After bidding us sit down, Mr Shea would pull himself up into a chair with his one arm and then you could see how his short trousers ended in the leather pads on which he walked – or waddled. After his accident he had broken off his engagement to a girl back home and now he seemed without kith or kin; hence Mamma’s theory that he would be cheered by a visit from three young girls with a present of eggs.
I can’t remember what we talked about, except once or twice when he politely steered the conversation to cricket because Denis had come with us. I suppose we told him about our animals, but, although he offered us sweets and toffees, my abiding memory is of unpleasant smells, embarrassment and horror.
‘How does he wash himself?’ I asked, after one visit.
‘He rubs himself against a cake of soap fixed to the bath,’ Mamma said. ‘And Mrs Moring cleans his cottage once a week.’
The vision of Mr Shea in the bath stayed in my mind for years, like a maggot in an apple, nibbling at my natural feeling that the world was a happy place. And I suppose I put him in my book The Boy Who Came to Stay, as an unconscious act of therapy. Meanwhile Barney, in search of titbits, took it upon himself to visit the poor man daily, going via Spring Wood and coming back, to our consternation, by the road.
As we grew older, my cries of ‘He ’mells, Mummy, he ’mells,’ ended our visits. But by then Mr Shea must have become interested in our life, because he became a familiar figure in our yard, bringing leftovers for the chickens, in a wheelchair he could work with one arm. Much later the unimaginable happened. His old sweetheart, a spectacled woman who was I believe a retired school teacher, found him and they married. A happy ending, we thought, but perhaps she had come in the spirit of a saviour and Mr Shea was not a man to be bossed or pitied. Sadly, we were told, they had a fine capacity to make hell for each other. Rumour has it she died first, but I’m not sure rumour was right.
Meanwhile, Dinah had puppies, our bantams produced chicks, the cats kittens. Sitting in the granary’s doorway, which faced south, we dangled our legs in the sun and made plans. We each chose a tree to own and climb, which, in true Robert Louis Stevenson style, became a ship. In the spinney, supervised by Denis, we made huts and, outside the huts, stockades. Denis ruled we were to use no saws, hatchets, nails or string, so we had to find forked branches, and very often the shape of our buildings was decided by the wood to hand. We roofed the huts with fallen branches from the two beautiful pines which stood at the top end of the spinney. Then when all was ready, loving mock battles, we declared war and stormed each other’s stockades, yelling war cries. I was usually on the winning side, because, as Christine and I remember very clearly, Denis had one day announced that since Josephine was Cappy’s favourite and Christine was Nana’s, I was to be his. It was a very welcome development for me (although I don’t think I had noticed I was nobody’s favourite), because I rather revered him.
Although small for his age until fifteen, when he grew eight inches in one year, Denis was indeed good-looking, with his forelock of fair hair, blue eyes and general air of self-confidence. He was also a fine painter, a wit, a useful carpenter and very kind to his young sisters. He had strong views, which he expressed so forcefully that I hung on his words, a mistake sometimes because, growing up himself, he was inclined to change his opinions from term to term. Josephine says our spinney games would not have worked anyway, if I had not paired with Denis, because leaders were necessary and I would obey him, but not her, while Christine was willing then to accept her orders. In more peaceful moments, Denis showed us how to make fireplaces out of flints and stones. Matches were allowed; we lit fires and we boiled water to make hot Oxo to drink. It was bliss.
There was, however, one fairly regular event, which ended suddenly and, for Christine and me, inexplicably. It concerned Cappy, who was, I realise now, emotionally insecure. His own childhood had been at times traumatic. His father had not spared the rod and sometimes Cappy had been sent to buy the cane with which he was to be beaten. His parents’ marriage had been unhappy, and love, it seems, was scarce in the vicarages where he grew up. Add to this the horror of Flanders and his own stiff-upper-lip attitude and it is clear there were many horrific experiences in his life locked in the do not enter part of his mind. Yet in many ways the war was a highlight in his life, and for some months after we moved to The Grove, Cappy occasionally came to our bedroom just before seven to sing us First World War songs: ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’, ‘There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding’, ‘Keep The Home Fires Burning’, and so on. An impressive figure standing at the bottom of our beds, he sang in a manly baritone voice, which I enjoyed. Then suddenly he came no more and I, with my tendency for self-blame, suspected it was somehow my fault. Years later Josephine explained that one night when we were all in the parlour, Cappy said, ‘Come on, off to bed!’ and she refused his kiss. Deeply hurt, he rejected Mamma’s explanation that all little girls feel like that sometimes and, without a thought for Christine and me, he never kissed any of us again. I didn’t miss the kisses, which I don’t even remember – some psychological clue there – only the songs.
