My Animals (and Other Family)

by Phyllida Barstow

  Nursery food was uniformly bland and disgusting. I remember my gorge rising uncontrollably when Gerry said pensively, ‘Just think! Some little animal once depended on this,’ as he pushed the sheep’s brain about his plate, and our refusal to eat the bitter scorched skin on milk puddings led to tremendous scolding and lectures about the starving millions in China.

  Dining room food – as we discovered when we were allowed to eat downstairs – was little better. I don’t think this was entirely due to wartime shortages, nor because it was difficult to get staff; it was more because neither Grandfather nor Granny was in the least interested in what they ate; in fact Granny amazed us once by saying she could never remember being hungry in her whole life. She considered it bad manners to discuss food, particularly at meals. You simply ate what was put on your plate and that was that.

  Though she would meticulously plan the day’s menu every morning when the current cook came up to her bedroom to collect her breakfast tray, she never commented on – let alone criticised – the result, which was usually overdone, under-seasoned, and lukewarm after its journey by double-decked trolley from the kitchen, across the hall, and into the serving-room’s warming cupboard, where it became desiccated beyond redemption.

  ‘The carver is either a knave or a fool,’ Grandfather would say ruefully when he found he had left little or nothing for his own helping, but he would never have dreamed of sending out to the kitchen for more. He was as frugal by nature as Granny was extravagant – ‘Have you nothing more expensive?’ my mother once heard her ask a jeweller – but both of them were prepared to sacrifice their own comfort if it helped the war effort. Just as Uncle Trevor had given his four lovely hunters to the Army to serve their country as cavalry chargers in the First World War, Grandfather sold his large luxurious Packard to the Army for £20 in the Second.

  This was actually more of a sacrifice for Granny than himself, since he never learned to drive, which was probably just as well because he was short-sighted and kack-handed. I once saw him measuring with knickerelastic the space needed to hang a picture, though at lawn tennis, as he always called it, when well into his seventies he could still wear out any grandchild by lobbing the ball from one side of the court to the other with slow, remorseless accuracy.

  Granny, on the other hand, was a bold and dashing driver. She had never taken a test, and had a fine contempt for traffic laws. Much later I remember the Humber Hawk which replaced the Packard swooping from one side of the river road to the other as if on a dance-floor as the strains of the Blue Danube Waltz crackled from the radio, and her map-reading was rudimentary. ‘The roads go like spaghetti in my head,’ she explained.

  Dull though most Chapel House food was, few cooks can really spoil roast chicken, and this was our regular Sunday treat. ‘White or brown?’ Grandfather would enquire as he distributed the meat – a question largely redundant nowadays since there is little difference in colour between leg and breast of chicken – but before mass-production, the farmyard roosters we ate had long brown muscular legs like footballers. We used to clamour to be allocated the wish-bone which, when picked clean, would be returned to the warming cupboard to dry and later two children would hook their little fingers into either side of it and ceremoniously pull until it snapped. The pieces were then compared and if yours was the longer you closed your eyes and wished.

  Though we all inhabited the same house, children and grown-ups led parallel lives, and very little of the drama and turmoil of war penetrated nursery consciousness. Even when Uncle Oliver, who had survived the fighting at Dunkirk, was killed in Greece, our parents’ and grandparents’ distress was carefully concealed from us.

  Peter Fleming had asked Oliver to join him, together with a few other adventurous spirits backed up by a handful of Grenadier guardsmen, on a mission of sabotage as the Germans advanced on Athens, capturing trains, blowing up bridges and in other ways harassing the enemy, which they did with a good deal of success and enjoyment, until they were eventually forced to flee, along with the Legation staff, which included Oliver’s sister Nancy and brother-in-law Harold Caccia, with their young son and daughter.

  Packing and leaving in a hurry, they sailed from the Piraeus for Crete, moving by night and hiding on islands by day. Most of the party were picnicking ashore on the small island of Polyaigos when German planes spotted their caique in the harbour and repeatedly dive-bombed it, killing Oliver, who was on guard aboard, while Nancy and her children watched in horror from the shelter of a cave.

