Fair Girls and Grey Horses

by Christine Pullein-Thompson

  Darkie was not house-trained, so the bean hole was converted to a kennel in which she was to sleep at night. She hated it and, having kept everyone in the neighbourhood awake by howling at the moon, finally gnawed her way out. A large dog bed was then provided in the dining room and the first person down in the morning was frequently confronted by a lake of pee. Luckily the ancient brick flags of the floor stood up to it and the maids, being country girls, didn’t object.

  Darkie’s other disadvantage was that she took up the whole of the back seat in Bouncing Bertha, leaving only a tiny ledge among her paws, on which the twins and I had to perch.

  I suppose we were all growing tired of sharing everything, for after the arrival of Darkie, who plainly belonged to Mamma, the twins suggested to me that we shared out the spaniels and had one each. I remember the knotted feeling in my stomach as I suddenly became aware that I had given my heart to Pippin. Apprehensively, I asked which of the dogs they wanted and remember an enormous flood of relief when Diana answered ‘Barney’ and Christine ‘Dinah.’

  Barney, Pippin and Dinah

  Almost every day, if we succeeded in borrowing enough ponies, we rode through the beechwood cathedrals, pillared by pewter-grey trunks and carpeted with centuries of leaves, soft and muffling to the thud of hoofs. The woods changed dramatically with the seasons: the white anemones of spring, the drifts of bluebells, the green canopy of high summer, the seductive melancholy of autumn with rosebay willow herb and the orange brown of falling leaves, all brought their own heady pleasure. Winter could be beautiful too and it was possible to canter on the carpet of beech leaves when the fields were frozen iron-hard, but I always hated the cold.

  Though we were encouraged to love and admire and write poetry about the countryside, sentimental gushing was not permitted. Mamma mocked flower-arranging ladies enthusing over autumnal tints, disdainfully alluding to them as ‘autimnal tunts’.

  The countryside of the thirties offered little room for sentimentality, for though the farms boasted meadows bright with wild flowers, fields fenced with hedges and ancient orchards that had never known a pesticide, they were also gloomy reminders of world recession. Ruinous cottages, unrepaired barns and sagging barbed wire fences abounded. The ubiquitous corrugated iron rusted as it filled gaps in hedges, patched up roofs and walled the shanty town sheds that passed for farm buildings in many smallholdings.

  It was a time when old horrors lingered and new ones appeared. Dogs could still spend their lives chained to damp kennels, but the first battery henhouses were being erected. Rheumaticky farm labourers lived without electricity, baths or indoor lavatories; in the winter their bent figures moved across the sodden landscape cloaked against the weather with sacks. But we watched swathes being cut through the woods for the erection of the first pylons. Stephen Spender wrote a poem of admiration, Mamma and Denis penned hate poems, which appeared in The Grove Magazine.

  We would ride through the hamlet of Nuney Green, deep in the beechwoods and reached only by lanes, where the thatched cottages were collapsing one by one, through Stoke Row, a dull straggle of a village except in cherry blossom time, where the men who worked for the Star Brush Company, fashioning the wooden parts of brushes and brooms, were said to be of a different race. They were small, dark, round-headed men, whose forebears had been charcoal burners, and it was considered rather a disgrace for a girl from another village to marry one of them. We would visit the well, presented by the Maharajah of Benares in 1864, as an expression of gratitude to an engineer from Stoke Row. The oriental dome, bedecked with elephants, the cypress walk and the small round house provided for the custodian, looked incongruous among the dripping beechwoods, and the concept that the best way to honour a man was to bore a well for his village conjured up visions of a different, dryer world.

  Nearer home, the Crowsley Park road branched beyond the Kews’ and the downhill road, heading for Sonning Common, passed between the Butchers’ Arms (in those days a small whitewashed pub) and the bottomless pond. Dark, shaded by trees except where it was walled against the road, it lost its mystery for Christine, she says, but not for me. The pond’s bottomless reputation rested on the seventeenth-century attempt to drain it. According to local accounts, they had drained and drained for days and finally, coming to the topmost branches of a standing oak, they gave up. It was also said that a coach and four had gone in one winter night and never been seen again. I viewed it with respect and wondered what other horrors were concealed in the black waters, but all that emerged in our day was the annual migration of frogs – presumably to mate – and hundreds of them filled the road and died a grisly death under the wheels of passing cars.

