My Animals (and Other Family)

by Phyllida Barstow

  A tactical rethink suggested introducing them on neutral territory, one at a time, and this was more successful. I felt sorry for Rosy, left alone in the big hutch while her sister cavorted with the young buck, jumping over one another, boxing and nuzzling playfully, but when we felt sure they weren’t going to damage one another we left them alone for a few days, and later repeated the exercise with Rosy. The result was two cracking litters, and soon an urgent need for extra housing.

  The temptation to peek inside the sleeping-quarters at the newborn rabbits was overwhelming but had to be resisted, because if the doe caught you at it, she was liable to eat her naked helpless offspring. In any case, the deep nest of fluff in which she cradled them hid all but a tiny movement of the top layer to confirm that the babies were there. It always seemed an age – but must have been about ten days – before they opened their vivid pink eyes and ventured out into the open section of the hutch. Then there was the excitement of counting them, handling them to make them tame, and determining their gender – not easy, and one always hoped for a preponderance of females, for which there was more demand.

  Snowball was a prolific progenitor, smaller and faster-moving than the laid-back does. He was also quite aggressive, kicking and scratching when transferred from one pen to another, so my arms and legs were usually decorated with long parallel lines of half-healed scabs.

  I wasn’t altogether sorry when he was killed by a visiting terrier which broke into one of the wonky pens, but by the time that happened we were almost snowed under with rabbits, despite selling as many as we could bear to part with. It was like that poem by W.B. Yeats about seagulls in a storm:

  First there were two of us, then there were three of us, then there was one bird more,

  Four of us wild white seagulls, treading the ocean floor,

  And the wind rose and the sea rose and the angry billow’s roar,

  With four of us, eight of us, ten of us, twelve of us seagulls on the shore.

  He goes on about: ‘A wild white welter of winnowing wings…’ which in our case was more like a wild white carpet of fluffety fur, but when Mummy eventually called a halt to the breeding programme because I was going away to weekly-board, we had twenty-seven rabbits to feed, muck out, and house according to age and sex, and the sense of overcrowding had become acute.

  Great armfuls of greenstuff had to be gathered for this horde, from the lane that led to the allotments in summer, where you could be sure of finding cow parsley and hogweed, dandelions and hazel wands, all of which were rabbit favourites. In winter we scrounged leftovers from several different greengrocers – cabbage and sprouts, carrots and parsnips. It was before the days of pelleted feedstuffs, but I remember we also gave them oats and flaked maize, on which they did very well, but providing for them all and keeping the cages clean took a lot of time.

  Just once I remember Mummy finding the water-bottles empty, and giving me a tremendous talking-to. ‘If you take away an animal’s freedom and put it in a cage so it can’t fend for itself, you are the only person it has to depend on, and unless you care for it properly it will die and it will be all your fault!’

  What with the sales of young stock and angora wool, rabbit-breeding was quite a lucrative little business, but although the money was nice, better still was the sense of shared endeavour with the person I most wanted to please. Like most middle children, I schemed and dreamed of having my mother all to myself, and since none of the others was much interested in rabbits, I could always secure her attention with news of the latest litter or behavioural problem. It marked a great change in our relationship. In this area, at least, we were colleagues – even conspirators – building pens, planning matings, chosing which rabbits to show and which to sell, and debating anxiously which of our friends could be trusted to look after them properly. On one embarrassing occasion, I charged a form-mate’s mother ten shillings for a young doe, only for her to shriek with disgust when she spotted fleas in its ears.

  The move to Much Hadham brought the war much closer. The village was only about thirty miles from London, so misdirected bombs and doodlebugs sometimes ended up nearby, and all the rules and regulations which various Ministries kept spewing forth were applied much more strictly there than in Wales.

  Rationing, for example. At Chapel House the big vegetable garden and adjacent farm provided plenty to supplement official quantities of eggs, butter, bacon and so on, but at Much Hadham our ration-books with their funny little grids and different coloured pages suddenly assumed great importance.

