Fair Girls and Grey Horses

by Christine Pullein-Thompson

  As the day approached, we put an enormous amount of energy into grooming and tack-cleaning; but when it came, more urgent business had demanded H.W.’s presence and he sent a substitute. The friend was a pleasant man, but he lacked H.W.’s charisma and knowledge, and we were all deeply disappointed.

  Later H.W. found time to come himself, but his ferocity with bad riders scared away some of the members. In those days, in moments of stress, his Ws had a habit of becoming Vs; so he said, ‘This is vot you are doing to your pony’s mouth,’ as he took Edward’s ear and gave it several sharp tweaks. And, after a particularly fierce roar at Patricia, he demanded, ‘Vy are you veeping?’ He seemed to have no idea of how ferocious he sounded, but fortunately, as the riding club members faded away and the club was abandoned, he became our friend and mentor. Even Cappy admired him, though they had nothing in common, and Mamma was thrilled that one of the fantasy Masters of Foxhounds of her youth had actually materialised. Later, seeing that I had grown to love H.W., she told me that she and I both liked difficult and dangerous men.

  H.W. would tell stories of his wartime journeys round Britain, trying to find airfields. Endlessly lost in a land from which all road signs and fingerposts had been removed and maps taken out of circulation, stopping to ask the way was a waste of time; his Dutch accent meant he was invariably taken for a German spy, or parachutist, and the locals, filled with patriotic cunning, would send him in the opposite direction. At the Wynmalens’ Kingswood House there was the sort of stableyard we had always longed for, and it was bliss to be invited there. At first we rode Holly, a pony belonging to Julia – H.W.’s vivacious second wife, whom we were invited to call Juanita. Later we graduated to riding the horses. Basa, the grey, Hungarian-bred Arab stallion, was my favourite. Highly intelligent and lovely to look at, he was almost house-trained. It was as though he had an inherited memory of sharing an Arab master’s tent. He used one corner of his loose box as a lavatory, and when I rode him in the outdoor school I was disconcerted by his refusal to sully the peat track; he would suddenly turn and leave his droppings neatly in the grass alongside. We were also allowed to drive the high-stepping hackney horse in the elegant phaeton, which was a thrilling exercise in the control of energy, and quite unlike driving a pony and cart. In the garage at Kingswood hung fascinating evidence of H.W.’s previous life – a collection of framed photographs, depicting youthful helmeted aviators standing beside tiny aircraft, which appeared to be tied up with string.

  It was largely through H.W.’s instruction and interest that we were in the vanguard when, after the war, British riders began to adopt the continental style of horsemanship. We dutifully passed on all we had learnt to our pupils and ponies which enabled them – representing the South Berkshire Pony Club – to win the first nationally-held Pony Club Inter-branch Competition in 1949.

  It was also fortunate for budding equitation experts to have so many human and equine pupils on which to experiment. A single rider with one horse could not have made the mistakes, or had the successes, which increased our knowledge in such enormous bounds. I enjoyed teaching and found it deeply fulfilling, especially as time passed and our pupils became more advanced. I also loved schooling horses and knew the poetry of perfect harmony between horse and rider, not only when jumping and riding cross-country, but also in the well-executed dressage movement: half-passes at the canter, shoulder-in at the trot. I was not so keen on the housework of horses; mucking out was heavy and boring work, grooming was a chore that had to be done. Tack-cleaning, though dreary on one’s own, became a social occasion at The Grove when a large number of the older pupils – including boys, those well-known haters of tack-cleaning – would stay on to help us.

  Mamma enjoyed the riding school. She never interfered, though she would help in emergencies, and she shamelessly collected copy for More Ponies for Jean. Cappy didn’t show much interest, and guarded his remaining territory of house and garden against the hordes of pupils, but I think he was pleased that we were doing something profitable and constructive and making a large contribution towards the telephone bill. In Bowley’s absence, we tried to keep the place up; as well as clipping hedges, mending fences and mixing concrete, we picked the apples and, obeying the constant exhortations to ‘Dig for Victory’, attempted to grow soft fruit and vegetables.

