Fair Girls and Grey Horses

by Christine Pullein-Thompson

  It must have been a little later that Granny sent us eskimo style coats from Canada. Made out of blanket, with vivid stripes across them and with pockets and red buttons, we wore them into Reading. We must have looked a strange sight and certainly people stopped to look at us. I remember saying afterwards, ‘Us different’, and we were different. I think Mamma wanted us that way.

  Reading was quite a small town then. You could park anywhere. Friar Street was my favourite street. GP Male, MRVS and Partners had a large imposing entrance there and Bradbury’s the old fashioned saddlery shop was nearby; a little further down the street was Simmonds the brewers’ yard from which huge horses emerged pulling drays loaded with barrels of beer. There was always a whiff of horse in Friar Street and it was wide and empty, unlike Broad Street which was busier with a Woolworths and Wellsteeds and a fishmonger’s and much else.

  When Nana took us to Woolworths, she always headed straight for the biscuit counter. Tipped sideways so that customers could see inside was a row of biscuit tins. Waiting until the assistant’s back was turned, Nana would grab two or three chocolate biscuits and, handing them out to us, would hurry us on muttering, ‘Go on, eat them up.’ I never understood what made Nana, honest through and through, do this; and though the biscuits, half chocolate, half shortbread, were probably delicious, fearful that we would be caught and dismayed by such dishonesty, I never enjoyed eating them.

  When my mother had time she took us to the London Road in Reading. Trams still ran up the hill there, which was wide and paved in places. We never rode on one but rushed straight to the two bookshops: William Smith, which catered for the University, but in those days had a secondhand department at the back; and another one which had floor after floor, room after room of secondhand books. The second was a very dusty shop, but we would have gladly stayed all day. We sometimes drove past Huntley and Palmer’s biscuit factory and even from the car we could smell the biscuits cooking. Then past Reading gaol with its high-barred windows giving on to a view immortalised in Oscar Wilde’s ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’ as ‘that little tent of blue, which prisoners call a sky’. There was a theatre in Reading then, and several cinemas including the brand-new Odeon with what seemed then a palatial car park.

  Driving into Reading from Peppard we would pass the Reading and Caversham Laundry which constantly telephoned us requesting their account be settled; then over the Thames which separated Oxfordshire from Berkshire. It took me a long time to discover all of Reading: the castle-like County Offices, the Forbury lion stately and forbidding; the shop in the market place which sold milking stools and pails, everything one needed for cow and dairy in those days. But I’ve forgotten wide and imposing Castle Hill; the rope shops were there. And as well as the Thames, there was the canal with little metal bridges over it and small pubs by the water. Most interesting of all, perhaps, there was the Cattle Market where monthly horse sales were held, our haunt in later years. Nana took us to Reading quite often by bus. In my letters to Mamma I wrote that she took me to buy shoes and another time that she bought us all ices, ‘which were very good’.

  A day out

  Poor Nana, it must have been lonely for her in three-storied Highclere, housekeeper to Granny who was hardly ever there. Each evening she listened to her radio and ate the same meal, white bread and Cheddar cheese washed down by beer – I don’t think she ever drank water straight from the tap, perhaps because the water in Witney, where she grew up, wasn’t safe to drink. We were her family as the Cannan girls had been before and she spent as much time as she could at The Grove, fussing over the chickens’ water, helping turn the hay; bossing the helps about (which always came to a head when Mamma was away). Fred Kew would take bets if asked, and Nana always put her money on Gordon Richards, the top jockey of the day. If the National Anthem was played Nana would stand up and sing it in a high, tremulous voice. But because of the horrors of the First World War, she no longer believed in God.

  In later years we weren’t very kind to Nana when she sometimes looked after us in the evenings. Once we climbed high into the whiteheart cherry tree and then kicked away the ladder when it was time for bed, leaving Nana to find Bowley to help her put it up again. We romped in our bedroom when she was looking after us and we were meant to sleep, until she called up again and again, ‘I’ll tell your father when he gets back.’ But she never did.

