Tom had the gift of making one want to please him, which was perhaps the secret of his success with women, and he left a trail of disappointed lovers who did not quite come up to his standards. His bugbear was depression, an affliction from which my sisters and I did not suffer. He sometimes came home unexpectedly and hardly spoke for days but sat, at times reading at times not, oblivious to his surroundings and to Decca and me jabbering away in Honnish, our private language. The depression lifted as mysteriously as it came and off he went to whatever he was supposed to be doing. He was the peacemaker of the family and managed to remain friends with everyone throughout all the political upheavals. He was the most steadfast and attractive person in the background of our lives and we all deferred to him, including Muv and Farve.
Tom’s letters to Muv from prep school chiefly concerned food. The hungry last years of the 1914–18 war must have been hard on growing boys and ‘sossages’ and fried bacon are often mentioned, perhaps as a tease because they were outlawed at home. Tom made lifelong friends at school with Basil Blackwood, later the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, and Jim Lees-Milne. Nanny told me of my introduction to Jim. At three months old I was taken with parents and sisters to a school cricket match in which Tom and Jim were playing. Jim lobbed a ball into my pram, which got him a brisk telling off from Nanny – the closeness of the near-fatal blow no doubt exaggerated. (I do not suppose Muv noticed.)
From prep school Tom won a scholarship to Eton and could have gone there for nothing, as a ‘Tug’ in Eton language, but because Farve could afford the fees it was decided that he should go as an ‘Oppidan Scholar’, leaving the place for a needier boy. Tom thrived at Eton, where his friends Jim and Basil were also pupils. His musical talent flourished and his tutor allowed him to have a piano in his room – an unusual concession, but he realized it was a part of Tom’s being.
Diana left home to get married when I was nine. I saw little of her until after the war and did not really get to know and love her till then. Her beauty was the first thing that struck you; she was beautiful when she was born in 1910 and remained beautiful until her death. Without make-up or artifice, and often in clothes that she wore till they were threadbare, she was always the best-looking woman at any gathering. She was a great reader with a huge appetite for literature and was the intellectual equal of Tom, to whom she was closest in age and interests. Like Decca and Unity, once Diana had decided on a course of action there was no deviating or turning back and, like them, she was drawn to extreme politics. It was more surprising in her case as almost everything else about her was open-minded and tolerant.
Her immediate understanding of human frailty and her extraordinary sensitivity made Diana doubly attractive, and later on it was interesting to see how people who were prejudiced against her because of her politics melted on meeting her. Her rigid views on race were partly influenced by Grandfather Redesdale, an advocate of Teutonic supremacy, and were hardened by the experience of war and her unyielding nature. I do not share her views but my love for her overcame this side of her character, the greater part of which was pure and selfless. She was always the one to volunteer for some boring family chore and went out of her way to be kind to anyone in difficulty. As she grew old, she became almost saint-like in her goodness.
Unity was always the odd one out. She arrived in this world in August 1914 to the sound of troops marching to war and departed it thirty-four years later in tragic circumstances. Larger than life in every way, she could have been the model for a ship’s figurehead or Boadicea, with her huge navy-blue eyes, perfectly straight nose and fair hair worn in two long plaits. Perhaps because of her teenage diet of mashed potatoes, her teeth were her only bad feature. (In those days cosmetic dentistry was in its infancy and you took what nature gave you.) As a child she was a dreamer, obstinate, fearless of authority, disobedient, affectionate and easily hurt, with a precocious talent for drawing and design. When she was about eight she made an unforgettable picture of a man walking in a field wearing a turban and little else. He had a bag hanging around his middle and was broadcasting seed as though it were peas and beans. The title of the drawing was ‘Abraham and his Seed Forever’.