  Years later, I discovered in the British Library a seventeenth-century account of the draining. The local stories were true as far as they went, but no one had told us of Dr Plot’s conclusion, that the pond was a Roman silver mine and when our colonial masters withdrew they had attempted to fill it, even dropping in whole trees.

  The summer I was eleven, Mamma suddenly announced that she and I were going to a gathering of the Wychwood School old girls. All three Cannan girls had attended Miss Batty’s classes for the daughters of Oxford dons – then affectionally known as the Battyhole, which had grown into Wychwood School, with Miss Lee (who had taught English in Mamma’s day) now the headmistress.

  I remember only a buffet lunch in the garden of Miss Lee’s house at Dorchester-on-Thames and being warned not to approach a horse in the field alongside, as the previous year it had badly bitten the nose of a senior girl. Afterwards I learnt that I was being considered for Miss Lee’s personal scholarship, which would have covered tuition fees throughout my schooldays.

  When the offer of the scholarship came – it obviously owed more to Mamma’s record, she and Carola Oman were the school’s most distinguished old girls, than to any sign of academic brilliance on my part – the parents turned it down. Peppard was twenty miles from Oxford so I couldn’t go daily, and they decided that I was too young to be a weekly boarder. They told the school that I would go as a paying pupil the following year.

  It may have been pride, but I suspect they feared that I could become Miss Lee’s child, and they wanted to fashion their daughters in their own mould. Eton was a different matter; Grandfather Cannan had judged it the best and they seemed prepared to let it mould Denis as far as he was mouldable. I don’t think it occurred to them that I needed older companionship or that the longer we spent at Miss Fryer’s, the harder it would be to adjust to the curriculum of a conventional school.

  At Miss Fryer’s I was moved in with the older girls, who worked largely unsupervised at the round table in the sitting room of the cottage. I much preferred worldly conversation with Jean and Bernice to essay writing and they had great difficulty in persuading me to work. One of my many inquiries, wisely put to Bernice – the blacksmith’s daughter – was, ‘Are there any worse swear words than bloody?’

  She reeled them off without hesitation and I was deeply disappointed. They seemed so short and meaningless, so much less satisfactory than ‘bloody’: I began to wonder if she was fooling me.

  That evening, alone with the parents, I chose one at random and asked, ‘Is bugger really a swear word?’ Cappy exploded; shouting, he demanded to know who had told me? Where I had heard it?

  I instantly became obstinate and Mamma, trying to calm him, pointed out that if he insisted on knowing, I would never confide in him again. He repeated that it was a terrible word, only used by men in prison, and that I must never, never let it pass my lips.

  As Bernice’s father was a perfectly respectable blacksmith, Cappy was obviously wrong. This, with his absurd shouting and his demand that I told tales, angered me. However, I now knew that Bernice was trustworthy, and, though I confined myself to ‘bloody’ until I was adult and never divulged my secret store to the twins, I hugged them to me; knowledge was power.

  Cappy admired a sexual knowingness in Denis, but he seemed to expect innocence in hi
s daughters. Hearing him warn Mamma that a certain novel had better be kept away from me, I naturally searched for it and, balanced precariously on the back of an armchair, reached it down from the top shelf of the bookcase. He need not have worried, the sex act demanded in a regimental initiation ceremony was baffling to me and while a pair of lovers coupled in a wood I worried about the horses they left tied to trees.

  Apart from sex, Cappy’s cry was always ‘It’s not the things you’ve done that you’ll regret in later life, it’s the things you haven’t done.’ He took a fitful interest in our education, which usually ended in him saying that we were learning nothing. Once he laboriously typed three copies of the dates of Kings and Queens of England, and offered half a crown to whichever of us learnt them first.