Poor Cappy became increasingly critical, an angry father always shouting. But letters he wrote to Mamma when she was away with Granny in the south of France describe how he played Blindman’s Buff, Bears and other games with us, events which have entirely slipped my memory, so convinced have I become over the years that our relationship was always unhappy. And sadly, Cappy knew he was for us second best, for he wrote to Mamma, again in the south of France, that we hung around him because we were missing her. He would have liked to ride with us, too – he had ridden a good deal in the war – but his arthritis prevented him. I remember him sitting on Countess and saying it was no good, it hurt too much. Of course, with his temper, he might have spoilt our riding, too, but nobody explained to us that constant pain shreds nerves. Yet on his good days he often became a practical joker, cushions were balanced to fall on your head when you opened a door; apple pie beds were carefully made, and one April the First he sent a fender bumping down the stairs and, shouting ‘Help,’ pretended he had fallen. All the same, The Grove became a happier place when he was away and we had our merry-hearted mother to ourselves; a mother who didn’t mind untidiness or absent-mindedness, and allowed us to bring tame bantams into the dining room on our shoulders; a mother who climbed up trees to rescue us when we got stuck and giggled when we giggled.
Then we would take it in turns to sleep in Cappy’s bed, partly because Mamma hated sleeping alone, having come straight to marriage after sharing a bedroom with her sister Dorothea. At first light the other two of us would pile into her bed and quarrel about who should lie next to her; symptoms of a closeness which, I realise now, must have been hard at times for Cappy, still in love, to bear.
If I was asked now who in Peppard, apart from our family and those my parents employed, had the greatest influence on my life, I should answer the Kews. Unlike anyone else we knew, they belonged to a kind we would not meet again. Early every morning Daisy delivered us milk straight from the cow for breakfast – Nana believed in freshness. It came in a can and was ladled into our jugs and I can still remember its creamy warmth. The afternoon milk came just in time for tea and Christine and I each drank at least a pint a day.
Daisy was unfailingly kind to us, a familiar and homely figure behind the shop counter, who addressed us as ‘duck’ in that hoarse whisper which we quickly learnt to understand. On Sundays if Mamma discovered she had run out of a grocery she needed, we went round the back of the small farmhouse and knocked on the door. Daisy came, usually pushing another Kew out of the way, and, without any complaint, found and gave us what we wanted.
One night Fred Kew took us with Denis in his van to hear a nightingale sing on Peppard Common. Josephine remembers the delicious smell of bread as we sat on the van’s floor, but I only remember my feeling, shared by my sisters, that the song was overrated and could not compare with the dawn chorus which welcomed the day
so dramatically at The Grove, or, for that matter, the haunting evening song of a blackbird.
Sometimes Fred invited us to see his bob-tailed sheepdog jump a five-barred gate. Other times when we went to buy chaff we watched the Kews’ mare, Jane, circling as she turned the chaff cutter.
Fred took Denis shooting and one day, hearing that we were to visit Denis at school, caught some fleas off a sow’s back, put them in a match box, and said, ‘Give him those.’ I don’t know what Denis’s school friends thought of the present, but I think he rather liked the idea of starting a flea circus.
