My Animals (and Other Family)

by Phyllida Barstow

  ‘Don’t tell Granny. She’s got enough to worry about,’ she said as we rode home; but of course by degrees the story came out. After constant re-telling it became enshrined in family lore as a rather jolly adventure, but I remember the whole episode was very frightening.

  Muffled echoes of the war reached the nursery from time to time. I don’t think there was any deliberate policy of keeping children in the dark; merely the general assumption that we wouldn’t be able to understand why people in uniform kept coming and going, or where Daddy was fighting, so there was no point in trying to explain. The words ‘Sidi Barani,’ ‘Monty,’ and ‘Alamein’ gradually penetrated our consciousness, however, and one Sunday there was extra praying in church, and we were told Daddy had helped win an important victory and had been made a Colonel.

  With St Mauritius’ Church actually inside the perimeter of the garden, there was no escaping its fortnightly services, (‘Singing communia – hell of a row,’ remarked Olivia, aged 3, when asked where Granny was) but along with the inevitable boredom of sitting still and quiet, there were compensations. Not only were the boys allowed to ring the bell and take round the little red felt collection bags, but we were all encouraged to invade the tiny vestry and count the proceeds, heaping coins – there were never notes – into little stacks and checking and re-checking one another’s totals before the Rector filled in the Church Attendance ledger.

  We sat on the narrow polished benches of the high-sided ‘loose-box’ at the back of the church, hidden from the rest of the congregation, and free to play cards or jacks or read whatever we had managed to smuggle into the pew. From time to time one of us would stand on the seat to see how things were going, or a burst of giggling would bring a parent or nanny to haul out the offender and make him or her sit in an ordinary pew under supervision.

  There was much that puzzled me about Church, but questions were not encouraged. Why, for instance, was Jesus always in such jolly spirits – ‘Merrily, merrily I say unto you’ – when his subject matter was plainly serious in nature? Why should an unfortunate lamb be killed so that its blood would wash away your sins? It sounded very much like putting the blame on someone else, and everyone knew that blood stained: you couldn’t wash with it. Why should anyone but a cannibal want to eat His flesh and drink His blood? I thought – and still do – the whole idea bizarre and revolting, and was thankful that children were not obliged to go up to the altar rail. Those sinister little discs looked all too like dried skin, and if I’d had to eat one I would have been sick on the spot.

  But I enjoyed the hymns, however silly the words, especially when I was allowed to turn the pages for Granny at the wheezing, temperamental harmonium. She and Miss Jones Alltmawr played the voluntary and hymns at alternate services, their faces rapt and feet pedalling furiously. So anxious was I not to miss the quick nod indicating the turn that I often muffed it and flicked over the page several bars too early. It was nervous work.

  Grandfather read the Old Testament lesson, taking off the spectacles which seemed a part of his face in order to focus on the small black print. His enormous memory encompassed whole books of Paradise Lost, and all Shakespeare’s Sonnets, but he also had a taste for doggerel, and was apt to indulge it to commemorate family events – hence that heroic ballad How Grandma Lost Her Knickers When She Went To See The King, (set to the tune of The Wearing of the Green) and My Wife’s a Cushion-Plumper, A Picker-Up and Thumper, and he composed verses of a vaguely Biblical nature to amuse us thus: Joshua the son of Nun/And Caleb the son of Gefunneh/Were the only two/Who ever got through/To the Land of Milk and Honey.

  Being a Yorkshireman, he made a point of retaining the short ‘a’, so:

  Goliath of Gath

  Stood in the path

  When poor little David came by.

  He took out his sling

  And gave it a fling

  And hit the old fool in the eye.

  One Sunday he abandoned Scripture, and his verse had a triumphant ring:

  All you people, do you know?

  Daddy’s won the DSO.

  First he crossed the ocean wave,

  Then he was extremely brave,

  And with all his shells and guns

  Pounded those disgusting Huns!

