My father’s solid nature was rooted in his love of the land—and even then he would often voice a warning that the earth was something we should cherish. “If we’re not careful, that’ll be a Tesco’s over there,” he said, pointing to a bank of bluebells as we tumbled after him through the woods one Sunday afternoon, meandering off the path because the path represented someone telling him exactly where to go. We stopped and stared at the woodland before us, imagining it sullied by a Tesco’s supermarket.
“And a garage over there, with a car park,” John added.
“And a block of flats right there,” I chipped in.
We did this a lot on walks with Dad; we glimpsed into the future to see the worst that might happen to our country idyll, if we weren’t careful. Perhaps that’s why he pointed out every movement of wildlife, every badger, hawk and fox, and the changes that came with the seasons.
Dad hated seeing countryside developed and his fears were prescient, as if he knew the earth was at risk even then. But he was sadder than most when the railway closed—it was as if part of his childhood had been snatched up and away from him, his escape route from London gone, even though he’d already found freedom. Perhaps he felt bereft because, as a boy, he’d traveled on the branch line from Paddock Wood down to Goudhurst for the hop-picking, and it was the same line that linked us to Paddock Wood and then Tonbridge and London, and of course home again. Always home again.
Cranbrook Station, two miles out of the town, was inconveniently situated for everyone who actually lived in Cranbrook, but was a boon for us because it was a twenty-minute walk from the house, up to the top of The Terrace and then down Station Road. The train was our nearby link to a bigger world. My swing had been delivered by train to the station. I’d seen it even before it was brought to the house on the back of the coal lorry—I knew it had been ordered because Mum could not keep a secret, and on our way down to the farm one day, I looked across to the station as we walked over the railway bridge and saw the swing-shaped brown paper package leaning against the station house. I knew it was mine, because who else would be expecting a swing to be brought to Hartley in the goods wagon of the train?
We traveled to London on the train a couple of times each year. A “push and pull” locomotive was used on the line, so if a passenger was a bit late getting to the station, the station master was known to blow his whistle and wave to the guard in the signal box, and the train would stop and come back again for the tardy passenger. That happened to us a few times. I enjoyed the train because I didn’t get sick and the rhythm lulled me. And I loved the way Mum dressed to go to London, in her New Look coat from before she was married and her one pair of leather shoes. She would buy a new pair of nylons for the journey if her old ones were laddered. In winter she’d wear her black woolen scarf with silver thread woven into the pattern, wrapping it around her head and shoulders as if she were a film star, and in truth, she still had something of the Rita Hayworth look about her that everyone had commented upon when she was seventeen. We’d clamber onto the train, with me wearing my flannel pajama bottoms underneath the woolen plaid trews that Mum made us put on for travel to London to keep us warm. I was allergic to wool and would come up in red welts if it touched my skin, and I had to be careful with the seats, too, because they were covered in old red woolen fabric in a paisley pattern fashionable in Victorian times when the railway was built. Once we were settled, Mum would look into the mirror set on the wooden carriage bulkhead between two lamps in the shape of shells, and apply her red lipstick from its case of twisted golden metal. She’d press her lips together and then take her seat, checking and rechecking that she hadn’t lost the tickets.
I think the first time I was aware of my mother’s claustrophobia was on a train. It was just the three of us, going up to London—Mum, John and me. John wasn’t walking, but we didn’t have a pushchair with us because it would have been too much to take on the train. Perhaps we were going to see Auntie Sylvie, and she would have one somewhere. When the train stopped at Paddock Wood, we were the only passengers in the carriage and Mum could not get the door open to step out onto the platform. She tried to pull down the window in the door, but it wouldn’t move, so she told me to quickly turn and run along the carriage to the other door, and that one wouldn’t open either. Then she started to cough, and I remember thinking that we had to get off the train very quickly. It was probably only a few minutes that we were stuck, but I was scared because I could see the fear in my mother’s eyes, and if she was scared I knew we were in trouble. Then the guard on the platform saw Mum struggling with the window, and came to open the door.