  Losing their youngest son was a terrible blow to my grandparents, and for weeks the grown-ups must have talked of little else, but so insulated were we children that no word that I can remember reached the ears of the nursery party. As far as we were concerned, the tragedy simply meant that our cousins, David and Clarissa Caccia, appeared one day like magic and were absorbed into the household.

  They were exciting technicolor newcomers in the quiet Welsh valley, sun-tanned to a deep apricot, against which their large pale blue eyes stood out startlingly. Their fair hair was bleached almost white by the Aegean sun, and they had a fund of thrilling stories about a world of which we knew nothing.

  Though much the same age – David younger than Gerry but older than me, Clarissa younger – they were far better than us at running and jumping, and instead of a nanny they were attended by a tall sailor called David Yellowlees. Most exotic of all in my eyes, they had a smattering of demotic Greek. Soon they had me and Gerry counting to ten: ina, thea, tria, tesera… and singing anti-Government ditties learnt in faction-torn Greece:

  Zito, zito, cucoides!

  Zito, zito M and V!

  Dirty water, compo tea/

  Zito, zito, cucoides!

  ELAS at the windows

  Andartes on the wall,

  They’ve pinched our ammunition,

  We’re done for good and all!

  Our thoughtless chanting must have been horribly painful for Grandfather and Granny, but they never – as far as I remember – tried to stop us, nor raised more than the mildest protest as we put on the wind-up gramophone another favourite record with the refrain:

  Oh, what a surprise for the Duce, the Duce,

  He can’t put it over the Greeks.

  Oh, what a surprise for the Duce, the Duce,

  He’s had such a kick in the breeks!

  The last line seemed to us so uproariously funny that we would roll on the floor in hysterical laughter; and the moment it stopped would lift the arm back to play it over again, the triangular fibre needle grinding round relentlessly, until at long last it skidded across the grooves and ruined the track for good.

  With five children in the house, the nursery party split into the Big Ones – Gerry, David, and me – who did lessons every morning with the two governesses. Miss Cover for me and Gerry, Miss Oldershaw, aka ‘Oshie’, for David, and were occasionally allowed to lunch in the dining-room, and the Little Ones – Clarissa and Olivia. I remember very clearly the moment when I learned to read. Everything suddenly fell into place and I thought, So that’s how it works! Why didn’t anyone say so before?

  The Little Ones, meanwhile, remained in the charge of the current Nanny and the naughty, flighty, irrepressible nursery-maid, Florence. She was thin, freckled and star-struck, adored going to the flicks, as she called the cinema, sang, I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles… and It’s Foolish but it’s Fun and, with comb, water and kirbigrips, tried unavailingly to put waves in our straight, floppy hair.

  Florence was one of a large family and, aged fourteen, already had a boyfriend. He would call at the kitchen door on her day off and carry her away on his motorbike while we watched enviously from the nursery window. She paid no heed to the frequent scoldings she got from Cook and the governesses, but one evening when we were having our bath, her fecklessness went too far. Hearing the scrunch of wheels on gravel in the front drive, she scrambled on to the high tiled windowsill to see who had arrived, and the movement caught my grandfather’s eye a
s he got out of the car.

  He looked up and waved in a friendly way, whereupon Florence ducked out of sight so hastily that she toppled backwards into the bath on top of us, cracking her skull on the rim.

  ‘She’d a lump on her head the size of a turkey egg,’ Cook reported to Nanny with ghoulish relish. Whether she was subsequently sacked or gave notice I don’t know, but as far as we were concerned that was the end of her. As we grew older and took to riding bicycles and ponies, life seemed to be one long round of minor injuries. David was the most adventurous and accident-prone. He couldn’t see a tree without wanting to climb it, or a stream without falling into it, and his elbows and knees were always patched with grubby Elastoplast.