Unity was devoted to Decca, a closeness that withstood their political differences. They communicated in Boudledidge, a private language invented by Decca that no one in the family understood except me, but I would never have dared speak it – it was their language, not mine, and I would have been pulled up sharply had I tried. I was satisfied with Honnish, which had a background of the local Gloucestershire accent, elongated and shortened according to the importance of the words. If someone upset Unity at meals, she slid slowly and noiselessly to the floor and remained under the table while the chat went on above, surfacing only when she thought the episode was forgotten. My parents never drew attention to it. She understood the power of silence and carried it to such a degree that it was sometimes what the Army describes so well as ‘dumb insolence’. One of the lessons in the PNEU programme was ‘narration’, when pupils had to recount a passage that the teacher had read out. Muv asked Unity to do this simple task but for some reason she dug in her heels and refused. ‘Come on, darling, you must remember something,’ said Muv. Unity shook her head. ‘Not one word?’ Muv insisted. ‘Very well then,’ said Unity, staring furiously ahead, ‘the’.
Decca was my boon companion all through childhood. She was bold, original, imaginative, generous, vulnerable, lazy, clumsy and comical in the extreme. We shared everything and life without her was unimaginable. We talked all day in Honnish, and when we slept in the same room we chatted for half the night as well – what about, heaven knows, but no secrets were hid. We had each other when the grown-ups and older sisters were difficult or when the Great Unfairness of Life seemed too much to bear.
Having opposite interests, we did not compete: Decca was a reader, an observer rather than a doer, and clever, with a talent for words that eventually made her famous. She was not interested in sports or games of any kind, she disliked the out-of-doors and was oblivious to the seasons. (When loyally accompanying her second husband, Robert Treuhaft, on a hiking holiday in an American national park, she intoned, ‘Nature, nature, how I hate yer,’ as she stumbled along a rocky path.) A feeling for interior decoration – so strong in my mother and inherited to the last degree of perfection by Nancy and Diana – was left out of her. Nor did she seem to care about her appearance: clothes were merely coverings to keep her warm; colours and shapes were thrown together hugger-mugger and made you wonder at her choice. Her mind and energies were engaged elsewhere, mainly with people and politics. Her unswerving loyalty to those she loved and biting criticism of the many she did not, were shades of my father – perhaps the only trait they had in common. When you were with her, all else faded in the face of her strong personality and you forgot everything except her company.
Decca had two pet animals and a bird, adored and transformed by her into human characters and, like Pam with her dogs, they were invested with considerable importance. The bird was a ring dove, complete with a beautiful wicker cage, which she had bought with long-saved pocket money. The dove became tame and flew above her head as she bicycled down the long hill to Swinbrook village, looking like the picture of the Holy Ghost in our children’s illustrated Bible. It was an object of envy to me, who had neither bird nor bicycle. Her black spaniel, Tray, was a later shadow and was named after the dog that gained the upper hand over Cruel Frederick in Struwwelpeter, Heinrich Hoffmann’s cautionary tales. Their terrifying pictures were a constant reminder of what could happen if we overstepped the mark. The Great Agrippa, so tall he almost reached the sky, was my father to the life in his dressing gown when he had just got out of ‘my good clothes’. Little Suck-a-Thumb, blood pouring from the boy’s amputated thumbs, and the smoking remains of Harriet, the result of her disobedience with matches, all hit the targeted conscience.
Decca’s other creature was Miranda, an orphan ewe lamb she had brought up on the bottle
. Miranda soon grew into a clumsier, pushier version of Tray and went everywhere with her loving owner, shoving people and furniture out of the way with a butt from her bony forehead. After the annual shearing, her fleece was sent to the Witney Blanket Company where the wool was transformed into a blanket with ‘Miranda’ woven in red into the border. The sheep and the annual blanket were an important part of nursery life. Miranda became the symbol of all the virtues, backed up by no less an authority than the Bible, which regularly harps on the necessity of separating the sheep from the goats (sheep being the superior of the two). Whenever a passage referring to this ancient state of affairs was quoted in church, Decca got excited and made the faces and sounds she kept for Miranda. If the parson noticed he must have wondered what had possessed one of the younger members of his congregation.
I sometimes wondered what it would be like to be an only child, but the stimulation of being one of a crowd, all older than me, was an education in itself. I could never keep up but I learned to hold my own.
