Turn Right at the Spotted Dog

by Jilly Cooper

  I clearly remember her singing at the top of her voice when, after weeks of frantic uncertainty, a telegram arrived saying my father was safe home from Dunkirk. She was so excited she weeded half my aunt’s garden. The syringa was in bloom. Even today if I breathe in its sweet heady smell, it triggers off instant euphoria.

  I remember my mother disappearing into a great bear hug when she met my father at Leeds the next day. She expected him to be haggard, but he had never looked better: tanned almost black by the French sun and sea air, and two stone lighter from not eating.

  A reticent, modest man, he talked little about the ordeal. One of his friends and fellow officers in France was the champion shot at Bisley. When my father and he and a party of soldiers were creeping towards Dunkirk, a German tank appeared on the horizon more than two thousand yards away. Through binoculars, they saw the turret open and a German officer pop his head out. Casually, as though there was absolutely no danger from the British, he lit a cigarette. Egged on by my father, the Bisley champion borrowed a rifle from one of the men and, incredibly, picked the German off.

  ‘We couldn’t stand his damn nonchalance,’ was my father’s only comment.

  Nor did he dwell on the horrors of Dunkirk, except to describe one ludicrous incident. Waiting endlessly for a little boat, he suddenly noticed the rocks were covered in tar and instinctively, despite bombs and bullets falling round him, removed his tin hat and sat on it, so his trousers wouldn’t get dirty.

  Happily, on his return, he was posted to the Staff College, and we went to live in Camberley. Here we all carried gas masks which we never used, and identity disks were attached to our wrists with our names, addresses and telephone numbers on.

  Then occurred my worst tragedy of the war. My adored brother Timothy, then aged seven, was sent away to prep school. To my mother’s distress at his departure was added dismay when an irate neighbour rang up saying: ‘Please come and fetch Timothy, he’s been crying on my doorstep for the past three days.’

  Frantic that my brother had run away from school, my mother tore round, only to find our Scottie, Jamie, to whose collar Timothy’s old identity disk had been transferred, sitting outside the house whining after the neighbour’s bitch.

  In 1941, my father went to the War Office, and we moved, till the end of the war, to Cobham. A sleepy and in those days very rural Surrey suburb, it had a winding river, a village green and white pebbledash houses with red roofs and leaded windows, the gardens of which were hidden from the outside world by great ramparts of rhododendrons.

  Cobham’s tranquillity was an illusion. By night the Tarter Hill Guns pounded away, the village was blacked out except for a huddle of searchlights scraping the sky like rapiers, the sirens howled, and the whole family including Jamie would seek refuge in the broom cupboard under the stairs.

  Having known nothing else, I didn’t realise how short of food we were, probably because my mother, who never weighed more than seven stone throughout the war, gave me most of her rations. I remember eating delicious spinach, which was in fact nettles, and making my weekly treat of a boiled egg last for at least six pieces of bread. Because fat was so short, my mother mixed butter and marge, but never resorted, as some did, to making cakes with liquid paraffin.

  The greatest excitement of the war for us was when my father went to Portugal and leased a group of islands called the Azores (so that the Germans couldn’t have them), and also brought back the first orange I had ever tasted. On a mission later to America, he returned with my first ever banana, and longed-for lipstick and silk stockings for my mother.

  The best thing about Portugal, said my father, was seeing all the lights on. The blackout in England was horrible, menacing – like having a thick blanket thrown over one’s head whenever one ventured outside. One night when my mother was in hospital with pneumonia, my father picked me up from the people opposite when he got home. Crossing our road in inky blackness, he tripped over a paving stone and dropped me, breaking my arm.

  Far worse than the blackout or the lack of food was the cold, as we queued endlessly in the bitter winters that characterised the war. I had terrible chilblains. A friend says that the thing he remembers about my mother were her little blue hands. It seemed almost colder indoors than outside, our only heating being a small coal fire in the drawing room.

  My mother was appointed Road Mother, which meant she had to keep our bath filled with water (which often froze) at all times, in case the air-raid warden opposite needed to extinguish anything. In fact, the only thing he needed to extinguish in our road were the fires of extra-marital passion.