  The citation put it rather differently, but the substance was the same. As the Allies battled their way up the spine of Italy towards the narrow pinchpoint of Monte Cassino, where the Germans had taken over the monastery and sited their guns to command the approaches, Daddy had crouched for days in a dangerous forward position, directing the fire of the Royal Horse Artillery guns where its could do most damage. After a prolonged struggle, the monastery was flattened and the German guns silenced, and Daddy’s bravery recognised with the award of the Distinguished Service Order.

  Not long afterwards, when the identical twins Adam and David Block won identical awards, Mummy’s congratulations were in the same vein:

  All you people, run and flock,

  Here we have the brothers Block

  In battle they have won their fame,

  And added glory to their name.

  When to Buck Palace they both go

  To fetch their well-won DSO,

  The King will have a bit of trouble,

  Think that he is seeing double.

  Say, as he scratches royal pate,

  ‘Do I do this in duplicate?’

  ‘Nay, Sire,’ they’ll say, ‘Survive the shock,

  For here we have the brothers Block,

  Alike in size and shape and girth,

  Two of the finest chaps on earth!’

  Despite her energy and ready wit, Mummy believed in keeping children on a tight rein. She liked them to be a) busy, and b) useful, and the last lines of Once in Royal David’s City – ‘When like stars, thy children crowned/All in white shall wait around,’ used to provoke a derisive snort.

  ‘Not if I’m there, they won’t!’ she would mutter.

  We were kept in our place quite strictly, and disrespectful remarks were slapped down with a crushing, ‘Don’t be pert’. We were not allowed to question her decisions, and explanations were kept to a minimum.

  Aunt Nancy could be just as fierce.

  ‘You know, Mummy,’ David once began helpfully, ‘women like you and Granny with short thick necks should always…’

  ‘Stop right there,’ ordered his mother. ‘I see no future in that sentence.’ And so we never heard what women with short thick necks should always do.

  Real naughtiness – scribbling on walls with lipstick, telling lies, peeing in the sandpit – brought a spanking with the back of Mummy’s Mason Pearson hairbrush, which stung even through the overworked pair of Austrian lederhosen passed around between us. Worse than the discomfort – one could hardly call it pain – was the gruesome anticipation as one waited in one’s bedroom for the footsteps of the avenging angel, hearing sobs and howls from other rooms as justice was dispensed.

  Actually retribution was often far from just. Gerry was spanked along with the rest of us for the sandpit episode, although he was completely blameless and, indeed, had warned us not to do it. But having decided that some crime merited a spanking, I think Mummy just gritted her teeth and punished guilty and innocent alike, rather as Dr Keate, the Flogging Headmaster of Eton, beat the entire confirmation class he found gathered outside his door under the misapprehension that they were defaulters.

  Punishment – or escaping it – was largely a matter of luck. One summer evening after a long drive the Caccias and I raced down to the river, leaving Gerry to help Mummy unpack the car. There, tied to its mooring alongside a croy projecting into the smooth dark water of the Boat Pool, was Uncle Trevor’s fishing-boat, newly painted a beautiful green.

  We climbed into it and pretended we were shipwrecked sailors for a time. Then we got out the oars and pretended to row, and presently David untied the tow-rope and said, ‘Let’s go across to the other side and explore.’

  It seemed a marve
llous idea. He pushed off and gave me one oar while he took the other, and Clarissa sat in the middle, but rowing was much more difficult than we expected. We couldn’t make the boat go straight.

  ‘Come back!’ shouted Gerry, who had been sent to fetch us for supper, but already the boat was out of control, sweeping downstream at a frightening speed, David and I were struggling to turn it, and Clarissa was screaming.

  ‘We’re going to drown! These are our last moments!’

  Brutally I whacked her on the head with my oar and she flattened herself in the bottom of the boat. We had left the relative calm of the Boat Pool and were going sideways down a wide strong run known as the Woodstream, unable to point the bows across the current. Not far ahead we could see broken water with rocks sticking out.

  We flailed away with the oars, desperately trying to get beyond the full force of the current, sometimes catching a crab and sprawling backwards, sometimes dipping so deep that the oar wouldn’t move at all. David stood up and tried to pole like a gondolier, but the water was too deep and he nearly went overboard. We were pretty well exhausted and in despair when the boat suddenly slid into smooth water, grounding on gravel just a few yards from the Radnorshire bank.