  Firewatching teams were recruited in every street and village and in Peppard this seemed to be a female preserve; all the able-bodied men had joined the Home Guard. Mamma and I attended a training session at which Marjorie (the dominant Miss Platt) and Babs, the doctor’s sister, were demonstrating the use of the stirrup pump. The water source was a bucket and, while Babs pumped, Marjorie directed the jet on the imaginary incendiary bomb. They took it extremely seriously, and their commanding cries of ‘Ready, Babs?’ and ‘Water on!’ ‘Water off!’ gave Mamma and me the giggles. Marjorie and Babs organized a rota and a route round the scattered village, and we were enrolled. At first we rode and the ponies seemed to enjoy a nocturnal expedition, but there were soon complaints about the clatter of hoofs waking the inhabitants and we had to walk our beat, gazing up at the rooftops to see if some unnoticed plane had dropped an incendiary.

  The phoney war ended, and, with terrifying rapidity, the Germans occupied Denmark and Norway and in May launched their long-awaited attack on Belgium and France. The news was always bad and when the much-vaunted Maginot line fell and the out-flanked allies fell back, our hearts sank and sank. Only the fact that Winston Churchill had become Prime Minister, and we had a leader at last, saved us from despair. Our parents, though deeply gloomy, normally preserved stiff upper lips, but I remember Mamma hiding tears as she listened to Duff Cooper, the Minister for Information, speaking from Paris and she knew that her beloved France was about to fall. There was also the worry about Granny who had obstinately refused her last chance to come home, as the remaining English residents – including the novelist Somerset Maugham – were evacuated on a coal boat.

  Then, on Mamma’s birthday, May 27th, abject defeat became elevated into a kind of victory, when the Navy and a flotilla of little ships and boats chugged across the Channel to fetch home the soldiers trapped on the beaches of Dunkirk. We listened avidly to every news bulletin, and the courage of the crews of tugs, fishing and pleasure-boats, making trip after trip, filled us all with pride. Then came Churchill’s famous speech about defending our island whatever the cost:

  ‘We shall fight on the beaches and the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender …’ And, as with all his wartime speeches, he lifted our spirits and we believed him implicitly.

  As the twins have written, the Battle of Britain went on all that beautiful summer. The Germans had taken over the French and Belgian airfields and were now on our doorstep. We watched the aircraft streaking cross the brilliant blue sky, there were vapour trails and smoke trails, but one never knew whether the planes were ours or theirs. Below, the garden bloomed with careless indifference, the herbaceous borders were a bee-loud dream and Mamma swore she would never like phlox again. In September there were heavy attacks on the airfields near London and then on September 7th the Blitz began. In November it was the turn of the Midlands to be bombed and the German planes would fly over The Grove every night. At first they were heavy-laden and then, as they returned in the early hours, their engines had a different note, and you knew they had dropped their bombs. Christine has described how Denis lay dying of peritonitis. I have never forgotten the night the parents came home and our relief that Denis was out of danger was muted by their grey faces and look of exhaustion. They had spent their days at his bedside, the nights at a hotel in the midst of the bombing, and they had economised on food. We gave them dinner and hurried them to bed, and then, as Christine has told, the hospital rang to say Denis was haemorrhaging and asked them to return at once. They set off into the night, with the tiny amount of light that the blackout shutters on headlights allowed, Cap
py reassuring us that he more or less knew the way.

  We went to bed. Later, when the telephone rang again, I answered. A voice asked if the parents had started and, when I said ‘Yes’, rang off. The twins were asleep; Nana called out to know who it was. I told her and went back to my room convinced that Denis was dead. It was a terrible night. All the week before I had been praying for Denis, now suddenly I found myself praying for Mamma. I hardly slept at all for I knew how much she loved Denis and I felt that his death would destroy her.

  Nana did not seem perturbed and next morning began her daily quarrel with Joan, who still came in for a few hours to cook for us. When I burst into tears, too miserable to arbitrate, it was Joan, not Nana, who tried to comfort me. At lunchtime Mamma telephoned. She was horrified to learn that we had been left in suspense, for the nurses had told her we had been reassured that Denis was not in danger.