Old Charlie Kew was a raconteur who, while he talked, dug his listener in the ribs with an elbow to punctuate a point. ‘That’s wot ’tis,’ he would say. ‘That’s wot ’tis.’ He brought any forms he found perplexing to Cappy for advice and told us he had had thirteen children and buried two – or was it three? I can’t remember. Christine has already mentioned wild-eyed Polly and epileptic Will, who rather frightened me because of his lumbering gait, his rolling eyes and loud voice. But I remember especially how, when we went round the back of the shop, Daisy would shoo Will and Polly away like chickens, if they dared to show their faces. Daisy controlled the family, ran the business, served behind the counter and worked from dawn to dark. Nowadays, mothers might be suspicious of Fred’s kindness to us all, but country people then seemed to have a lovely, totally uncalculating way with children, and we felt completely at home with most of those we met.
Cappy, astonished by our frequently grazed knees and hands, offered Christine and I a halfpenny for every day we didn’t fall over, a sum rarely earned. Usually we jumped up quickly, but when I tripped over an open tap cover and cut my leg to the bone, I lay still for a moment and the puppies came and licked away my tears.
The doctor, a sober-faced, rather silent man, ordered bed rest and bathing with salt and water twice a day, a boring remedy which brought Nana to the fore. Mamma said I would have an honourable scar. Aunt May visited and read me stories and, unknown to Mamma, my sisters, wanting to amuse me, brought some of our animals to see me.
Roly Poly, my bantam was perched on the end of my bed when the doctor called unexpectedly. Looking down at me from a great height, he pulled back the eiderdown – how could I have stopped him? – and found five little black puppies wriggling excitedly. Then, although a bandage and a sheet protected the wound from infection, he was furious. I don’t know what he said, and I can’t remember which grown-up was with him, but later our parents decided he wasn’t a kindred spirit and changed to a woman doctor whose uncle had mountaineered with our grandfather.
Whatever happened Mamma continued writing. Sometimes when we pretended to be horses on the lawn, from where we could see her, she jumped up from her desk and shouted. ‘Why must you play just by my window when you’ve five acres to run in?’
And reluctantly we would move away. Later, when Winnie or Nana pestered her too much she drove off and stopped further down Crowsley Park Road, where she could write in peace. Other times she continued writing in her Woolworth’s exercise book, with chaos around her. My cousin, John Gardner, remembers her writing with an HB pencil while sitting on a laundry basket in the kitchen. By 1931 her three latest novels: High Table, Ithuriel’s Hour and No Walls of Jasper, had established her as a serious and successful novelist. Snow in Harvest followed in 1932. North Wall was the first novel she wrote completely at The Grove.
Josephine
Apart from the passages, the parents decided to leave the house as it was. They tolerated the wallpapers – large blowsy roses in their bedroom, life-size wistaria flowers in ours – and, though they mocked at the horrid juxtaposition of a thirties fireplace beneath a Victorian overmantel in the nursery, they made no effort to change it. In the time of the Depression an air of shabbiness, of peeling paint and faded chintz, was in good taste; the concept of DIY did not yet exist and would not have been well received at a time when providing work was seen as the duty of the better off.
Both parents liked gardening, and as long as you employed a man for the vegetables, this was acceptable. Cappy took on the lawn, the roses, and made plans to change the old ha-ha, between the lawn and the paddock, from two sloping beds on either side of a gravel path to four raised beds with flint walls and flights of cobbled steps in the centre. Mamma undertook to look after the two herbaceous beds, and decided to keep bees.
Mamma’s schemes were usually romantic – Virgil had raised bee-keeping to poetic heights; Cappy’s were supposed to be practical but, though designed to make or save money, rarely did so.
He decided on a potato patch. The vegetable garden was large, but not large enough for main crop potatoes as well as vegetables and soft fruit. So an area of the orchard, rank with nettles and alongside Spring Wood, was enclosed with split chestnut fencing and laboriously dug over and planted by Bowley. It took Cappy several years to realise that it was cheaper to buy main crop potatoes by the sack than to pay someone to grow them.
The bees were a disaster too. The two hives were placed at the top end of the potato patch, and Nana’s neighbour, a Mrs Francis, had a trunkful of bee-keeping equipment for sale. A tall woman with long teeth that clicked, she had heard that Mamma was a writer, and explained, with pride and a formidable click of her teeth, that she never read books, ‘the real world left her no time for the world of make believe.’ We bought the trunk and giggled for days over ‘the world of make believe’.