  On the Breconshire side, Gerry had run downstream to keep level with us. He yelled through cupped hands, ‘Pull – it – back – up,’ and though we couldn’t actually hear the words, gestures got his point across. Somehow or other we were going to have to cross again, and if we started from the place where we had grounded, and the same thing happened, we would certainly be swept into those jagged rocks.

  With all three of us heaving at the mooring rope, we managed to wade and drag the boat upstream until we were opposite the croy where we had embarked on this foolish voyage, and with hearts in mouths we began the return trip.

  I don’t remember this as being nearly so frightening or difficult. Perhaps the swirl of the current was more favourable, because although I was now so tired I could hardly row with my oar, it seemed only a few minutes before Gerry, up to his waist in water, had seized the gunwale and was hauling us into the bank.

  ‘You idiots,’ he said. ‘Look how you’ve scraped the paint. Uncle Trevor will be furious.’

  Chastened and soaked, we staggered up to Chapel House, hoping to get inside unnoticed, but our mothers were enjoying a drink in the loggia and spotted us at once. ‘What’s happened?’ they shrieked in unison, and there was nothing for it but to confess. Then the lottery element of punishment kicked in.

  Gerry and I were scolded, spanked, and sent to bed without supper. David and Clarissa were scolded, spanked and sent to apologise to Uncle Trevor. He was a daunting figure and set in his ways – the quintessential cavalry colonel, tall, thin, upright, moustached, a Master of Foxhounds and lifelong bachelor who was never at ease with children at the best of times, and when he understood that his boat had been taken without permission – and damaged – he was indeed furious.

  ‘He swore – horribly!’ reported Clarissa, saucer-eyed and shaken.

  But when Gerry and I were sent to Abernant after breakfast next morning to apologise, Uncle Trevor had completely recovered his temper. He offered us toast and marmalade and hardly mentioned the boat at all. It just went to show the truth of one of Mummy’s favourite sayings: ‘Life’s not fair, and nobody ever said it was going to be.’

  It never occurred to me that she might dislike spanking us as much as we disliked being on the receiving end. There was a great gulf between grown-ups and children at that time, and we found it difficult to believe that our elders had feelings.

  We were seldom warned and certainly not invited to contribute our opinion on future plans, however closely they concerned us. One evening when we were fetched from the drawing-room, instead of being put to bed, Gerry and I were surprised to be bundled into a car and driven for several hours to a hospital in Cardiff. I remember holding my breath as long as I could when the little pink mask, like an inverted cup, was placed over my mouth and nose, and the noxious smell of ether when at last I was forced to inhale.

  I woke up with a cracking sore throat, having had my adenoids removed, but details of Gerry’s operation were concealed from me, though clearly it hadn’t been the same as mine because his throat was fine. For two days I lay in bed, eating ice-cream, and then – whoosh, swoop – without a word of warning we were whisked back to Chapel House.

  I don’t suppose we moved much more often than other families with fighting fathers, but it seemed to me that no sooner were we settled in one place than something would happen to uproot us again. More adventurous children would probably have enjoyed the excitement of new surroundings, but I was a conservative child who disliked change. Particularly I hated packing and unpacking, sudden orders to look for things I didn’t know where to find, the grime, cold, haste and tension of forcing possessions into boxes and overflowing suitcases and cramming these into overloaded cars, the endless waiting for grown-ups to be ready, so often followed by dashes back to the house to fetch things that had been left behind. I was, besides, miserably car-sick.

  So when one day Mummy announced that we were going away to live in Hertfordshire, I immediately began to argue.

  ‘We can’t! What about the ponies?’

  ‘We’ll take them with us.’ She tried to cheer me up. ‘We’re all going. The Caccias as well.’

  I wailed, ‘I don’t want to leave Chapel House.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. We’ll come back for holidays, but we need to be near London so Daddy doesn’t waste all his leave travelling.’