“Turned it the wrong way, love,” said the guard, pointing to the door handle before touching his cap as if in salute after he’d helped us from the train. “No need to rush, the up train hasn’t come in yet.” The up train, the down train—I was fascinated by the language of the railway.
The locomotives were old and the carriages ancient. Dad came home from London one winter’s night—he’d been sent up to town on a special job with another man from the painting firm—and told us about the carriage he’d been sitting in for the journey from Paddock Wood.
“Should’ve seen it—it was like a posh hotel, with seats arranged around an open fire, right there in the carriage. I asked the conductor about it, and he said they had to bring it out of storage on account of repairs on another carriage. I felt like a king in there.”
We marveled at the story, because we liked a bit of elevation in life, us Winspears. I’m like that myself when I get upgraded to first class on a flight. Jackie Winspear, queen of the red-eye.
But there would be no elevation to another class of rail travel after the branch line closed in 1961, which meant we had to take the motor coach up to London. Losing the trains saddened our small community. Dad always blamed the station’s demise on Dr. Beeching, the Chairman of the British Railways Board, who was responsible for closure of branch line stations up and down the country, along with thousands of miles of railway tracks, when he published his report that led to what became known as the “Beeching Axe.” Increased road passenger travel and freight movement were blamed for the closures, which were designed to reduce government railway subsidies and the number of loss-making stations. Dad always said the people who closed the station “couldn’t see any further than the ends of their noses,” but he said that about all politicians. Sometimes, if they really irked him, he said they all ought to be “put up against a wall and shot.” The truth was the station had never made money because it had been built in the wrong place, a place chosen to save on restitution payments.
In the great industrial age of Victorian Britain, landowners had to be paid when a new railway line was constructed across their land, especially if it was agricultural land. The landowners closer to Cranbrook were asking a pretty penny for the railway to go through in the mid-1800s, so instead the station was built in the hamlet of Hartley two miles outside the town. And there it lost money hand over fist, because not enough people wanted to come from Cranbrook to the station. Yet there’s many who would agree with my dad about the shortsighted Beeching and his axe, as Britain’s roads became choked with traffic—perhaps in time many of those railway lines and stations could have become profitable. Certainly old Beeching might have had a change of heart if he’d ever been in a car stuck on the M25 outer London orbital motorway at any time of day.
Railway economics probably went over the heads of most locals, but they knew they would miss their railway. On the June day in 1961 when the station closed and the last push-pull train rumbled on its way, more people came to buy tickets and sit on that train than had journeyed by rail for years. The station was resplendent with hanging baskets filled with blooms and window boxes spilling over with color. As always, the station master walked ahead of the train to open the level crossing gate where the rail met Bishop’s Lane—the very place where my mother would race us across even if a trai
n was nowhere to be seen or heard, and where I was always scared I’d get my foot caught between the rails and be run over, just like heroines in those old silent films sometimes shown on Sunday morning television. I wonder how our station manager felt, closing that gate for the last time and walking back to the station to close the ticket office forever.
The Hawkhurst Line was often said to be the most beautiful railway line in the county, if not the whole of England, as it meandered through the Weald of Kent countryside, past fields of barley, past apple orchards where our Russets, Cox’s Orange Pippins, Bramleys and Worcesters grew. And past our cherry orchards, boasting those tallest cherry trees in the world, and our precious hop gardens and farms; past forests and small cottages, past the Marguerite daisies that grew on verges along with wild lupins, pink mallow, foxgloves, primroses and bluebells. I loved hearing the train in the distance if we were working in the fields and I’d always look up as it came closer. Sometimes I ran to the fence that separated the land from the railway line just to see the train come along, steam punching up through the trees as it took people, produce, milk, parcels and letters to the bigger world beyond, and brought that bigger world to us, even when it was a new red swing. If the driver saw me, he’d wave.