  Only years after did I learn that Mrs B, who was always so bravely cheerful despite a husband away in the Navy, had a lover who stealthily arrived after the blackout. Or that Mrs X and Mr Y, who were always joking and gave me their sweet ration, and whom I so preferred to their grouchy other halves, had actually fallen in love fire-watching and carried on a raging affair throughout the war.

  Everyone bicycled everywhere. If anyone came to stay, my father went to the station, riding his own bike and guiding my brother’s, which had a wonky seat that tipped backwards. When one aunt arrived, all we could see was her nervous little face peering just above the handlebars.

  There were few cars on the road, and no signposts. Leatherhead, four miles away but unvisited, seemed like Africa. In this curiously enclosed world, people seldom went out at night. We made our own amusements, singing round the piano. How the pop songs ‘Run, Rabbit, Run’ and ‘Hey Little Hen’ lifted our spirits!

  Clothes being so short, I was lucky my mother was good at sewing, and made most of mine. For my sixth birthday party, all the children invited had a going-away present of a little horse made from an old brown blanket, each with a mane and tail of different coloured wool.

  As the bombs got worse, my parents installed a Morrison shelter. A huge, ugly, green metal table with wiremesh sides, it only left space in the dining room for one narrow single bed. This my parents shared, stretched out like two anchovies in a tin, for the rest of the war. At the first wail of the siren, they rolled into the shelter beside Jamie and me. Goodness knows what it did to their sex lives. Perhaps that was why I was their last child.

  For me, it was a fantastic comfort having them so near, racked as I was by fearful nightmares of German parachutists disguised as nuns, the Gestapo tugging out my finger nails, and Japs with slit eyes sidling through the bamboo shoots, filling me up with water and jumping on my stomach.

  My attitudes were very simple. The French were soppy dates because they had caved in. Monty was a star who turned the war. The Americans were also stars, because they threw me chewing-gum out of passing tanks, until I overheard my father telling a chum that Ike had a mistress. I was appalled. A mistress meant a schoolteacher. How soppy of the Americans to need a teacher to tell them how to fight. Our generals could do it on their own.

  It is impossible to describe the adulation we felt for the cuddly, jaunty, defiant figure of Mr Churchill; at times the glowing red tip of his cigar seemed the only thing that lightened our darkness. Hitler was of course the arch-fiend, the focus of all loathing.

  ‘Did we really detest him that much?’ I asked my mother the other day.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she thought for a minute. ‘Even more than Mr Scargill.’

  D-Day raised everyone’s hopes. Over the fence, I heard people saying war would be over by Christmas. I was thrilled my father had promised me a pony.

  But the mood of optimism was shattered by the arrival of the doodlebugs which terrorised southern England. One fell as we were about to bathe in the river. Hearing the throbbing overhead like some malignant flying taxi, we all flattened in the wild garlic, except two of my little friends, who prostrated themselves in the one bed of nettles not yet turned into spinach, which caused more tears than the subsequent explosion.

  Another bomb fell on our school. All the windows blew in, filling the orange jelly we were eating for pudding with lethal splinters. W
ithin minutes, hoards of ashen mothers converged from all sides, like the Valkyries, peddling furiously. Fortunately none of us was hurt. School on the other hand was closed for two months – my first inkling that Hitler might be on my side.

  My father was a brigadier now, one of the youngest in the army. I nearly burst with pride each morning as I saw him stride off down the road with a red band on his hat. But for my mother, he left home six days a week for bomb-torn London, and was never back until after nine at night. Considering how many fathers were away fighting or in staff jobs, most children were brought up in virtually one-parent families. As the war entered its sixth year, the strain began to tell, mothers got rattier, staff at school more bad-tempered.

  Then at long last on 7 May 1945, as my mother was bashing the stems of some wisteria, we heard on the wireless that the Germans had surrendered.

  ‘Pinch me,’ she said. ‘So I know I’m awake.’