  He was having no success with his writing, despite evenings and weekends spent at the typewriter, but these rejections did nothing to diminish his passion for the theatre. When we were first at The Grove I was taken to see Harry Lauder at the New Theatre, Oxford, Cappy saying that I would remember the great man all my life as he had remembered seeing Sarah Bernhardt when she had only one leg, but could still hold an audience spellbound. He took an interest in the repertory company which played in the little eighteenth-century theatre in New Street, Henley and later threw himself into organizing the Friends of the Theatre. We enjoyed being taken to Maria Marten or Murder in the Red Barn, and the villain’s soliloquy on the scaffold, ‘See where my education has brought me,’ provided an invaluable quote.

  Denis, who had also been passionate about the theatre since Carola Oman had given him a model one at the age of eight, began to help at the Kenton in the holidays. We saw him act for the first time as Richard Hare in East Lynne, and ‘Dead, dead, and never called me mother!’ became a quotation that could be used in moments of stress. At Christmas there was usually an amateur production, and once Mamma took the three of us and Nana to a production of Iolanthe. The vet’s youthful assistant played the part of a lord with great vigour and we all fell in love with him. As we grew older we became regular theatregoers and saw the Barries, the A.A. Milnes, and the Priestleys which made up the repertoire of the company.

  We put on our own plays too. The end of the dining room with its four doors was fine for entrances and exits and the audience could be seated at the table. Our plots were very rough, the actors improvised the dialogue and the finale invariably disintegrated into mayhem and murder, my antique blunderbuss, a birthday present from the twins, being used to shoot most of the cast.

  When I discovered Cappy’s collection of plays, I thought On Approval by Frederick Lonsdale the most racy work I had read. I tried to put it on, but it was too old for us and when the twins, who didn’t believe in learning parts, would giggle, the performance had to be abandoned. After that the plays ceased.

  The twins’ vocabulary had grown enormously, but their early diet of pirate books, rousing poetry and Nana’s euphemisms had made it decidedly idiosyncratic. They talked of swabbing floors and used might as a term of reproach – ‘You might get up, play farms, come and ride etc.’ One of my most heinous faults was ‘sipping’. The twins drank milk or water, I sipped tea.

  We had been brought up never to fight two against one but once, when there had been a twin rift, Christine and I began to gang up on Diana. Mamma spoke to us seriously and confessed that she and Aunt Dot had treated Aunt May in the same way when they were young, but it was wrong and their parents should have stopped it. However, though ganging up was wrong, democracy was right and, as the twins discovered their voting power, I learnt the frustration of being in a minority.

  When they took the clippers to Milky’s mane and hogged her so that she matched Rum, I pointed out that as part-owner I ought to have been consulted, but my protest was shrugged off with, ‘Oh well, it would have been two against one, anyway.’

  Being smaller than my younger sisters was also humbling. They had taken to handing me their outgrown garments with an airy, ‘Here, you’d better have this.’ I made a joke of it, saying that I now had two of everything, but I began to call myself ‘Dustbin’. I think this was a protest, for I don’t remember any feeling of worthlessness; but my teenage letters to Mamma are all signed ‘Dustbin’, so I suppose it assumed the status of a pet name.

  Mamma always said that I held my own and used a lot of low cunning in dealing with the twins. I remember playing on their fear of death. I had only to say ‘When you die, you go out like a candle,’ to make them block their ears and scream. And when one of them beat me at high jump and the other at long jump, I would challenge them to jump the garden seat back to front, or the extremely prickly paddock hedge. To preserve my seniority, I could force myself over, but without this spur they couldn’t and, like overfaced horses, refused.

  I began to ride Rum. She was a safe, experienced and passionate jumper but, unlike many good horses, she needed a jockey; she never jumped in and out of fields on her own. Denis had leapt five-barred gates and ridden her in Handy Hunter classes, Mamma had led the field over trappy timber fences out hunting, but Rum and I began to showjump. I was the pupil, Rum the teacher and we communicated in some mysterious way. Flying over far greater heights than I could jump on my feet gave me great pleasure and boosted my self-confidence enormously.

  The Silkies were very dear to me, but it became apparent that some of their progeny had to be sold. Owing to their blue skin the cockerels couldn’t be eaten, and I needed a second blood line to provide breeding pairs; the Kew family’s congenital deafness had alerted us to the dangers of inbreeding. I bought new stock, Young Lochinvar and the Pentland Daisy – named after a Scottish ancestor from Penicuik – and Mamma got in touch with the pet department at Harrods. Later we took a pair up to London in a hamper. I suspect Mamma paid both our fares, giving me an exalted idea of my profit.