  The parents had suffered unnecessary horrors, too, for on reaching the hospital – it was one of those hastily converted from lunatic asylums – they had found the impregnable gates locked. They had banged and shouted frantically, as they imagined Denis dying, and, after an age, had wakened the gatekeeper and been let in. The surgeon had also been locked out, but being young he had climbed the gates – and then found that the haemorrhage was not from a vital area; it was a false alarm. Denis recovered slowly, but was never to be graded A1 again. We became regular blood donors as we waited in vain for his character to change, expecting that, full of Birmingham blood, he would develop a taste for begonias and the shiny cushions with tassels which we believed decorated every Midland home. Indignant at missing active service, he later volunteered as a glider pilot, but was fortunately turned down for being colour-blind.

  Of the dogs, Darkie died during the war, and Mamma took on Sarah, a deerhound belonging to a young RAF officer who had been posted overseas. Sarah was slightly smaller than a wolfhound, and had even less brain. Later when Denis was sent overseas with an Infantry Method of Instruction Team, another dog joined us – a golden cocker spaniel jointly owned by Denis and his girlfriend Joan, who was also posted abroad. Rufus was an enthusiastic dog, who showed extremes of excitement when walks or dinners were mentioned; but his vocabulary was small and, using the same voice, you could invoke equal joy by offering to have him painlessly destroyed. Initiated by Denis, we all used this as Rufie’s party piece.

  Life would have been very drear without the riding and writing. No adolescent amusements were provided in the winter and long journeys in blacked-out buses to blacked-out towns were not lightly undertaken. There was no opportunity for adolescent rebellion, for how could you rebel, or even complain, when other people were being bombed or shot down by German planes? Adults were in short supply and we found ourselves called upon to help with running gymkhanas and building show-jumping courses for local shows, all run to raise money for the Red Cross or some other worthy cause. We were asked to provide pony rides, which were extremely popular, at charity fêtes. But it was purgatory for ponies to have endless children scrambling on and off their backs and, by the end of the day, they longed to savage every child in sight. The riders were often insatiable, running to rejoin the queue after every turn. I remember a police fête in Reading where the long queues for each pony never grew less and, when evening fell and we insisted on going home, the waiting mothers were furious.

  In the winter evenings we settled down to write. Now we had proved that we could get our stories published without adult help, it became permissible to consult Mamma on literary matters. To split an infinitive was definitely a sin, and she vowed to turn in her grave if we ever sold our copyrights. But when I asked how to punctuate – I seem to have missed that lesson at Wychwood – she answered, ‘By inspiration’ which I found unhelpful.

  Mostly we were referred to Quiller-Couch’s On the Art of Writing. He taught us not to use ‘case’, ‘Jargon’s favourite child’, to prefer the concrete word to the abstract and the direct expression to circumlocution, while the advice contained in The King’s English – to prefer the short word to the long, the Saxon word to the Romance – soon had us in conflict with horse show committees determined to use ‘commence’ and ‘terminate’ on their schedules.

  In conversation one could commit endless sins. Cappy had always banned horse-talk at meals, except for tea, on the grounds that we must not become horsey bores. His other constant cry was ‘Think before you speak’, but I think this had less influence, for most of us still belong to the ‘How do I know what I think until I see what I say?’ school of thought. Another of his injunctions was that we must learn to drink beer and always ask for it when taken out by impecunious young men. This last was delivered with feeling, for apparently Mamma had always asked for champagne when they were courting. Saying ‘Pardon?’ instead of ‘What?’ was the worst sin of all, and young men using the dreaded word were never welcomed to the house.

  Mamma had added children talking about school to her list of sins. Veronica in Blind Messenger is much afflicted by her children’s endless accounts of school and their use of peer group words, and a boy in More Ponies for Jean is said to be ‘all right, except that he will talk about school’. Now that our Wychwood days were over, we found that profitless speculation and all sentences beginning with ‘I wonder’ were also sinful. Dithering and saying ‘I don’t mind’ had never been allowed, and women who bought dresses and then spent the day wondering if they ‘should have taken the blue’ were beyond the pale. If you did wish to make a banal remark it had to be addressed to a fictitious Mrs Snooks. ‘It never rains, but it pours, Mrs Snooks,’ was perfectly acceptable.