  ‘The falling was all right, it was the landing that hurt,’ he would say stoically when someone sympathised with his latest crash. He was a one-off – a true original – and from an early age an outstanding mimic and raconteur in the Peter Ustinov tradition, doing all the accents and noises with tremendous brio. He also had the useful knack of making the grown-ups laugh, thereby deflecting criticism or punishment. With fascinated dread, my mother once watched him, at the age of five, plodding round Chapel House in his gumboots with a stone in his hand, squaring up to each window in turn and drawing back his arm as if about to hurl his missile, then lowering it and moving on to the next tempting target.

  ‘Why were you doing that?’ she asked when she managed to collar him, and he said he wanted to know what it would sound like.

  I found him wholly captivating, and the my first-ever reversal in love came when we were splashing through puddles on the valley road, with Nanny Price pushing Olivia’s pram fifty yards behind, on an afternoon when it was too wet to play in the garden. I asked him to marry me and to my consternation and distress he refused, explaining that later on I would meet someone I liked better than him and (this was the bit that really hurt) he would find someone he liked more than me. I remember the horrible hollow feeling of jealousy in the pit of my stomach, but I didn’t believe him and continued my secret hopes.

  Like most girls at that time, I yearned to be a boy. Not only were Gerry and David older than me, but they seemed to have all the fun, and one would have had to be blind not to notice that they were Granny’s favourites. It rankled that when Grandfather brought home two golden sovereigns, they were presented to the boys, mounted on cards inscribed: Granny’s wish is quickly told, Be like St George, be good as gold, while Clarissa, Olivia and I got nothing.

  Even in the matter of clothes, the boys got preferential treatment. We were not a dressy family and most of the time both sexes wore identical blue Aertex shirts and grey shorts with plimsolls in summer. But come wintertime the boys were kitted out in splendid shiny black boots with little yellow tags at the back, while I had to wear boring lace-ups. On one occasion, I kicked up such a fuss in the shoe-shop in Builth that, much to the disapproval of the proprietor, Mr Eadie, Mummy bought me boots, too, and I wore them proudly though I found them stiff, heavy, uncomfortable, and inclined to rub my heels, just as Mr Eadie had predicted.

  Below the house a broad terrace of flagstones – deadly slippery when wet – stretched the length of its facade. A flight of steps led down past two more grass terraces separated by a flowerbed, the whole forming the obstacle known to us as the Whee-air jump. ‘Doing the Whee-air’ was a rite of passage which we all undertook with varying degrees of dread. You had to screw your courage to the sticking-point and leap boldly out from the upper grass terrace, over the roses, and land with a tooth-rattling thump on the grass at the bottom, and any child who started the run and then ‘refused’ at the last moment suffered irretrievable loss of face, no matter how convincing his or her excuses.

  Sipping their drinks in wooden garden armchairs on the sunny terrace, the grown-ups used to encourage us to hurl ourselves over the drop in a way that might surprise parents nowadays. I suppose they thought it was a good way for children to let off steam. Though I never really enjoyed the nervous anticipation of launching off or the shock of landing, I did love the resulting murmurs of approval and, except on the occasion when David rode his bicycle over the Whee-air, none of us ever suffered more than bumps and bruises.

  These in themselves were a bonus if the damage was deemed worthy of a smear of the delicious-smelling cure-all we called ‘Bermarderveen’, whose faint scent emanated from the wall-mounted medicine cupboard outside Granny’s bedroom. I guess it was arnica compounded with wintergreen and other healing herbs: a thick yellow grease which turned transparent as one rubbed it into the skin and brought instant relief.

  Later I discovered that this magical embrocation was the famous ‘Pomade Divine,’ expensive and difficult to obtain in those days, and therefore used very sparingly. You needed to suffer more than a common or garden grazed knee before you were taken upstairs to sit on the oak chest outside the linen cupboard, and the stopper was pulled from the greasy little container, which was shaped like a flat-bottomed bulb.

  Before it was applied, though, there was the grisly business of picking dirt and grit from the wound, during which moans and squeaks were given short shrift. ‘Worse things have happened at sea,’ was a recurring phrase, and even the most spectacular falls from the dour little solid-tyred Fairy Cycle on which we were taught before graduating to a proper bicycle were casually dismissed as ‘a bit of a smeller.’