  Actually there was only one page, an orange one towards the back, in which we children took an interest, and that was because it contained the ‘points’ we needed to buy sweets. Mummy would tear out these pages and send us off to the Post Office to choose our week’s ration, a long-drawn-out process fraught with argument. Should one splurge the whole week’s allowance on two Mars bars, which was all you would get for your week’s points, or four tubes of Rowntree’s Clear Gums, or simply masses of Smarties? Or go for a mixed bag which might include striped humbugs from a tall glass jar, lemon sherbets which fizzed excitingly in the middle, and boring boiled sweets? Was a Venus bar (white in the middle) slightly more delicious than a Mars? Chocolate was so heavy on points that a plain bar of it wasn’t worth considering, and it contained so little cocoa that it tasted very nasty.

  Mr Groom the postmaster would wait patiently while we changed our minds forward and back, and eventually weigh out our choices in little white paper bags, twisted at the corners, and we would dawdle home with bulging cheeks.

  The rest of the household’s ration books were kept centrally, and I remember long debates between Mummy and Nan, the Scotch cook, when supplies ran low, because by then there were a lot of us to feed. Besides Aunt Nancy with two children and Mummy with three, there was Nan with her legitimate son, plus a baby she had unwisely borne to her husband’s best friend, the dashing moustached Hector Macfarlane, and wanted to get adopted before her husband came on leave. Then there was Nan’s unmarried sister, who acted as a sort of unofficial kitchenmaid, and was later replaced by Lily, a big-boned, simple-minded girl who had been rejected for war work because of an uncontrollable twitch that affected her left arm. This defect made her less than ideal as a parlourmaid, and as the breakages mounted exponentially, Aunt Nancy decreed that keeping her was too expensive and she must go.

  Soon we were joined by Mummy’s French sister-in-law Marianne, with her two baby sons, and Aunt Nancy’s friend Ann, a fragile-looking divorcee with large soulful eyes and a yearning expression. She, too, was accompanied by her sons Peregrine and Hugo, but before long her gentle charm attracted a rich, wisecracking bachelor friend of the Caccias, who fascinated us children by eating – or pretending to eat – spiders, and they left us to get married.

  Finally – and most importantly – there was Grandfather, who took the train to work in London every day, and for whose benefit Nancy had taken the house in the first place. She hoped it would be more peaceful for him than living in London during the Blitz, but sharing a house with this shifting mass of women and children must have been anything but tranquil, even though all of them weren’t there all the time. People came and went; as work and war dictated. There were camp beds in odd corners and unexpected faces at meals.

  One advantage of having so many children on the strength was the special vitamin-rich foods devised by the MOF to stop us getting rickets. Very small blue-labelled tins contained a blackcurrant puree so strong and sweet that it brought out beads of sweat on your forehead. Rosehip syrup had a gloopy delicacy that seemed half-taste, half-smell, and the creamy gruel known as Midlothian Oat Food made a pudding fit for the gods.

  We all shared two or three to a room, and privacy was not something you could count on. It was, for instance, often difficult to find a lavatory unoccupied, and when I felt desperate to indulge an addiction I never dared admit to Mummy, I had to hang about for ages at the top of the stairs where I could keep an eye on th
e shelf known as ‘Exchange and Mart’ because everyone dumped things on it, and the built-in cupboard above it. This was where bottles of vinegar were kept, along with tins and boxes of emergency stores.

  I would listen carefully until I knew the coast was clear, then make a dash to climb onto Exchange and Mart and jerk open the cupboard door. Kneeling uncomfortably, I would uncap the vinegar bottle and take an enormous swig, which turned the world black for a moment, and then gave me a tremendous high as the blood seemed to rush through my veins and my head spun vertigiously. I don’t know if Mummy or Nan ever wondered why the vinegar kept disappearing, but from time to time a new bottle would be added, and since I was never accused of stealing from the store cupboard, I suppose they never noticed the loss.

  Although housekeeping in such circumstances must have been quite a challenge, even preoccupied as I was with rabbits and ponies and school, I sensed that Mummy was happier than she had been at Chapel House.

