very little to tell us about the Sickert family and what Walter was like as a boy. Almost every published reference to Walter’s early life can be traced back to Helena’s memoirs. If any other family member left a record, either it no longer exists or it is safely locked up somewhere.
Helena’s description of her mother reveals an intelligent, complex woman who could be fun, charming, and independent and at other times strict, emotionally absent, manipulative, and submissive.
The home Nelly made for her family was an inconsistent one – severe and harsh, then suddenly blooming into games and song. In the evenings, Nelly often sang while Oswald accompanied her on the piano. She sang when she was at her needlework and when she took her children for romps in the woods or to swim. She taught them delightful nonsense songs such as “The Mistletoe Bough” and “She Wore a Wreath of Roses” and the children’s favorite:
I am Jack Jumper the youngest but one
I can play nick-nacks upon my own thumb…
From an early age, Walter was a fearless swimmer with a head full of pictures and music. He was blue-eyed with long blond curls, and his mother used to dress him in “Little Lord Fauntleroy velvet suits,” recalled a family friend. Helena, four years younger than Walter, remembers her mother’s endless praises of his “beauty” and “perfect behavior,” the latter of which did not quite mirror his sister’s view. Walter may have been lovely to look at, but he was anything but gentle or sweet. Helena recollected that he was a charming, energetic, and quarrelsome little boy who made friends on command but was indifferent to them once they no longer amused him or served a useful purpose. His mother often found herself having to console Walter’s abandoned playmates and make feeble excuses for her son’s suddenly vanishing from their lives.