Fair Girls and Grey Horses

by Christine Pullein-Thompson

  Mamma and Cappy soon after their marriage

  Christine

  My sisters asked for ice cream, while I asked for a little cake. Respectably dressed in winter coats, we were sitting at a table in the carpeted upstairs restaurant in Barkers Store in Kensington having travelled there with Nana in an open-topped bus. It was Nana’s idea of a treat. I must have been four or five years old and, though I still spoke mostly in twin language, I was able to make myself understood. It is a moment I have never forgotten, because I greatly desired an ice cream rather than the little rather dry cake I ordered, which eventually arrived for me in a pleated case on a small white plate. It was I believe my first small step in wishing to be an individual rather than just one of the twins. This feeling has never totally left me.

  As was the fashion in those days, we were dressed alike and often given identical toys. We were expected to share to such an extent that on one never-to-be-forgotten birthday, when our parents must have been particularly hard up, we were given just one book between us entitled The Ghostly Galleon. I have it still.

  But I am in no doubt that we were much loved and that my mother was proud of having twins and as Josephine was hardly bigger than we were, the three of us were sometimes mistaken for triplets. Diana and I were not easy children. I was, I believe, Nana’s favourite just as years before Mamma had been favoured among the Cannan girls. I suspect that Nana favoured Mamma because she was the youngest and also because she had had rickets when small and had had to wear irons to straighten her legs. I was of course only the youngest by twenty minutes, but I was the most backward and had almost died when Diana and I had bronchitis, a killer of babies in those days. I was the worst affected and, as Nana often related later, she hardly slept for a fortnight, using steaming kettles to help our breathing and poultices to clear our congested chests. Because of our illness Diana and I were not christened until we were nine months old, when we are reputed to have pulled down a curtain in the church of St Clement Danes, which was later destroyed by a bomb in the ’40s.

  We were certainly trying infants. A playpen was bought for us, which we instantly climbed out of, falling screaming on our heads on the other side. I managed to fall off the elephant at London Zoo, surely the only child ever to do so. Definitely the slow one, I was still reading ‘I am up on my ox’ while Diana had moved on to ‘Winter days are jolly’.

  Nana taught us with immense patience, but her aitches, or lack of, caused problems and it was a long time before I could sort out ‘has’ from ‘as’. Josephine insists that we were still talking twin language at six or seven, but the fact that we were learning to read by then surely proves otherwise.

  Nana was loving, but strict. Every morning we remained strapped in our high chairs until we had eaten our breakfasts, which consisted of porridge, bread and butter – often cut into fingers – and a soft-boiled egg. (Hard-boiled eggs were considered bad for children in those days, and breakfast cereals were yet to be produced.)

  Sometimes we sat screaming; occasionally Aunt Dorothea or my mother, having also suffered under Nana’s rule, would throw our breakfast on the fire when Nana’s back was turned; but mostly we ate it all up eventually; and to this day I find it difficult to leave anything on my plate. Nana taught us the Lord’s Prayer and our last duty of the day was to kneel by our beds and recite it. But instead of saying ‘Hallowed be thy Name’, Diana and I recited ‘Harold be thy Name’, believing it to be somehow connected with our own father. Nana thought toys should be locked away on Sundays, but did not insist on the learning of psalms or hymns as she had with my mother and her sisters.

  When out with Nana we were not allowed to put our hands in our pockets or eat in the streets, or on buses. If one was cross one had ‘a black patch on one’s back’, or ‘had got out of bed on the wrong side’, common phrases among nurses of an earlier time. Nana taught us to sew. I remember making little pincushions filled with sawdust and knitting dreadful garters for my father’s birthday, which Nana always finished and which I’m sure he never wore. We wore a great many clothes. Nana knitted us long socks and even longer bedsocks. Because we had bronchitis, Diana and I wore even more clothes than other children of our time – combinations, bodices, thick knickers, vests, monkey vests. Diana and I slept with Nana in the night nursery. Briskly tucked in and kissed at six o’ clock, we were expected to sleep until next morning. Sometimes it was just too long for me and I disgraced myself. Then my mattress was washed and dried leaning against the brass-topped fender which guarded the nursery fire, and though no one complained I can still recall the rising steam and the shame I felt.

