CAPTAIN REN
Josephine Pullein-Thompson
(Aged eight or nine).
O, bold Captain Ren,
Who roamed the ancient seas,
He strove to find the Spanish Main
But all he found was bees.
THE END OF CAPTAIN REN
O, bold Captain Ren
Who roamed the Lively seas
He loved to hear the distant sigh
But he, like all, must die.
We left him far behind us
Far below the sea,
Far, far behind us
With the starfish on his knee.
There were other contributors. Our cousin Jim, Aunt May’s son, contributed ‘Tune for after Tea’, a musical score and a piece entitled ‘On Ranches’ which begins: ‘When going shooting a gun should be used not a rifle’, and more such advice. (Later Jim went into the army.) He also wrote ‘Adventures of Trapper Tom, Trapper Bob and Arkansas Jones’. Tom is an inventor who manages to turn two cars into flying machines.
Aunt May’s poem ‘The Ballad of the Sword’ appears in this one. It is not up to her usual standard and maybe had been rejected for one of her collections. It is set in the First World War.
Mamma wrote ‘Answers to Correspondence’, which were entirely fictional. Here is her reply to ‘Eater, Oxon’:
‘Your fears are well founded. Bursting is painful and an un-becoming process and should be avoided. Thirty apples a day is enough for anybody.’
But surely the best contribution is Mamma’s ‘A Grove Alphabet’. It describes perfectly how life at The Grove was at that time. In it Josephine Mary is of course Josephine, who was christened Josephine Mary Wedderburn. Judas was Denis’s ferret.
A GROVE ALPHABET
by
Joanna Cannan
A is for Authors. At The Grove they abound,
Like leaves in the autumn they cover the ground.
B is for Bertha. She leaps and she hops,
She bounces and flounces and sometimes she stops.
C is for Cappy, so sturdy and strong,
No one else at The Grove is so broad or so long.
D is for Dinah, who bristles with rage,
If she bites me again, I shall buy her a cage.
E is for Eggs, which we look for in vain,
We’ll be all dead and gone ’ere the hens lay again.
F is for Farmers, both poultry and dairy,
Christine and Diana and Josephine Mary.
G is for Gander. He’s fierce in the spring,
But the rest of the year he’s the dearest old thing.
H is for Heavy Hen. Though she’s not slim,
When she fell in the tank, she proceeded to swim.
I is for Ice Cream, Eldorado or Walls,
I hope I have tuppence next time the man calls.
J is for Judas. His size is no merit,
He’s as big as a bear but he’s really a ferret.
K is for Kitchen. I know of a sinner
Who opens the door and asks what’s for dinner.
L is for Larder. Without saying please
Some people go in there and finish the cheese.
M is for Mummy. We call it all day,
What we want we don’t know, but it’s something to say.
N is for Nursery. There’s sharks on the floor,
And booby traps fall as you open the door.
O is for Orange, so pleasant to eat,
And six lumps of sugar and you’ll have a treat.
P is for Pony, white, brown, bay or sable,
We’ll have nothing to wish for when he’s in the stable.
Q is for Quicklime. It gets in our eyes
When we whiten the henhouse, but nobody cries.
R is for Rabbits. They scratch up the lawn,
We rise from our beds and pursue them at dawn.
S is for Summer, that glorious time,
When to stay for a moment indoors is a crime.
T is for Teatime. We wash with a fuss,
There are lard cakes and dough cakes for Barney and us.
U is for Useful. That’s what we must be,
And shut up the hens when we’ve finished our tea.
V is for Vauxhall, so cold she won’t start.
Let’s save and buy Cappy a donkey and cart.
W is for Water. To wash we are made,
But we like it to drink when there’s no lemonade.
X We don’t mention. But sometimes it’s clear
That everyone’s horrid and nothing is fair.
Y is for Yawning, a horrible sight,
But don’t think we are tired, we could sit up all night.
Z’s for Zip Fasteners. Some people wear ’em,
When we take off our clothes, it’s much quicker to tear ’em.
Diana edited Grove Magazine No 2 which was published in January 1935. In it is possibly Diana’s first horse story called ‘The Life of a Carthorse’. Called Crown, the horse begins by pulling a coal cart, has many adventures and eventually returns to his old home having been bought for the then princely sum of one hundred guineas. There are echoes of Black Beauty in this one and a mare called Ginger.
My first horse story is included too. About New Forest ponies, which predictably are rounded up and sold, it also has a happy ending. ‘A Dreadful Day’, by me, is a rambling story in which children sell all the eggs there are in the house to a strange lady who knocks on the door, resulting in no eggs for father’s breakfast and much fury both from him and an upset maid. It has a tailpiece by Denis.