4
Swinbrook House
A
STHALL MANOR WAS host to a poltergeist, one of those nuisances that accompany teenage girls. It crashed and banged in the attics and, according to legend, pulled off the cook’s bedclothes. My sisters thought it was one of the reasons why Farve decided to sell the house in 1926. He loved building and having a project on the go and set about enlarging a farmhouse above Swinbrook village. I have never seen a photograph of the original house and do not know if Muv was consulted before Farve got to work on it. Judging by what emerged, I imagine not. While the house was being finished we went to Paris and stayed in a cheap hotel. Farve took his car. He got into trouble with a policeman, who stood blowing his whistle and waving his windmill arms at this driver on the wrong side of the road. Farve wound down his window and shouted, ‘Sorrry, no Frrrench,’ in an exaggerated French accent (to make it easier for the policeman to understand). There was a bidet in our hotel bathroom and Nanny, Decca and I, who had never seen such a thing, hurried out to buy goldfish assuming that was what it was for.
After a few months we came home to Swinbrook for the first time. Farve was delighted with his new house. My mother had done her best to make the interior as attractive as possible, given the newness of the shell. Neither of my parents were gardeners, surprisingly in the case of my mother as people who are good at decorating are often good at gardening. She particularly disliked white flowers, saying they were like bits of paper blowing about. My father’s favourite flower was scarlet Anemone fulgens, a specialist’s bloom not often seen in a garden. He treasured the two or three bulbs that succeeded out of the many he planted, and it was the end of the world if a rampaging dog or child were to step on one of these objects of untold value.
I loved the house from the start. The others did not. They had lost the Asthall barn and their freedom and had only the long drawing room to sit in, which they had to share with Muv. They were of an age to complain to whoever would listen and the cry, ‘It is unfair’, was often heard. Lesser complaints ruled the day: ‘The knives and forks are so cold we can’t eat with them’ or ‘Unity’s got a rat and I’ve only got hens.’ Our bedrooms and Nanny’s were on the top floor and were painted white, each with a border of a different colour. Mine was green. The interior doors of the house were made of elm which, as every skoolboy knows, is prone to warping. Farve insisted that it was ‘damn good wood’, but Nancy said that even when it was locked, you could put your head round the visitors’ bathroom door and see what was happening inside. The dining-room table was made of two long pieces of oak, sixteenth-century style (perhaps it was sixteenth-century; it is not the sort of thing children notice). The boards did not quite meet, making a little valley down the middle which we sowed with seeds and watered. It was the usual game of Tom Tiddler’s Ground and, greatly daring, we would taunt Farve with this until he shouted at us to stop.
My mother stretched at meals. From her outspread arms her hands made circles in the air, first one way then the other, which she said was good for the digestion. She also yawned. I expect the governesses were surprised by this but they were surprised by many of her foibles. Farve drank water out of Grandfather Redesdale’s magnificent goblet made from the melted-down gold medals won by his Shire horses. Farve did the carving. Mabel noticed short commons for the unloved and used to push the plate against his arm till he topped up the helping. She kept the remains of breakfast – forbidden sausages and ham – that came out of the dining room on shooting days, and we were into the pantry like lightning.
Mabel’s domain was a refuge for us children. Like Nanny, she was usually unflustered but even she set about us when she had work to do and we annoyed her too much. ‘GET OUT OF MY PANTRY,’ was always followed by a kiss, her aquiline nose coming first, followed by kindly eyes. She and the under parlourmaid wore the same uniform: a dress of blue-and-white toile de Jouy in a traditional bird pattern, smart and clean-looking (my mother’s idea, of course) with a white linen apron and white organdie cap threaded with black velvet ribbon.
Farve and Mabel understood each other perfectly. In most such households her position would have been held by a man, a butler, but because of my mother’s bad experiences with drunken men in her father’s pantry, she preferred a woman. After twelve years with us Mabel accepted a proposal of marriage from Mr Woolven, a regular visitor who was in charge of preparing the inventory of whichever of our houses was, for reasons of economy, being let. He was probably the only eligible man Mabel ever met. When she told my father the glad news he was furious. ‘I would never have engaged you if I’d known you would leave at once,’ he stormed. Yet they remained friends and Mabel always came back in an emergency. I thought her home address the most romantic imaginable: ‘Mabel Windsor, Peacock Cottage, Queen Camel’.