There were times after the line closed when I would be helping Mum as she worked in a field, and I’d hear the distinctive whistle of the train as it reached Bishop’s Lane. I’d hear the clackety-clack, clackety-clack, clackety-clack rhythm of the wheels on the tracks and I’d look up, ready to see steam coming through the trees. But there was nothing, for the trains had long gone. Then I’d look around and see someone else staring toward the old railway line, as if they’d heard it too, and it made me wonder if trains could become ghosts.
Many years later, as I rode my bike from my home in Ojai, California, down to the beach in Ventura, I stopped at a crossing to wait for the Coast Starlight train to pass, en route to its next stop in Santa Barbara before making its way onward to northern California and Washington state. On a whim I waved to the driver and he waved back and sounded the horn. It warmed my heart, and I thought about those trains of my childhood and realized that some ghosts reside in the heart. Perhaps that’s why I’ve always loved trains.
18
The Horse, of Course
It seemed that so much happened during the year I turned six. Mum’s thyroid trouble appeared to stabilize, though she didn’t gain weight and would sometimes still drop cups and saucers or have coughing fits. Her weight loss was such that the skin on her neck seemed to have been sucked into her chest—I would run my fingers along her collar bones and refer to the deep recesses at the base of her throat as “Mummy’s buckets.” Whenever she pulled me in for a cuddle, I could feel her bones sticking into me.
My eyes improved, so I started to catch up with my schoolwork, and was relieved because I wouldn’t have to wear the dunce’s cap after all. And I had two friends I loved: Wendy in Cranbrook, who was my best friend at school, and Jennifer who lived about half a mile away in Hartley and was my best friend at home—at weekends I could walk to Jenny’s house, whereas Wendy lived on the other side of Cranbrook. At school, Jenny tended to pal around with a girl named Janet, who lived in the town. Their joint birthday party in Cranbrook was the first party I had ever been invited to, and after that I was only ever allowed to go to a party at Jenny’s house, because Dad could walk along the road to bring me home. In fact, if it wasn’t for Jenny’s dad having a car and me being friends with Jenny, there’s a lot of things I wouldn’t have been able to do. If her Dad was taking the family to Hastings for the day, or Jenny to another party, I was allowed to go.
I was sometimes allowed to stay at Wendy’s house for the odd overnight sleepover on a Friday evening after school. Wendy and her brothers would walk me to the bus stop the following morning. I loved Wendy’s house because she had three brothers and a sister, and they had bunk beds—and they seemed to have so much boisterous fun. Wendy’s mum always had chocolate spread on the table to have with bread, and that was something my mum would never buy, because it was too expensive. Oh what fun it was at Wendy’s house. Wendy sometimes came home with me after school on a Friday. I remember one Saturday two of her brothers rode out to the house on their bikes during a warm summer storm because they missed her so much. Mum sent us up to the shop to buy Mivvi bars, a sort of ice cream bar coated with strawberry flavor sorbet. A Mivvi bar was a rare treat. Years later, during the Falklands War, I wept when my mother telephoned to let me know that Wendy’s younger brother, Anthony, had been killed on HMS Sheffield when it was hit by an Exocet missile. The image that came to me was of a gaggle of kids standing by the back door, giggling and eating Mivvis on a hot, sticky day while watching summer rain pour down outside.
Jenny was the friend who came around on her bicycle to see me on the day I was discharged from the hospital. I later discovered that as she waited for me to come to the door, my mother told her that she wasn’t to say anything about my eyes, and that they wouldn’t look like that forever. I can still see Jenny standing by the kitchen door, backlit by sunshine as I came running when Mum called out to say she was there to see me. Jenny looked at me and said, “Oh Jackie . . . your eyes are . . . your eyes are so beautiful.” And then she collapsed into my mother’s arms in a flood of tears. That’s when it occurred to me that it was a funny kind of beautiful that made people cry.