  Why was she crying? She’d never cried before except when Jamie was put down. Had we lost after all? Then she laughed and dried her eyes on her apron, and we ran into the street. People were cheering and hugging, and hanging out flags, a little crumpled after five years in the attic. Then suddenly the bells rang out, peeling gloriously from Cobham, Oxshott and Leatherhead, echoing across the flat black-earthed Surrey landscape, announcing the fall of the powers of darkness.

  My father took May 8th off. My brother came home from prep school. Together in the kitchen we listened to Mr Churchill’s bulldog growl: ‘The evil-doers now lie prostrate before us. Advance Britannia,’ followed by cheer upon cheer.

  We had a great party in the evening at one of the big houses on the hill. I had a bath beforehand and, used to washing with only a sliver as thin as a communion wafer, was amazed my mother didn’t scold me for leaving a new bar of pink soap in the water.

  The weather was muggy and warm. Carrying a red jelly and a shepherd’s pie containing our entire week’s meat ration, we walked to the party. Every house was ablaze with lights and strewn with union jacks and bunting. The scent of lilacs and the Badedas tang of nearby pine woods mingled with the smell of hundreds of bonfires and beacons turning the sky to rose.

  Reaching the party, we found bunting hung from lights all round the garden. The women looked lovely in their cotton dresses – one enterprising lady had even run up a long skirt from her blackout curtains. But my mother, as always, seemed loveliest in a green flowered dress which matched her eyes.

  Drifting around was old Lady Thornley, a legend in Cobham since she emerged unhurt from the drawing room after a direct hit on her house,and her husband, seeing her white hair totally blacked with soot, said gallantly: ‘My dear, you look twenty years younger.’

  I was madly in love with our host, who went up to London every day in a black coat with an astrakhan collar, and who seemed able to get masses of everything from gin to milk chocolate throughout the war. The tables certainly groaned with food – jellies, jam tarts, spam and corned beef, even a nobly sacrificed chicken. There also seemed buckets to drink.

  The host’s father-in-law, a knight very high up in the Civil Service, was a great character. Running around in pre-war gym shoes, with holes cut out for his corns, he supervised the huge bonfire, which reared up nearly twelve feet tall at the bottom of the garden. Perched on top was an effigy of Hitler with mad staring eyes, slicked black hair, a little black moustache and Swastika armbands. At last the great pyre roared into golden flame. After two thousand days of blackout, the brilliance was breathtaking. Birds disturbed by the unaccustomed brightness sang their heads off. Insects freaked out, moths bashing against the lights, colossal maybugs bombing us like doodlebugs.

  Looking across the garden my mother suddenly stiffened. For there was my father laughing and shoving his hand down a blonde’s dress. But it was only old Lady Thornley again. This time her white hair was turned gold by the bonfire, and my father was retrieving a maybug from her cleavage.

  Later we toasted Mr Churchill and the King and Queen, and there was singing. My favourite song, written by Hubert Gregg, was about getting ‘lit-up when the lights go up in London’. ‘The whole population will be canned, canned, canned’, went one verse. ‘Through our gins and Angosturas, we’ll see little pale pink Fuehrers Hi de Heiling from the Circus in the Strand.’

  Then we bellowed out ‘There’ll always be an England’, and all the grown-ups cried. Really they seemed an awfully soppy bunch.

  My poor brother remembers having the most excruciating earache that night, and no one taking any notice because they were all plastered. I got awful indigestion from eating half-raw baked potatoes with charred outsides from the bonfire. My best friend guzzled a whole tin of condensed milk, and was sick in the rhododendrons.

  But the Tarter Hill guns were silent, as half asleep we were carried somewhat unsteadily home by my parents. Gradually it sank in that we had won the war, and we were free.

  My father had made us a see-saw for Christmas 1944, which not only went up and down but round and round. It was such an amazing novelty that our garden was always packed with excited, yelling children, fighting for a turn. The see-saw had a hollow base, with a hole in it. Putting his hand inside to tighten the screw the morning after VE Day, my father was amazed to find a blue tit sitting on four eggs, which she later hatched out. Despite all the yelling, the fighting, the bombs and the pounding guns, she had determinedly stuck to her post and raised her family. Just as the British, despite the terrors and hardships, had finally won through. She seemed to symbolise our war.