Swinbrook village and its inhabitants seemed eternal. Winnie Crook, whose initials gave us children such pleasure, ran the post office. She served tuppence-worth of acid drops in a twist of paper, weighed on the same brass scales as the letters. Our other delights were Fry’s peppermint cream, which broke off into conveniently sized bits, and good old Cadbury’s tuppenny bars. I do not know if she sold anything more expensive but these were what we could afford. There was the village idiot who chased Nancy and no one thought anything of it, Mrs Price, who lived up a bank and was nearly a hundred years old, and at the Mill Cottage, Mrs Phelps, whom Farve mistook for a heifer calf when she was bent over weeding her garden.
The formidable Mrs Bunce was in charge of the Swan Inn and kept strict order; anyone out of step had to beware of the consequences and we never heard of any late-night fracas, even on a Saturday. She wore a black dress fastened at the neck with a cameo brooch and a sacking apron over her substantial front to keep off the meal that she mixed and fed to her turkey poults. The turkeys lived in a paddock opposite the pub and Mrs Bunce’s stately figure could be seen slowly crossing the road – a car was a rare sight in those days and there was no need to hurry. There was sawdust on the stone floor of the pub and a charming curved settle in the parlour. The box tree that grows by the door had already reached its full height and I would love to know when it and the ancient wisteria next to it were planted.
The blacksmith, a huge man and a Methodist preacher, was a great figure in the village. His forge was as good as Vulcan’s own to me (with Venus nowhere to be seen) and he let me pump the giant bellows. He was one of those men with whom animals are calm and the horses stood peacefully to be shod, resting their foot on his leather apron. I loved the hiss and smell of the smoke billowing from the smouldering hoof when the red-hot shoe was fitted. It left a mark where the hoof had to be trimmed and out would come an enormous file and the ragged edges fell away. What a skill it was and taken for granted by us.
There was also my father’s gamekeeper with his broody hens and pheasant chicks, and his gruesome larder of magpies, jays, stoats and weasels, nailed to the branch of a tree. The Gibbet Oak (where men, not birds, were hanged)
still stands by Widley, the wood where I found my first butterfly orchid. Farve put a stoutly built railway van in the main ride of Hensgrove Wood to serve as a shelter in the worst weather and for the keeper to store his multifarious kit. I was taken to see it the other day and it still stands, nearly a hundred years later, just as I remembered it.
We went to church of course, at St Mary’s, Swinbrook. Muv and Farve sat on the short pew at the back and we directly in front of them. The effigies of the Fettiplace family on the north wall near the altar fascinated us: six life-sized stone men lying on their sides, heads supported by their hands, elbows resting on stone pillows. John Piper described them in the Shell Guide to Oxfordshire as ‘intelligent, wicked-looking former lords of the village, lying on slabs like proud sturgeon’. This powerful family’s claim to fame is that they disappeared some two hundred years ago, as did their house, although traces of the garden terraces are still visible in a field. We all believed this story but many years later a mention of the family in one of my books sparked a letter from a Fettiplace, to whom I wrote to apologize for saying she did not exist.
My parents made several contributions to the church, replacing the Victorian tiled floor with stone flags and installing oak pews. Farve had promised to give the pews should he ever have an unexpected windfall. This unlikely event came about in 1924 when he placed an ante-post bet at huge odds on Master Robert in the Grand National and the horse won. It belonged to our cousin Joe Airlie and there was a great celebration. My father had originally wanted a horse’s head carved on the end of each pew to record how the munificent gift had been paid for, but the Bishop refused. Farve thought this hypocritical of the Prince of the Church as he knew perfectly well where the money had come from. Muv gave four brass chandeliers including a small pair with double-headed eagles at the apex that stand out to good effect against so much stone.
Wait for Me! Page 6