  The grown-ups were always trying to toughen us up physically, no doubt feeling that if the country was invaded and we were forced to take to the hills, we ought to be prepared for hardship, but neither Gerry nor I was naturally hardy. As soon as we could read we preferred curling in an armchair with a book to building dens in the garden, and I think this was a disappointment to our mother, who had so passionately longed to be Tarzan of the Apes in her own childhood.

  ‘Run like a village child, not a governess!’ she would shout as we trotted about with our knees knocking together, and she made great efforts to improve our action with built-up insteps and, in the case of my sister Olivia, fearsome medieval-looking leg-irons which were supposed to straighten bandy legs.

  During the governesses’ reign, however, we saw little of either my mother or Aunt Nancy until six o’clock, when we would be brushed and scrubbed and buttoned into tidy clothes in order to spend a civilising hour in the drawing-room before bedtime.

  Feeling constrained and chilly in white socks, ballet pumps, and either a white silk dress smocked in red (my favourite) or a much-hated organdie number that prickled under the arms, we would be lined up on the stairs, told to behave, and then propelled through the opened door into the long low room set about with sofas and armchairs, a grand piano, two big black-and-gold Chinese cupboards adorned with golden dragons and brass locks that Granny had brought back from Pekin in 1936, glass-topped tables full of precious oddities and, on the far mantelpiece, a row of figurines of Chinese musicians which were supposed to have come from a princess’s tomb.

  You had to move with care in the drawing-room, because there were so many things to trip or knock over. The grown-ups would have finished their tea from the double-decked trolley, but there might well be delicate sandwiches or a rather dry cake left over beside the slop bowl and silver teapot. Granny would be sitting on the sofa beside the fire, carefully adding milk and sugar to a saucer of weak tea for each of the Siamese cats, Proust and Pooh-Hi, who sprawled elegantly on blue silk cushions with gold fringes, their long chocolate-gloved paws stretched out before them.

  Proust was the elder, and actually belonged to my father, but sharing his life with my mother’s dogs, Chinky the stroppy wire-haired terrier and Brioni, aka ‘Boney,’ the Dalmatian, would not have suited him, and when Daddy married, Proust preferred to continue his luxurious existence at Chapel House throughout the war years. By the time I remember him, he must have been ten or eleven, dark for a Siamese, and with a placid careworn expression. Solid of figure and stately of pace, he was perfectly prepared to let children lie close beside him while they tried to imita
te his deep rumbling purr. We thought that was why he was called Prrroust, and were later surprised to discover his name’s true origin.

  His companion, Pooh-Hi, was very different – lighter in colour, frame, and temperament, quick-moving and unlikely to let children near enough to stroke him. He would leap to the back of the sofa if you so much as stretched out a yearning hand, and glower at you with blazing blue eyes, daring you to come closer. All his love was reserved for Granny. A true one-woman cat, he dogged Granny’s footsteps about the house and garden, and chatted to her in his plaintive Oriental yowl. He was even allowed to curl up at the foot of her bed.

  He, too, was wary of Mummy’s dogs. She had trained Chinky to shut a door by flinging his solid little body at it in the hope of dislodging a sugar lump balanced on the handle. It was not a very labour-saving trick, since you had to get up in order to position the sugar lump before ordering Chinky to perform, but he loved doing it and both Granny and the Siamese cats used to flinch at the resulting bang. At Chapel House, their expressions said, doors should be closed soundlessly.

  Boney the Dalmatian was tall and handsome and supposed to be utterly brainless, but when we lived in London his wits were sharp enough to recognise the butcher’s boy’s whistling as he hurried down the street with his big wicker basket, delivering meat. The boy would ring each bell and place the order on the windowsill, but before the householder came to the door, Boney would make a lightning raid and be away round the corner with the chops or sausages in his jaws. He had an even more uncultured predilection for lifting his leg on any upright, sentient or non-sentient, that he passed – once, to Mummy’s consternation, on the line of waitresses holding trays just inside Lyons Corner Shop. Horrified, but nearly helpless with laughter, she described the way each black-stockinged leg lashed out in fury as Boney anointed it, while she hurried on pretending he was nothing to do with her.