  In those far off days, Wimbledon seemed more like a village. The pavements were wide and empty and in autumn rusty with fallen leaves. In the dairy there were large model cows which mooed when you pulled their tails. There was time to talk and often we lingered while my mother stopped to talk to people we met. The bank messenger was one of them – young, tall and handsome and wearing a top hat. We would throw ourselves at him calling out something like, ‘Your money or your life’. But best of all there was Jack, surely the last cock horse in Britain. Jack waited with his minder near the bottom of Wimbledon Hill, standing under a tarpaulin beneath often dripping trees, partly fenced by iron railings. He was there to assist other horses pulling carts, mainly coal, up Wimbledon Hill. His minder, small and wearing a cloth cap, had bandy legs, as so many horsemen did in those days; he would talk to Mamma while we gave Jack sugar, remembering to keep our hands flat. He was my first real horse.

  I remember too one dreadful day when I dropped a pumice stone I had been asked to carry as a privilege by Mamma, far far below on to the railway lines at Putney Bridge. I can still feel it slipping through my fingers; and I wanted it to go, I wanted to see what happened when it fell onto the rails below; though Mamma assumed it was an accident, as I burst into guilty tears, I knew it wasn’t. I knew I had meant it to happen, and my sense of guilt made me cry even more.

  Our parents had a car but I do not remember Diana and I travelling in it often; for one thing we were carsick. Because of this, when we went for our annual holiday to Bexhill or Westgate, Diana and I travelled by train mostly just with Nana, complete with pudding bowl, flannel and flask of brandy. I don’t think I was ever trainsick, but I can still recall the feel of damp flannel tainted by sick and brandy on my face, and to this day I dislike brandy and abhor face flannels.

  Years later recalling these holidays, Mamma said that sometimes no holiday was better than a holiday. Certainly Diana and I did not distinguish ourselves on these holidays. Once while Mamma was reading the Just So Stones to us, we fought and broke a mirror in a boarding house and poor Mamma had to deal with an irate landlady, while we were promised seven years of bad luck! We refused to go into the sea and on one occasion Diana and I were chased along the beach by Mamma with a slipper in her hand. It was some years before we were able to explain that we had both been afraid of sharks; Mamma was appalled by such a revelation.

  ‘But surely you knew that if there were sharks in the sea, we wouldn’t have let you go in?’ she said.

  But we did not reason that way; small children don’t. Besides if we were still talking twin language at that time, we could hardly describe our feelings. I rode my first pony at Bexhill, a little brown Dartmoor, and screamed in terror – not a very propitious start to a life in the saddle spanning more than fifty years!

  Cappy joined these holidays at weekends to play golf. I do not remember welcoming his presence. Nana disliked him and as I was very involved with Nana at this time, probably some of this rubbed off on to me. I do remember him bringing buns to us at eleven o’clock with one small piece of Cadbury’s chocolate in the middle. Somehow they were always gritty with sand. Afterwards my mother was to say that these holidays had been for Nana.

  There are many other things I remember about living in Wimbledon. The long passage with the door at the end leading to the house Granny Cannan built on to ours; a door I never went throug
h. Being sick in Granny’s car and an angry chauffeur called Mr Clark (later she was to engage an Italian chauffeur who was never cross). The box where outgrown clothes and toys were put for the poor children. Running one’s hands along split oak fences to make them tingle. Jumping the lines on the pavement, because if you stepped on one the lions had you. Pushing toy horses along a garden path. The aroma of oranges sucked slowly with a lump of sugar in the middle. The smell of damp clothes drying in front of a coal fire. I don’t remember Granny ever entering the nursery; or talking to me. Nor do I remember anyone preparing me for the move to the country when I was six and a half. I don’t recall packing or being excited. I had no idea that it was to be the end of my early years, that Nana was to move out to housekeep for Granny, who, still wanting to be near Mamma, had rented a house less than a hundred yards away from ours. No one told me that there would be a spinney and five acres and a large garden in which to play. Or if they did, I cannot recall it. I think that parents did not explain things to their children as they do today; but Josephine had been with my parents and helped to choose the house. Did she tell me about it? If she did, I cannot remember it either. So I didn’t say goodbye to Wimbledon at all.