  Deep down I think I had always known that our life at Chapel House was too good to last, but I sensed she was in a mood for concessions. ‘Can I keep rabbits at the new house? Angora rabbits?’ I had seen the white powder-puff babies at the North Breconshire Show and fallen deeply in love with them.

  She hesitated for a long agonising moment, no doubt weighing up the considerable nuisance of adding captive rodents to her roll of dependants against the benefit of getting me on-side, and eventually nodded. ‘All right. But you’ll have to groom them and muck them out yourself.’

  ‘Oh, I will, I will!’

  The following week she got in touch with the rabbit breeder, and before we packed up to leave Chapel House for life at Much Hadham, Herts, two beautiful pure white does with red eyes and pink insides to their ears joined the household. They were full sisters, and I called them Snow White and Rose Red.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Much Hadham

  RABBITS DOMINATED my thoughts for the next three years. They were charming pets and the more I had of them, the more I loved them. At one stage pretty well the entire lower lawn at Gaytons, the long rambling house fronting on Much Hadham’s main street which Mummy and Aunt Nancy had rented, was covered by rather wonky wood and chicken-wire runs in which my young stock, who had been weaned and were advertised for sale, spent their youth. They did a better job on the grass than the push-mower, but little for the look of the garden.

  My foundation does, Snowy and Rosy, had been well handled as babies and were very tame. You could let them run free in the walled garden and catch them again with ease, and unlike most animals, they actually seemed to like being cuddled. There is nothing so soft and luxurious for a child to bury her nose in as the thick silky fur of an Angora rabbit, and this amazing fluffy fleece kept growing, even when they were shorn twice a year.

  The shearing was quite a performance, requiring time, patience and nerve – all heroically supplied by Mummy, armed with dressmaking scissors, while I held the rabbit as still as possible on the kitchen table. Angoras have rather loose, curiously yellow skin, which makes them unsuitable for culinary purposes – or so the Breed Society advice booklet informed us, and even in the hungriest days of the war none of us would have dreamed of popping them in the pot. However, the loose wrinkles were all too easy for the amateur barber to nick with her shears, thereby ruining the snowy fur from which I derived most of my pocket-money.

&nb
sp; In those days you could get ten shillings an ounce for white Angora wool, though it always astonished me what an enormous mound of the airy fluff had to be heaped into the scales to achieve that tiny weight. The company which bought all we could supply probably weighed it at their end, too, but they paid up faithfully, never less than the sum I billed them for.

  Not having proper clippers, Mummy’s attentions left the shorn rabbits’ coats covered in ridges and they looked very odd for a few weeks until the fur began to grow again. Rosy, however, never endured this indignity because by some fluke we had chosen from the breeder’s large litter a show champion.

  To my eye, she was almost indistinguishable from her sister, but when I took them to a Breed Society show in the nearby town of Bishop’s Stortford, Rosy came home with six first prizes and a cup, while poor Snow White won precisely nothing. One of the judges told us that shearing would spoil her looks, so to the end of her life she remained as nature intended, a gigantic powderpuff who had only to appear on a show bench for honours to be showered on her.

  The drawback was that this made her a high-maintenance female, who needed daily grooming and ultra-clean living conditions. Feeling through her coat for mats was something I could do in my sleep; as soon as your fingers encountered the smallest seed or blade of grass that could form the basis of a clump, you had to tease it out very gently, gradually easing it away from the skin until at last it was loose enough to pull free without tweaking. Snowy, in contrast, was the ultimate in easy-care – two strokes of the brush and she was perfectly soignée.

  For about a year, the two sisters lived a peaceful celibate existence in a big hutch just outside the stables, but things changed dramatically with the coming of Snowball. I can’t remember if I nagged Mummy into buying him, or if she got him off her own bat, being now quite as keen on the rabbits as I was. Anyway, we let him into the outer compartment of the does’ hutch, and almost immediately had to take him out smartish as they erupted from their sleeping-quarters in fury at the invasion, scratching and kicking until their precious fur began to fly