  Cappy loved picnics, and each year on my mother’s birthday on 27th May we had one on the Wittenham Clumps, near Dorchester in Oxfordshire. One year we knighted Barney there with a tin sword. We knighted him Sir Barnacle Bill the Sailor, for some brave deed none of us can now recall. Another time there was unpleasantness because Mamma had forgotten the sugar for Cappy’s tea or coffee. Our early birthdays passed without fuss. I cannot recall having a party, though once Denis had one with rounders in the top meadow. Diana and I were fielders, but I do not remember ever catching a ball, just an increasing sense of boredom. I think the adults enjoyed the game far more than the children. I know there was trouble when a man of around fifty found his team had lost. He grew redder and redder in the face while his wife kept saying, ‘It’s only a game, Humpers,’ a saying which soon became part of family folklore.

  One Christmas Lady Agnes invited us to her party for the children of the village, at Blounts Court. We had a large sit-down tea in an impressive dining room, when Diana and I fed the marzipan on the Christmas cake, which we hated, to her Dalmatian dog Otto. Unfortunately he grew tired of it and spat a large lump out on the carpet for all to see. But that was not our only faux pas that day; no one had told Denis that it was not done to win all the prizes at a party, which he now proceeded to do, leaving only the last for me to win. We were never asked again to Lady Agnes’s Christmas party. But I did go once more with my parents. On that occasion we played poker and I won, beating all the grown-ups. Impressed, Lady Agnes gave me half a crown and an ivory ink pot.

  With poor Countess dead, my parents began looking for another horse. Inexperienced and without expert advice, they soon found Billy. He was around fourteen two, mousey coloured with some white on his face. He was standing in a loose box too low for him, which I suspect made my parents decide straight away that he needed a better home. I cannot remember anyone trying Billy, though I think Josephine may have been led around the yard on him. I can only imagine that our parents, used to being provided with suitable horses to ride, thought that no one would ever offer them anything else. So without more ado, they bought Billy and a few days later he was delivered. I cannot recall the tack he wore, or whether it fitted; but after he had had a day or two to get used to his new home, Mamma mounted him. She did not stay in the saddle long, a few quick bucks and she was on the ground with her spectacles broken. After that my parents sought advice from Mr Smith, who ran a small riding establishment near Nettlebed with stables built against a bank. He diagnosed a cold back and suggested Billy be lunged with his tack on before being ridden. I think he gave our parents a demonstration of lunging and certainly our parents did their best; but it made not an iota of difference. So Billy was sent back and, as they had never thought of having him on trial, they lost quite a lot of money on the deal. But, intrepid as ever, they did not give up the search and quite soon afterwards found the pony we called Milkmaid, who became greatly cherished and enriched all our lives.

  Diana

  Those first two years at The Grove were only marred by school. Yet going to Miss Fryer’s was, for me, rather like a temporary illness, when the pleasure of recovery almost compensates for the horrible experience you’ve just been through. My heightened joy when Mamma turned up to take us home – ‘What’s for lunch?’ was always the first question, for we were ever hungry – overrode the morning’s experience. I can’t now remember how often my tears wetted the newspapers which covered the school’s tables, inspired by my own sense of inadequacy, Miss Fryer’s cruelty and the hatred of being away from home. Looking back it seems to me that I was constantly crying, and I remember (but m
y sisters don’t, so perhaps I’m wrong) Miss Fryer discussing our tears with Mamma. I remember her saying that perhaps we twins should be allowed to run wild for a time and come back when we were more mature. But in my heart I know that if Miss Fryer had been young and dashing, we would have tried harder, and also that she knew our conduct was partly motivated by bloody-mindedness. I, for one, would not work hard for someone I despised. Nevertheless, unlike Christine, I learnt after many a whack to keep my finger flat on the long-handled pens we used, and subsequently could never handle an ordinary fountain pen without getting inky, so ballpoints are now a blessing.

  Tom and Edwina suffered in the cottage, but I never saw anyone except us hit in school, so why did Miss Fryer vent her anger on Christine and me? At least one pupil was a slower learner than we were. Irritated by our clumsiness and lack of enthusiasm, did she convince herself – if she thought about it at all – that she was whacking us into shape? If so, it is sad that no punishments were ever countered for us by praise or encouragement. One summer holiday we tried to show our mettle after being asked to embark on a holiday project. While Miss Fryer with her passion for botany probably hoped we would return in September with an immaculate book of pressed flowers, we learnt a long ballad by heart and recited it together in front of the school. We chose ‘The Burial March of Dundee’, by Aytoun, which begins:

  Sound the fife and cry the slogan—

  Let the pibroch shake the air

  With its wild triumphal music,

  Worthy of the freight we bear …

  and three pages later, we declaimed fervently words which are with me still:

  On the heights of Killiecrankie

  Yester-mourn our army lay:

  Slowly rose the mists in columns

  From the river’s broken way.