  Certainly she was much less strict with us. Anyone who has watched a bitch with an unruly litter punish a puppy for unacceptable behaviour by growling and shaking it and pinning it down until it rolls over in jellified subservience will have been tempted to say, ‘Oh, the poor little thing! How can she be so cruel?’ But they will also have noticed that the puppy doesn’t repeat the offence. In the same way, Mummy – who had a great respect for the maternal skills of animals – may have instilled the basics of civility into her brood with a certain ferocity, but once it was well established where the boundaries were, she could afford a degree of latitude.

  Another reason may have been that, despite the daily struggle to keep us all fed and clean and happy, (and constant worry about what was happening to Daddy), at least at Much Hadham she was in command of the household. However much she loved and admired her parents-in-law, it must have been a strain to live in their house and make her children conform to their standards for so long, especially since during Granny and Grandfather’s Victorian upbringing children were supposed to be seen but not heard. Grandfather had been only half joking when he threatened to disinherit the lot of us if he heard another shout of, ‘Finished! Come and wipe me!’

  Nominally, of course, it was a shared command at Gaytons. Renting the house had been Aunt Nancy’s initiative, but she was out all day, working as a Progress Chaser in a factory near Finchley that made bomb sights. There her diplomatic skills ensured she got the best from the tired girls on the production line, and also helped her frustrate attempts by communist agitators to go slow, undermining the war effort, but it meant that Mummy had to look after five children rather than three, as well as running the household.

  She was stoical about this burden of work and worry, and only once do I remember seeing the brave mask slip. It was a summer morning in 1944 when I burst into her bedroom to wish her a Happy Birthday, and thrust into her hands a badly drawn card with the brutal message, Now You Are Thirty!

  For a moment she stared at it, still half asleep, and then her face seemed to crumple. ‘Thank you, darling. It – it’s lovely,’ she said shakily and, to my consternation, burst into tears.

  Puzzled and dismayed, I backed out of the room, dimly aware that the card was not a success. Poor Mummy! The war – the bloody war – had swallowed five precious years of her youth. Her twenties, and all the fun that should have gone with them, were vanished for ever and now she was thirty. Just for that moment, it was more than she could bear.

  Gerry, David and I had outgrown governesses, and were sent to The Barn School, at the other end of the village. On the way we had to pass the village school, where the boys inside the railed playground would shout insults at us and we at them, while surreptitiously increasing our pace in order to get out of earshot as quickly as possible.

  Most of the little toffs in the neighbourhood went to The Barn, which consisted of a single-storey Gothic-looking building with knapped flint walls, where the smallest children struggled to make shopping-bags out of raffia and milk-bottle tops, and alongside it a long low wooden hut with a bare plank floor, where the rest of us worked at proper desks. It was divided into two classrooms by a flowery curtain on a rail, through which you could all too easily be distracted by whatever was going on the other side.

  Not that short, dark, dynamic Mrs Clukas or wispy-haired, steely-eyed Miss Cookson (who owned the school) allowed our thoughts to wander for long. Even David’s diversionary tactics cut little ice with them, beyond, ‘Yes, dear. Very amusing, but now perhaps you’ll finish your work…’ and when a particularly naughty little boy called David Moller was rumoured to have actually sworn at ‘Cookie’ and kicked her on the shins, a frisson of horror ran through the school. No-one was surprised when he vanished, never to be seen again.

  Boys aged seven were only at The Barn on sufferance in any case, and the moment they passed their eighth birthdays were booted out into the harsh male world of boarding-school. Gerry went away to Horris Hill, near Newbury, and David to Summerfields, Oxford, their trunks stuffed with stiff new clothes and tuck-boxes, while the left-behind girls drew closer, and work with Cluky and Cookie became more geared to female tastes.

  Mrs Bentley, our Drama teacher, used to put on surprisingly ambitious plays, bold chunks carved out of Shakespeare which she tailored to fit our acting capacity. I remember particularly the drinking scene and teasing of Malvolio from Twelfth Night, in which I was cast as Feste, the Fool, and sang, O Mistress Mine, in a breathy, feeble pipe which could have been audible only to the first row of the audience.