Jenny was enrolled at the Audrey Hill Ballet School in Hawkhurst on Tuesday evenings after school, and on that day she would stay on the bus to get to her class. Her dad would collect her afterward in their creamy yellow Vauxhall car. My parents couldn’t afford ballet lessons, but I really wanted to dance and to wear that same white dress with the pleated skirt and the “AH” insignia embroidered on the pocket in red silk that Jenny wore to school on her ballet days. So I sometimes stayed on the bus with her, and was allowed to watch, and every now and again Miss Hill felt sorry for me and let me join in, just for one dance, usually tap, because then I could keep my shoes on. Jenny had pink ballet shoes and red tap shoes and I thought they were beautiful. I was not perturbed by the fact that I was a spectator—it was quite enough just to be there with other girls I didn’t know who came to the ballet classes from different villages. Jenny’s dad would drop me off at the top of The Terrace later.
It was all very nice, watching Jenny dance, but what I really wanted was a horse, though I knew that was a wanting all the blackcurrant picking, apple picking, hop picking and loganberry picking in the world wouldn’t get for me. I had fallen in love with horses soon after we moved to The Terrace. Well, to be accurate, I fell in love with one particular horse. Mum and I had walked up to the cottage near Tubs Lake, where a woman ran a small grocery shop. Perhaps it was a Wednesday afternoon, early closing for Cooke’s, the general store at the end of our row of terrace houses. The woman’s cottage had a very large egg-shaped dent in the roof where a bomb had dropped on it and then bounced off in the war. In fact, that small area was already legendary, given that Tubs Lake was so named because, apparently, when the notorious Hawkhurst Gang of smugglers rode through in the mid-1700s, chased by the excise men, they would throw their tubs of contraband into the lake for collection later. There was always talk that there were still tubs from those days at the bottom of the lake, which over the centuries had become a pungent pond, full of decomposing vegetation. By the time my brother was ten years old, he had waded into the muddy swamp many times to see if he could find sunken treasure, and then received a clip around the ear for his trouble when he got home on account of the smell he brought into the house.
But on this day our only treasure was a quarter pound of tea and a bottle of milk carried home from the little shop in a string bag. When we reached the crest of the hill I could feel my eyes widen as a magnificent black horse came galloping up to the fence to greet us. I pulled away from my mother and ran to the fence, looking straight up at the massive head above me. He leaned down and
I reached up to rest my hand on his soft nose.
“Come away from that horse now!” said my mother, running to catch up with me. I disobeyed her and knelt down to clutch at clumps of the sweeter grass and clover on my side of the fence, then held it up to the horse. My mother intercepted and snatched the grass from my fingers.
“That thing’ll have your hand off.”
I shook my head. I’d been around big animals since we lived at Black Bush Cottage. Cows and sheep held no more threat than dogs, though I treated approaching a cat as something of a risk. I’d heard stories of me as a two-year-old marching through a herd of cattle, elbowing them aside in my quest to get through to the far end of the field where my father was mending a fence, or spreading out feed. But this wasn’t a cow, this was a horse, and I had lost my heart to him.
I loved it when we walked along the road to see the black horse, who would trot from his place on the top of the hill down to the fence. Soon we were bringing carrots, though I was never allowed to offer him food in case he’d have my hand off, so we threw treats over the fence. Then one day he was gone, yet each time we came to the top of the hill, I continued to stand there, waiting, just in case he would come to find me. When he didn’t we’d continue on, either to the farm or the little shop with the bomb-shaped dent in the roof. But I’d made up my mind—I was going to have a horse, come what may.
I was eight years old and walking back from Five Acres, the field at the back of the house, when I saw a chestnut thoroughbred in the paddock next to the imposing manor house. In our part of Hartley—the older part; newer houses had sprung up on the way to Cranbrook over the years—the hamlet seemed almost medieval and would have looked so to someone peering down from an aircraft. There was a manor house, an old oast house now converted to a home, and a farmhouse next to it. Further on there was a series of older cottages where workers at the manor house must have lived very far back in the day. Other farms were located nearby with the occasional ancient manor house in between, along with more cottages tied to the job and the land, which was marked by a patchwork quilt of fields, some laying fallow and some with crops or used for grazing. Farming then was not far removed from the field rotation system first employed in the Middle Ages.
This Time Next Year We'll Be Laughing Page 17