  Five and a half pages of resounding words rolled off our tongues: romance, tragedy, colour and imagery were all there, in glorious contrast to Miss Fryer’s schoolroom and the poor, dead pressed flowers she treasured. We sat down. We had done it. But no one said a word, no one even understood. Miss Fryer, a Sassenach and probably a pacifist, seemed unmoved. Our enthusiasms would never be hers and vice versa. We felt peculiar again, different. Then we were told to get down to work. We dipped our pens in the inkwells and struggled again with sums, or Latin, which I rather liked because it was logical, or, best of all, essays, which sadly I always spoilt with blots. Mamma knew we didn’t like school, Cappy said we never would, because our home life was so happy, but they wanted for financial reasons to believe it was all right, so we told neither how awful it was. Instead we became stoics.

  My sisters have already mentioned the Laidlaws and Brownlows, both impoverished gentry, who no doubt found Miss Fryer’s establishment conveniently cheap. Commander Laidlaw and Major Brownlow, like Cappy, had fought in the war and returned jobless to civilian life; but unlike Cappy, they had small private incomes on which they frugally survived, with the help of a little farming. Lunch at the Brownlows, with Colin and Neville, was enlivened after those boring rests by games of ‘sardines,’ and ‘hide and seek’. Their dilapidated farmhouse had a plethora of small bedrooms where we hid in cupboards, full of clothes whose fusty smell, common in the days before widespread dry cleaning, I still vividly remember. When a couple of years later they bought a cream pony, called Bubbles, Mrs Brownlow rang Mamma up.

  ‘Would you girls come and try him? I don’t want the boys to be hurt,’ she said. And suddenly we were experts of a sort, and if things went wrong at least Christine and I knew how to fall.

  But the road to that level of expertise had not been easy. There had come a day in our second year at The Grove when Milky bucked us all off and Denis lay once again in a darkened room saying over and over again, ‘Is it Monday or Tuesday?’ And Mamma decided we must have riding lessons. The choice of school was not difficult, because at the recent Woodcote Show we had seen Miss Lawrence’s pupils carry off most of the juvenile prizes. In particular Claudia Severn had performed brilliantly in the Junior Jumping Class on her pony, Little Fellow. If only we could ride like her. Such an achievement seemed almost impossible.

  At Miss Lawrence’s Moulsford stables a week or so later, Mamma said, ‘My children keep falling off.’ ‘Oh we never let them fall off here,’ Miss Lawrence, thin and short with straight fair hair and a lined face, smiled kindly. She was very different from most horsey woman of her age. Indeed some of her pupilsparents described her as ‘a saint’. And in keeping with her gentleness, she had the gentlest of dogs, a Bedlington terrier.

  ‘Diana,’ she said, ‘you will ride Dickie and Christine Celandine.’ We mounted a grey Welsh gelding and a dark bay Dartmoor mare, both under twelve hands, and were told to trot down to the bottom of a field, circle round a copse and canter back. Dickie felt very small and narrow after Countess and Milky, but we reached the copse, a clump of trees fenced with iron railings, without difficulty. Then, as we turned for home, well hidden from Miss Lawrence and Mamma, the little ponies swerved violently, unseating us easily, and cantered back with empty saddles. While we walked back sheepishly, a mortified Miss Lawrence told Mamma that neither pony had ever done anything like that before. Meanwhile Josephine, the old soul, had ridden a mealy brown pony, called Billie Boy, without mishap.

  Then Mamma booked us lessons and on the way home stopped in Streatley to buy a delicious mocha cake for tea, a ritual which continued for several years.