  A more successful effort was Pyramus and Thisbe, the play-within-a-play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where we in the cast were deeply puzzled at the way our audience was reduced to hysterical giggles by our wrestles with Shakespeare’s jokes, which we hardly understood. However, the production that shattered my ambitions for an acting career and severely dented my self-esteem was a musical version of The Sleeping Beauty.

  All the girls, naturally, wanted the part of the Beauty and after a series of highly competitive auditions, it was alloted to me. ‘Briar Rose Bud was a pretty child, a pretty child, a pretty child,’ ran the opening line, and alone in the bathroom I practised expressions of swooning prettiness in front of the mirror. Full of wicked pride, I turned up at the first rehearsal with lines already word-perfect, only to be brusquely informed that I had been supplanted. Jocked off. A curly-haired, blue-eyed blonde of chocolate-box loveliness called Victoria was to play Briar Rose Bud, and I was relegated to the role of the ‘Ugly Fay’.

  Talk of adding insult to injury. In vain Mummy argued that any fool could play the Sleeping Beauty, and the Witch was a far more interesting character. I refused to be comforted, and my acting career withered before it had even bloomed.

  More animals were joining the household, though none were as specifically mine as the Angora rabbits. Olivia’s special pet was a magnificent fudge-coloured cat with white paws, called Mittens. He would sprawl on her bed like a pasha, eyes slitted, reaching out a velvety pad at times to touch her face. He killed baby wild rabbits and brought them into the porch to devour them, but was clearly perplexed by the Angoras because they didn’t give a damn when he went into stalking mode. When they were loose on the lawn you’d see him moving stealthily towards them, and lying prone with lashing tail, prepared to pounce, only for his prey to hop right up to him and shove him casually in the ribs. The buck, Snowball, went so far as to deliver a flurry of boxing blows at poor Mittens, which must have been a dreadful humiliation.

  More of a threat to my rabbits were the miniature Sealyham terriers, Beret and Betsy, which Mummy was given by an admirer. As a gift, it turned out a bit of a poisoned chalice, since Betsy had eczema and Beret suffered from fits. These were frightening, because he would howl and yelp and dash round and round the kitchen table, under chairs, under the bed, trying desperately to find somewhere dark. The best thing seemed to be to throw a blanket right over him, and by degrees the twitching and trembling would die down and he would go into a sort of catalept
ic trance.

  Bright light, even sunlight, could trigger a fit, and so could white bread, which in the absence of proper dog biscuit Mummy used as a ‘filler’ to eke out his tins of Chappie. He was short-tempered, too, and apt to snap at children. All in all, Beret was rather a nightmare, but Betsy – gentler and more obedient – so appealed to Granny (whose adored Pooh-Hi had recently died) that Mummy thankfully handed her over to a life of calm luxury at Chapel House.

  Petrol was scarce – the ration had to be hoarded for essential journeys – but now Dustyfoot, the redoubtable piebald Shetland, entered our lives. She was smaller than either Micky or Sally, with a short thick neck, short thick legs, and a disproportionately large head, all of which made her very uncomfortable to ride, but in the little tub trap she went splendidly, hammering along like a metronome, taking us to picnics and tea-parties, with the weight of the cart counterbalanced nicely against her heavy head.

  David was an athletic boy, and much the best at staying on top of Dustyfoot, though my hunting journal notes that when hounds met at the Much Hadham ford, Dusty rolled with him in the water, and he only just got off in time. He was also decanted in the plough several times that day, and arrived home with spring wheat apparently growing out of his shoulders.

  It was simply no good getting into a fight with Dusty, because she always won. With secret glee I remember watching her deposit David, Mummy, and Aunt Nancy on the ground in quick succession when they tried to make her jump over a very small log. David (who half expected it) bounced off without damage. Mummy took his place, lengthened the stirrups, gave Dusty a few hearty wallops, and was sent flying over her head; Aunt Nancy induced her to canter right up to the offending log as if she really meant to go over it, and then at the last stride Dusty ducked out from under her and she nose-dived over the obstacle alone.