  As I grew older and voiced alien opinions, Mamma was inclined to dismiss them with ‘Claptrap!’ She believed in evil and free will and her other retort, when I tried to excuse delinquent behaviour on the grounds of a difficult childhood or chemical imbalance, was a mocking ‘Glands!’

  Though the parents’ censoriousness did not inhibit our conversation or prevent us holding our own views, it did limit our friendships. There were so many people you could not ask to the house; or if they turned up, you waited on tenterhooks for them to commit one of the many deadly sins. I think my only teenage rebellion took place quietly inside myself; I began to feel that the parents’ feuds were absurd and most of the sins were nonsense.

  Physically, I was an extremely late developer. At seventeen I was still a year away from puberty, and it was only by growing until I was twenty-two that I finally matched the twins in height. I struggled to become adult. I smoked for a whole week and then decided that, as I still hated it, cigarettes must be a waste of money. I took to lipstick and, in the absence of hairdressers, put my hair in rollers every night to produce a fashionable pageboy style. Most women had given up and, tying a greasy ribbon round their heads, turned their hair outwards and then tucked the ends behind the band, making a very unbecoming roll. We all three tried to look older than we were and, finding that felt hacking hats were still in the shops and needed no coupons, we wore them in our roles as riding instructors, convinced that they gave us an air of authority and sophistication.

  Being stunted had its uses. As I still weighed less than seven stone, I could break and school the small ponies. Mr Sworder had produced a charming little skewbald called Sunstar, who became so accomplished that to keep her in the ‘family’ we arranged to sell her at a loss to one of our pupils. Later, when outgrown, she was sold to the small daughter of a show-jumping family at a vast profit, and we learnt not to expect a return on generosity. We tried to persuade Mr Sworder to buy horses for the twins to school, but this was not a success, for he wasn’t prepared to put up the extra money needed. I remember only a huge gawky chestnut, which couldn’t bring itself to jump and finally fell spectacularly flat, crushing a long section of the paddock hedge.

  In June the Germans invaded the Soviet Union and, though we were used to Hitler breaking his treaties and overpowering his erstwhile friends, this time there was a general feeling that he had made
a mistake – the bully had picked on someone his own size – and there was quiet jubilation that we were no longer fighting alone.

  Our expectation of invasion had faded, but Cappy was still fiercely territorial about his defences. When white lines were painted over the camouflage of a small concrete pillbox placed strategically at the Gravel Hill crossroads, he roared, raged and then painted ‘What fool did this?’ across the offending lines. The culprit was an official, I think the District Surveyor, who had hoped to save the populace from colliding with the emplacement in the dark. The whole village read the message and laughed. The Surveyor was deeply humiliated, and his son came to The Grove to protest. I never knew what he said, but Cappy decided that I must make a return visit. I was to tell the District Surveyor that I had come as my brother was in the army, and then point out the absurdity of endangering the lives of the Home Guard by painting white marks on their defences. I was far from willing, but Cappy seemed to think it was my duty to support him, so I set off with my feelings lurching between trepidation and disgust. When, in the Surveyor’s office, I announced the reason for my visit, his reply was, ‘I think you are a very brave little girl’, which I found both unexpected and deflating. I struggled on with my next piece, and he answered that he didn’t feel fathers should involve children in their disputes. I wanted to say that I agreed with him and, if it had been my quarrel, I would have made it up there and then, but I had to depart on frosty terms. And afterwards there was the embarrassment of meeting him in the road and having to look away; I hated feuds.

  I was pale, suffered from summer nosebleeds, and became spotty. Christine teased me, saying I had a bovine temperament and little sunken eyes. I taunted her with ‘codfish eyes’ in return and complained that while I followed the middle way, she soared and plunged from trough to peak. Then Cappy said that I had acne, and that his sister Muriel had suffered from it. Mamma, outraged, drew herself up to her full height and observed, in Granny’s voice, ‘No daughter of mine has acne’ – but I was provided with vitamin B. The problem, I discovered later, was that I didn’t have the Cannan dry skin and while Mamma, Denis and the twins thrived on a policy of never letting soap touch their faces, mine cried out for it.