  Fred Kew had bought me some Mallard duck eggs with instructions to set them under one of my bantams. They hatched and horrified their bantam mother by plunging into the duckpond. When adult they didn’t join the geese and other ducks – Mamma’s Aylesburys and the twins’ Khaki Campbells; they lived a semi-wild life, taking off on daily flights, but always returning to and nesting at The Grove.

  Cappy had lost interest in the White Wyandottes and Rhode Island Reds, who had sensibly escaped from their exclusive runs and joined the other hens. He suggested rearing turkeys; we would have a free one for ourselves and sell the rest for large sums. Local wisdom told us that the mortality rate was high and you must set twice as many eggs as you wanted turkeys at Christmas, so we filled the incubator and I found myself tending the turkey chicks in the brooder and later in the abandoned chicken runs. All went well until the adolescent turkey cocks began to grow their wattles, then depression seemed to overtake them. They died willy nilly of a dozen unrelated diseases and, as a last resort, hanged themselves by putting their heads through the wire netting. I believe that modern turkey farmers feed anti-depressants, but with us the local prediction proved correct and we lost half our hatching. The survivors didn’t grow enormously large, perhaps because we let them out to roam in a flock. Then, at the approach of Christmas, Bowley and an assistant killed them. When the gentle sound of turkey gobble ceased, a terrible silence reigned over the orchard and we resolved never to rear turkeys for eating again. For some unremembered reason one female was spared, we called her Lady Precious-stream, and later Mamma bought her a magnificent white husband and named him Fujiyama.

  I decided not to be a poultry farmer, I now knew too much about the hard work and hazards, the awful harvesting, and the modest profit. I announced that I would be a vet. Bowley took my ambition seriously. We discussed the health of the ‘Sooners’ – his name for those animals who would ‘sooner’ be upstairs in the bathroom than outside in the yard. When one of the silkies injured a toe, which gradually withered and died, we took her to the bathroom for an amputation. Cappy’s precious nail scissors were borrowed and my tears fell with the toe. ‘You’ll never be a vet if you cry
over that,’ said Bowley briskly.

  So far we had relied on the Complete Book of the Dog and First Aid Hints for Horseowners – which dealt with cuts and colic, splints and spavins – for our veterinary advice, but then Bowley presented me with a Victorian manual, retrieved from another employer’s bonfire. Illustrated with engravings of embryos in cross-section, with foaling mares and aborting cows, all attended by a veterinary gentleman wearing a frock coat and top hat, it became one of my most cherished possessions.

  Though we were still unorthodox riders – we shocked the conventional by mounting indiscriminately from either side – we had grown in confidence and were proud that we had the reputation of being able to ride any pony that came our way. We began to long for an unbroken pony. We loved Milky and Rum, but they were our mentors. Milky looked both ways before she crossed the road and took you home if you were lost. Now we wanted to reverse the process and train a young pony.

  When Mr Sworder agreed to try us, we took our new profession seriously. I spent the evening before Rainbow arrived making notes on schooling from Golden Gorse’s The Young Rider and we worked out a plan for training the child’s perfect pony. I am not sure if Rocket was the second Sworder pony, but he was one to whom I lost my heart. However much you love horses in general, you cannot offer equal affection to them all. There are stupid and ungenerous horses, horses who bore or irritate you and those with whom you just don’t dovetail. Rocket was a narrow four-year-old, dark brown 12.2 and of Dartmoor type, and we fell for each other at once. We seemed to be young together, we loved to gallop like the wind and we did it as partners; there was no worry about starting or stopping.

  Out hunting with the South Berks, this reckless galloping brought us to grief. Rocket put a forefoot in a rabbit hole and we both had a crashing fall. I lay on the cropped turf and a ring of middle-aged farmers gazed down on me, their concerned faces topped with bowler hats. To everyone’s surprise, we were only shaken and, reunited, we galloped on, but I had learnt to watch out for rabbit warrens.