  A few years ago I went back to Wimbledon. Our pretty house and Granny’s next door were empty and deserted. And everything looked much smaller; the long passage where I had been smacked was after all but a few yards long; the drawing room was really two rooms with fold-back doors between. The tennis court where my father must have played so often had become a swimming pool. The cedar tree which had worried Mamma so much whenever thunder struck was gone. Wimbledon of course has changed beyond recognition. The trees where Jack stood so patiently are no longer there. The streets are crowded with strangers now; it has become just part of the great sprawl of Greater London and homes and flats are crammed together where gardens existed before.

  I wish I could remember more of my years in Wimbledon. Josephine says that Diana and I were self-sufficient and didn’t need anyone else. Certainly as long as I had Diana I never felt lonely. I don’t think I craved great affection. And I was definitely the slow one. It took me a long time to be dry at night. There were no playgroups in those days, and though Josephine and Denis attended school, I had to wait until I was seven. There were no parties either, or if there were, Diana and I were never invited.

  From the beginning we were brought up to be tough. Nana never listened to complaint. If you kept on and on about something as children do, she would give you a good shake, shouting, ‘Stop it, you tiresome little thing.’ But we were expected to be special, just as the Cannan girls had been a generation earlier. Nana wanted to be proud of us. Being special can make it hard to fit in with one’s own generation, and being special can soon become being different, which can cause problems. I cannot recall ever addressing a word to my brother or he to me while we were at Wimbledon. He says he cannot either. Nana appeared at this time to be frightened of him, just as she was of many men; and what Nana felt I felt too.

  I do remember the journey to the house I was to love all my life. The stop for lunch at Henley-on-Thames at the Red Lion. The search for a kettle on our arrival because my parents could not last another minute without a cup of tea. The wonder of an overgrown orchard; tumbling into nettles off a leaning tree; sitting on a window ledge. Spic, the last of my parents’ Sealyhams, blind and trying to find her way, struck me then as incredibly sad. But I must have been very unsettled by the move, because my first night I disgraced myself for the last time and though nothing was said, I felt deeply humiliated. Or maybe it was because I realised that my beloved Nana was no longer sleeping in the night nursery with us. Instead I would be looked after most of the time by Mamma; to me a woman in spectacles I felt I hardly knew.

  Nana with Denis

  Chapter Two

  Josephine

  Cappy had to live within commuting distance of London, I think he was working for Frigidaire at that time. The Great Western Railway was a reliable line and Reading a convenient station. He knew Henley-on-Thames and he had stayed at Peppard Common with Christine’s godmother before the war.

  Mamma’s childhood knowledge of Oxfordshire had not extended as far south. Brought up among willows and watermeadows, she hadn’t been aware of the Chilterns or the beech woods, but, so fierce was her loyalty – she always regarded Berks, Bucks and Surrey as irretrievably inferior – she felt that she was returning home.

  They started househunting, they took Denis and me in the holidays; the twins, owing to their travel sickness, were left behind with Nana.

  I was undemanding on long journeys. In a tuneless chant I told myself a long confused story about some characters called The Blonker and the Stinging Nettle, The Mousetrap and The Car. The Blonker was, I think, a large female of the arms akimbo variety, the Stinging Nettle a tall, thin, slightly henpecked male, but I can recollect nothing of the Mousetrap. The country was still in deep depression, so there was a buyers’ market and plenty of houses for sale. I don’t remember much about our search, apart from thinking Nettlebed a terribly funny place name and trying to persuade the parents to buy a house solely because it had a little landing with a small window from which there was a wonderful view.