The swarms were installed and, as Cappy and Nana both fled in terror, I was dressed in white gloves and one of Mrs Francis’s large, black-veiled straw hats, and appointed bee-keeping assistant. I wasn’t afraid, bees didn’t seem to sting me, and I was fascinated by the gloom inside the veiled hat and its powerful smell, a mixture of camphor, beeswax and Mrs Francis. But the whole enterprise began to seem fruitless when Mamma developed qualms about taking the honey and substituting the guilt offering of sugar and water, and this, with the impossibility of making any sort of relationship with individual bees, relieved me of sorrow when the hives succumbed to disease and an invasion by mice.
We had inherited geese from the Dents. Jack the gander was white and aggressive, he pecked our bare knees until we learnt to drive him off with Oxfordshire cries of ‘Gid ’arn’. Jill, the white goose, had very little character, but Susie, the grey one, was friendly, she would eat out of our hands. Making a down-lined nest in a sunny corner of the paddock she sat with tranquil pleasure, surrounded, in the idiom of the Easter card, by wild violets.
The Dents’ hens had been joined by Nana’s, which, released from their cramped Wimbledon run, began to develop characters. A motley collection, they slept in a wooden building – probably the old cow byre – with long perches and a row of nest boxes. They roamed over the yard, orchard and sometimes, to Cappy’s fury, the garden. On wet days they took dustbaths under the granary.
They went broody and Bowley constructed a row of sitting boxes at the top of the potato patch. Turves had to be removed and the boxes placed on earth, with a floor of wire netting to keep out rats and a door which was wedged with a brick to keep out foxes. For three weeks the broody hen sat on her nest in total darkness. She was let out and fed once a day. At first she would have to be attached to a stake by a string looped round one leg, but most of them quickly developed feelings of responsibility towards their eggs and lost any wish to abandon them.
On fine days feeding the broodies was an enjoyable chore. Having filled their water dishes and given them as much corn as they could eat and, if the weather was dry, sprinkled their eggs with water, you were free to read or think for fifteen minutes. It was a sheltered spot and a suntrap; a profusion of wild flowers bloomed among the ungrazed grass. The only drawback was the enormous turds produced by the hens, who had controlled themselves for twenty-four hours in order not to sully their eggs.
The bantams, far too intelligent to accept human interference, stole their nests away. They regarded the garden and the granary as safe places and imposed an equally str
ict routine on themselves. It was important to feed them when they appeared, fluffed out and clucking importantly, and sometimes, recognizing their capacity for self-sacrifice, we delivered food to the stolen nest.
The motherly hens adored their chicks and Mother of Millions – a neat brown hen, her neck speckled with yellow – gladly fostered the chicks of less enthusiastic mothers. Mother of the Nakeds – a censorious-looking hen, orange-feathered and flecked with white – had a large family of cockerels who took longer than usual to fledge and ran round the orchard long-legged and pink-fleshed.
Our first human death was that of Mr Tanner, the ancient inhabitant of the smaller cottage, who had fought in the Boer war. He fell ill and one night, when the doctor had announced that the end was near, a deputation appeared to tell Mamma that his last wish was to see an elderly brother who lived in Berkshire. Cappy was staying in London, but our car was at home and Mamma realized that some lingering feudal bond demanded that she coped. She set off into the unknown with a Tanner relation as guide, and I suppose cook-general Beatrice kept an eye on us. Later, when the farewells had been said and a treasured Bible handed over, she drove the brother home; Mr Tanner died next day.
Denis had been provided, rather late in life, with a bicycle. Mamma thought them soulless. In her children’s books the ownership of a fairy cycle, especially in conjunction with hair worn in corkscrew curls, was a damning indictment of character. Denis learnt to ride with Cappy’s assistance and was bicycling round the lawn, showing off his new skill to the family, when he fell into the rosebed and hurt his arm. White and shocked, he was sat on the garden seat. Asked to shake hands – Cappy’s test for broken arms – he failed and the parents put him in the car and set off for the doctor’s.
Fair Girls and Grey Horses Page 7