I also contributed to a piece entitled: ‘Why Should England Take Money from Scotland for Repairing England’ – it seems I was by then a Scottish Nationalist – and ‘Pirates’, a story running to two chapters entitled: ‘Captured’ and ‘Escaping’. Included too is Diana’s ‘In Danger of Death’ which is another one which begins in Scotland and is full of danger and smuggling. It ends happily. Her ‘Olden Days are Best’ is included as well. It seems we have not changed much!
Diana’s ‘In Danger of Death’ takes up a great deal of space in Volume No 2 which may be why there is less of Josephine in this one, or possibly it was because she was already away at school. Her best contribution is ‘The Wilds’ which begins:
The Red Deer browses on the hill,
Against the skyline bright
You can see the cattle graze
Black, brown and white.
Mamma contributed a poem about a fish shop in Reading called ‘Colbrook’s’ (the name of the shop). The last verse is as follows:
I hope there is a heaven for us all,
but mostly for the beasts, green woods, deep seas,
that some day I may hear a bird’s voice call,
Send Mrs Partridge two knight’s widows, please.
She also wrote ‘Woodcote’ reviling the line of pylons which had suddenly appeared there. Denis wrote a poem on the same subject entitled simply ‘Pylons’. There is no ‘correspondence’ in this volume.
Grove Magazine No. 3 was a long time in the making. It finally appeared in January 1940, but I think many of the contributions were written long before then. I believe I had to be persuaded to edit this one by Mamma. With Denis now a soldier we had lost our illustrator, and the front is covered with Christmas paper. Included is a piece by Granny called ‘A Visit to a Snake Farm’, which took place in South Africa in 1929. (Maybe because she was born at sea Granny was an inveterate traveller who went round the world three times.)
In it too was Diana’s ‘The Fate of the Georgian Manor’. Below are three of its nine verses:
But their days are over now
The Manor is not there,
The stately trees have gone now,
And sordid villas stare
Out onto a slippy highway
Where there used to be a track.
In the coach house cars are kept
In the stables tools abide,
Where the happy horses slept
>
In their stalls side by side.
In the kennels where gun dogs used to dream
In the paddocks sordid dustbins gleam
In the paddocks where horses used to roam.
For in the happy days of sunshine
The Georgian Manor was pulled down.
Gone now has the oak and pine
Where they stood there stands a town.
I contributed a piece on the dangers of barbed wire which is equally relevant today, particularly to horse owners. Our visit to Scotland in 1938 had not diminished our love for it and Josephine’s ‘A Wish’ begins:
I wish I were in the West Highlands
Out in the mist and the rain,
Standing on Morar’s silver sands
And watching the gulls again.
On the same subject my effort, ‘A Longing’, begins:
Oh to smell the sea, the soft green Highland sea,
And see the waves lapping the sandy shore
And to know that it is scones and jam for tea.
Oh for all this and nothing more.
On the same theme was Mamma’s ‘Highland Lament’ which I have included at the end of this chapter. Diana also wrote a piece deriding battery henhouses, a view much in advance of our time, and a long poem called ‘A Londoner living in the Country’.
Perhaps influenced by Keats, Josephine’s poem ‘To An Oak’ ends thus:
And now you lie a huddle of glory in the dust
A broken tree to satisfy some thoughtless mortal’s lust
A headless Hector on a Grecian plain
Your friendly branches writhéd round with pain.
There is also Mamma’s wonderful poem about ‘Milkmaid’ whom she sometimes exercised when we were away at school:
All round about our white farmhouse
the tall green beechwoods stand;
they bar the hill and secret keep
this ancient secret land.
The tracks the timber waggons make
wind north, south, east and west;
Milkmaid and I don’t fear to try
the one we like the best.
The leaves of half a hundred years
lie soft upon the ground,
and Milkmaid’s little iron-shod hoof
pass there without a sound.
And north and south and east and west
the wheeling tracks divide,
and I don’t know which way they go,
but on and on we ride.
There are no signposts in the woods;
no people walk so far;
and when night falls the branches hide
the friendly evening star.
I’m not afraid of getting lost
however far we roam;
I just sit back, the reins lie slack
And Milkmaid takes me home.
I also wrote a poem about the death of three cats, and a piece about anti flower-preservers, and another on the stupidity of wearing gloves in summer, in the style of Frances Cornford.
Surprisingly there are two poems written by both Diana and myself. Why were we suddenly together again? It seems distinctly odd. Personally I recall Mamma saying that there was too much of me already in this edition, particularly as I was editor; so any more poems must be in collaboration with Diana. I remember inwardly squirming because once again we were to be the twins. I can think of no other reason. Diana disagrees. However, I remain convinced that at least the first verse of ‘Reading’ is solely mine. (We also combined on a poem about hunting.) Here is ‘Reading’, a town with which I suspect we had a love-hate relationship:
Reading, you are sordid, dusty, dreary,
Full of women cold and weary,
Always tired and never cheery,
Tramping back to Nottingham lace.
What a poor, dejected race.
Full of dentists smug and clean
Always earnest, always keen
Never dirty, never mean.