  When we found The Grove in Peppard, Mamma seemed to know at once that this was what she wanted. White washed, with a low, tiled roof, the house had a square simplicity which had been given an endearingly raffish and continental air by the slatted green shutters which were attached to the front five windows.

  It had been built as a dower house for the Baskervilles of Crowsley Park, probably at the end of the eighteenth or beginning of the nineteenth century, no one was certain, but the window tax had obviously been a consideration, for there was a distinct lack of windows – the parlour being the only room in the house to have two.

  The reigning Baskervilles had evidently not wanted the dowager on their doorstep for The Grove was two miles from the park, but they had given her stabling for two, a carriage house, a granary and two tiny cottages for her staff. The stable was topped with a weathervane, the granary with a dovecot. The yard and the garden were shaded by magnificent trees, the fields and tall thorn hedges which divided them were gloriously green. A linnet nested in the rose arch over the stable gate.

  Mr Dent, the owner, confided that a beloved daughter had died, I think it was of diphtheria, and his wife spent too much of her time at the bathroom window gazing across the fields and wood in the direction of the hidden churchyard on the far side of the valley. As we walked round the fields and spinney, Mrs Dent insisted that she and I picked an armful of bluebells. Not a very acquisitive child, I would have been content to look, and was not pleased at having to take a huge bundle of wilting flowers back to Wimbledon. It seemed very late when we arrived home, the twins were in bed and Nana not about. Mamma and I grumbled companionably as we filled jam jars with water and arranged the sad and drooping bluebells along the nursery window ledge.

  Christine

  I shall never love another house as I loved The Grove. It had four main bedrooms, plus a fifth along a narrow passage, which Cappy named the bottleneck, leading to a bathroom and separate loo. It had two reception rooms; and a lovely brick-floored dining room with an open hearth, a beam across the ceiling and a large black dresser. Four doors led off this room – to the hall, the dairy, the cellar and wine cellar, and to the kitchen; it was really the heart of the house, where later we were to do so much of our writing. The kitchen was old-fashioned, with a blue painted Dutch dresser, an ancient range and a window around which roses grew. It looked out onto the stables. Beyond the kitchen was a scullery or washhouse. It had a large stone sink with wooden plate-rack above, a pump, a cracked well, and a copper with a grate beneath, for boiling the washing. There was a large scrubbed table in the middle of the kitchen and, near the range, a basket chair with cushions under which dishes were sometimes kept warm. There was a boiler of sorts to heat the water and the two radiators in the house, one on the
landing and one in the hall. There was a telephone; and electricity was installed the day after we arrived, but I don’t remember electric fires until we were grown up. The room we originally called the drawing room had a small bay window where my mother sat in the mornings writing at her antique desk, first in long hand and then on a small Corona typewriter. The other reception room we called The Nursery. It had an ugly mottled-tiled ‘thirties fireplace, which must have replaced an earlier one, and a serving hatch from the dairy. It looked out onto the front of the property. Our books lived there in a large bookcase which ran along one wall, with toy cupboards beneath.

  Outside, The Grove was white with green slatted wooden shutters. There were double gates in those days opening on to a gravelled piece in front of the house with a border in the middle. Round the corner from the kitchen was an outside flush loo. Built for servants, it was a great boon to us since our father would often sit for hours in the upstairs one, reading The Times and no doubt praying for the motion, which had been so obligatory in his youth.

  Greengages and plums grew around the dining-room window, loganberries flourished along the brick and flint wall which divided the garden from the two humble cottages which went with the property. There was a whiteheart cherry tree in the orchard as well as Blenheims, pippins, russets, Bramleys and many other varieties of apple, including an unforgettable one called by the locals ‘the old Jewsan’. It was a wrinkled, bitter sort of apple which kept longer than all the others. I believe it was actually called ‘the old Jew’s hand’ because of its miserly appearance – a bit of pure racism. There were damson trees too in the paddock and mushrooms in the top meadow. Raspberries, gooseberries and red and black currants grew in the garden, blackberries in the high hedges which fenced the fields. So we were never short of fruit. There were hazelnut trees too, and in the spring the spinney was dazzlingly blue with bluebells.