  TWO

  Portrait Gallery

  Neil Kinnock

  THIS PIECE APPEARED in September 1983 on the eve of the Labour Party Conference, at which Neil Kinnock became leader. His remarks about other members of the party, particularly Meacher, Benn and Wilson, were picked up by all the other Sundays, and the Mail on Sunday led on the story. By midday Mr Kinnock had denied making any of the remarks, but fortunately they were all down in my notebook.

  Neil Kinnock not only cares – but more important he has to be seen to care. When I first met him three years ago in the Commons, he was so busy hailing fellow MPs, chatting up a party of blind men, and pumping visiting pensioners by the hand, it was almost impossible to get a word in edgeways.

  This week in the South Wales colliery town of Pontllanfraith, it was the same. Arriving at his house, I found a bright scarlet front door, no bell and no Neil. Soon I was joined by a handsome man and his springer spaniel, who with its ginger ears, freckled paws and indiscriminate amiability was not unlike Mr Kinnock.

  ‘Waiting for Neil are you?’ asked the handsome man, who turned out to be the local youth officer. ‘He’s a great bloke, cares about the area, people love him round here, he remembers their names.’

  ‘Would he remember to turn up?’ I asked anxiously as it started to rain.

  ‘Oh yes, he’s always late.’

  If you have charm, people will wait for you. As several other people stopped to pass the time of day and sing our Neil’s praises, I realised Mr Kinnock’s warmth is very much a local trait.

  And suddenly he drove up in the blue Rover the TGWU have given him to replace the Ford he piled up on the M4. Two weeks holiday in Tuscany had bleached the Tabasco red hair and given him a tan which blended into the freckles. Bouncing out, weighed down by a duvet, two carrier bags and an overweight briefcase, he said we couldn’t get in because he’d forgotten the key, but D’reen up the road had a spare.

  ‘How was Strasbourg?’ I began, but Mr Kinnock was already pumping the youth officer by the hand, telling him to Give us a Shout if he needed anything.

  ‘How,’ I began again, but our Neil had bounded into the traffic, across the road to shake hands with an ancient constituent and disappear inside his house. Ten minutes later he was back. The poor old boy’s wife had died recently.

  In between waving at passers-by, he tried to light his pipe, but gave up because of the rain which was now sweeping symbolically rightwards. I as
ked him about his U-turn on the Common Market.

  ‘The British don’t like the Common Market,’ he replied. ‘But they’re wrongly frightened we couldn’t survive without it. It’s like saying I can’t give up booze because I might freeze to death’.

  ‘I was addressing the Socialist group over there,’ he went on, then added in outraged tones, as though he’d never done the same thing himself, ‘and in the middle two Frenchmen started talking. I told them to shut up.’

  By now we were quite wet, so I was relieved when D’reen arrived with the key. The house inside was delightful and blissfully warm. The knocked-through room contains a pine table and a Welsh dresser. On the walls are Lowry prints, numerous photographs of Mr Kinnock’s wife Glenys and their two children, a framed Private Eye cover featuring Mr Kinnock and Mr Foot, and a certificate to show Mr Kinnock had been down a mine.

  Mr Kinnock apologised for the Venetian blinds – without them he’d never get any peace – and offered me real or instant coffee.

  ‘Instant’s fine,’ I said.

  ‘Real coffee’s much nicer.’

  ‘Isn’t it rather middle class?’ I said, teasing.

  ‘No,’ Mr Kinnock bridled. ‘The Italian working classes wouldn’t dream of drinking anything but real coffee.’

  Wasn’t he thrilled about becoming leader?

  Just for a second he dropped his guard, grinning engagingly from ear to ear. Then remembering his image as the caring family man who’s unwittingly had a greatness thrust upon him, added ‘But at forty-one, I’m too young. The kids are at the wrong age, Rachel’s eleven, Stevie’s thirteen. Before entering the leadership stakes, I had to think very seriously whether such a commitment would damage the kids.’

  Were they impressed?

  ‘Not very,’ said Mr Kinnock, adding skimmed milk to his coffee. ‘Although I’ve become an excellent source of autographs for Rachel. Stevie’d be more impressed if I captained Wales.’