Full of surgeons, squat and stout,
Sometimes in and sometimes out.
Reading, you are ugly, grim,
Sunless, smokey, squalid, dim,
And yet in some parts strangely trim.
Your factories shine against the sky
And in your streets the babies cry.
You have bloody butchers’ shops
Filled with fat gruesome chops,
Confectioners with no acid drops,
Fishmongers, greengrocers, bakers,
Shoe shops, clothes shops, undertakers.
Oh you daily-growing town,
You spoil the spinney and the down,
Every hillock you hideously crown.
With your vile suburbs stretching wide
You spoil the neighbouring countryside.
Mamma also wrote ‘Letters To The Editor’ for this one, plus the answers. I give you one example:
Sir
I live in a small villa on the outskirts of Birmingham. I want to own a dog. But I can’t give it much exercise, and cannot afford meat for it. What breed do you advise?
Enquirer
Wy/wurrie
Black Road
Birmingham.
In view of the fact that you can neither exercise nor feed a dog, our advice to you is to give up thoughts of becoming a dog owner and to purchase a cat or a white mouse. (Reliable cats can be obtained at a moderate price from The Misses Pullein-Thompson, The Grove, Peppard, Oxon. Ed.)
One cannot but wonder why we wrote what we did. I think Diana’s and my early work was influenced by the books we were reading at the time: Smugglers All, The Ghostly Galleon, Who Rides in the Dark? are full of pirates and kidnappers. Treasure Island and Kidnapped also fuelled our imagination, as did Black Beauty. Josephine, who had rather different literary tastes, nevertheless shared our obsession with Scotland. Later horse stories eclipsed our more violent offerings. But even in these, violence and dishonesty are rampant. Fox hunting appears in numbers two and three of The Grove Magazine, including articles justifying and in defence of it – once again we appear ahead of our time.
In our youth we pored over a book of tartans. We mourned the defeat of the Scots at Culloden as though it were yesterday. Sometimes we even raised our glasses at meals calling out to ‘The King’, then passed them over the water jug before drinking, so signalling to each other that we were actually toasting Prince Charles Edward across the water in France, not King George – a Jacobite habit. But then, as Josephine has written earlier, one of our ancestors was hung, drawn and quartered after the battle of Culloden, so maybe we had good reason.
The Scottish obsession has not left me; four of my books are set in the Highlands as were Mamma’s We Met our Cousins and Hamish, which was one of the first Penguin books for children to be published, about a pony from the Shetland Isles loose in London.
And finally Mamma’s ‘Highland Lament’ from Grove Magazine No 3:
Over the loch the gulls are wheeling,
Achateilasaig!
There is no fire in the lone sheiling,
Achateilasaig!
Down from the hills the wet mist wanders,
Achateilasaig!
The cow stands in the byre with glanders,
Achateilasaig!
From the dim grey sea the night comes creeping,
Achateilasaig!
The roar of the waves prevents us sleeping,
Achateilasaig!
Over the sound the wind blows harder,
Achateilasaig!
There’s nothing to eat in the wee sma’ larder,
Achateilasaig!
The wet rain falls on the hills of heather,
Achateilasaig!
The scones we have made taste just like leather,
Achateilasaig!
Up on the moor the storm clouds gather,
Achateilasaig!
Why did we come to the land of our fathers?
Achateilasaig!
Traditional.
Beside wri
ting and riding, we canoed. We had shared the cost of the Folbot canoe (or was it really called Foldboat?) taking much of the money Granny had given us each Christmas from our Post Office accounts to buy it. Denis paid the most. We called it Foy after Foy Quiller-Couch. It took us about fifteen minutes to remove it from its bags and put it together. We did not have the usual single paddle, but two shorter ones. Denis, already an oarsman, took us out in Foy, and I remember him taking us in turn up or down the Thames before depositing us on a small island covered with nettles before returning for the next one. Left usually in shorts, aertex shirts, sandals and without socks, one was horribly stung if one moved in any direction, but I don’t remember ever complaining, and we soon became experts with a paddle.
Diana has described our caravanning holidays in Cornwall. On our way we stayed in the grounds of public schools, where Cappy lectured in term time and discussed job prospects with the boys there. I remember swimming in Canford’s swimming pool and finding it shady and cold, and stopping at Monkton Coombe which I preferred. We already knew these schools by name and many others, having cheered them on at Henley Regatta.
The unpleasant side to these holidays was the jobs which we – Diana and I, in particular – were given. Peeling potatoes was boring enough, but infinitely worse was emptying the latrine buckets which Mamma, being cook, was excused. The rest of us took it in turn dragging the bucket across a field, trying to hold our noses as we went – then pulling it up a bank, before with a final desperate heave we tipped its unsavoury contents over a stone wall onto the clump of nettles below; then we lugged it back, thankful that the task was done.
Fair Girls and Grey Horses Page 14