  Miss Lawrence and, later, her dashing assistant, Christina Edwards-Jones, became important figures in our lives. The stars at the school were Claudia and her brother Guy Severn, two large, well-built, very self-confident children who, unlike us, knew their right hands from their left and were always well turned-out. Their tall, widowed mother, Lady Severn, was the first on the scene when any of us fell off. While Mamma sat writing or knitting in Bouncing Bertha, this kind woman would gather up her over-long grey or black skirts and run, like a full-breasted and distraught bird, to pick up and comfort us. Not wishing to be gathered up in her maternal arms and hating any fuss over yet another fall, we would try always to be on our feet before she reached us. Only once was this endeavour thwarted, when my stomach hit the ground first and I lay for a moment prostrate, ashamed of the long groan which left my winded body, before I could leap to my feet and say the usual, ‘I’m all right, thank you.’ This habit of remounting immediately after a fall became so automatic that when in my late teens I broke two vertebrae in my neck, I was so quickly back in the saddle that my companion, who had cantered on ahead, was not aware I had fallen off.

  As time went on, Christine and I found our metier at Miss Lawrence’s by volunteering at busy times to ride the ponies no one else wanted, usually Daisy and Jennie. They were both considered almost unjumpable, so every time we got them over an obstacle, there were cries of ‘Well done. Did you see, Jennie’s jumped a hurdle?’ and so on, achievements which stood us in good stead later in life when we schooled and broke-in difficult and discarded ponies. Meanwhile, Josephine, always a little ahead of us, progressed to riding a large mare called Darkie, and on Saturdays in the term-time she rode Little Fellow and other superior ponies while their owners were away at boarding school – a step-up which, like milking Miss Fryer’s goats, Christine and I never achieved. The previous year we had been luckier than Josephine at a gymkhana where she struggled in vain to thread a needle, because, being by nature both a quick eater and dresser, I came first in the Costume Race and second in the Bun Race, and Christine won, as usual, the Apple and Bucket Race. But to Cappy’s disgust we were always the first out at every gymkhana in Musical Chairs.

  Oxfordshire in the thirties seemed awash with ponies bought for children who couldn’t ride them in term-time, so now we were rarely short of mounts. Ida, who stayed with us a whole summer, was a special favourite: compact, bay and plump, with a wide blaze and white socks, she had a splendid firm rump, on which Christine and I practised cantering standing up like circus riders, vying with each other as to how m
any times we fell off – one hundred and ten falls by the time we reached eleven.

  Encouraged to run topless and barefoot, we were hardly aware of our bodies and when one day our parents asked, after a trip to Reading, what we had been doing we told them truthfully and without shame that we had been riding Ida in the top meadow with nothing on.

  By now Christine and I were moving closer to Josephine – or she would say beginning to pester her – but until we were eleven or twelve she was still the elder sister, who knew our frailties. Unlike her we were both terrified, as Christine has said, of death, so she only had to say, ‘You’re going to die’ and we would cover our ears with our hands and shout, ‘No’. When the kitchen was empty she would sometimes call us to the big blue cupboard in the corner and take out groceries: tea leaves, perhaps, or spices or curry. ‘Try this, it’s good,’ she would say, holding out a spoonful of her choice, and Christine and I always fell for the trick and then frantically tried to get rid of the lacerating taste on our tongues. The ‘elephant trick’ was another minor humiliation. We drank a great deal of milk in great gulps at teatime and if anyone made a joke at the right moment the milk would come rushing down our noses instead of our throats, a failing Josephine knew just how to exploit. Cappy would be annoyed if he were there, but Mamma only giggled too. Spilt milk was, she said, easily washed off the table or aertex shirts and, having been strictly controlled by Nana at Magdalen Gate House, she loved to see us free and happy.

  Sometimes we played murders in the dark, which could be frightening, but courage was expected of us and the fear of being thought a coward overrode all our terrors. The Pullein-Thompsons were brave. Any divergence from this accepted fact let the whole family down and was feeble. We taught ourselves to jump into nettles without flinching, to walk up the spinney in the pitch dark, and to recite poetry silently to stop ourselves crying out when the dentist drilled holes in our cavity-ridden teeth, in the days before a local anaesthetic was administered. Only Winnie’s boyfriend George, with his quiff of oiled hair, undermined this conceit, when, wearing a townee’s shiny blue suit, he came to the top meadow where Christine and I were pretending to be horses and urged us to leap over higher jumps than we could possibly manage.