My Animals (and Other Family)

by Phyllida Barstow

  With three ponies, the problem was finding grazing. Though Gaytons had a neat little stable yard with two looseboxes, a haystore and tackroom, there was no paddock, and the large field behind the garden at which Mummy looked so longingly remained obstinately arable throughout our tenancy. Farmers were working hard to increase food production, so every acre that could grow corn did so. The needs of children’s ponies had a very low priority if, indeed they figured in the local agricultural picture at all.

  Much Hadham was a horsy village, strongly supportive of the Puckeridge Hunt, but nobody who was lucky enough to own a paddock wanted three extra ponies in it. However Mummy did discover a sheep-farmer at a nearby village, Green Tye, who agreed without much enthusiasm to let her some grazing along with his ewes. Mr Turner was a taciturn old man, soured by the loss of his right hand. His hook made him a figure of dread to us children when we bicycled the three miles to his farm in winter, with buckets of boiled potatoes mashed with porridge oats swinging from the handlebars. This mash, which the ponies loved, smelt so appetising that we often scooped out a handful to eat as we pedalled, even though the spuds were unpeeled frostbitten ones from a clamp, not fit for sale, which Mummy had been given for nothing. There was good hacking around Green Tye, but it took so long to get there and back that we were all glad when the Hadham butcher agreed to let our ponies join half a dozen other grass-liveries in his big field near the ford.

  Here Sally, who had been covered the previous summer by a beautiful burnished chestnut Anglo-Arab stallion called Dropscotch, but was thought not to be in foal, surprised everyone by producing a lively colt with long wobbly legs and a fluffy tail. Mummy found her in a corner of the field one April morning, gallantly protecting her offspring from the interest of the other horses and most of the Barn schoolchildren, since the butcher’s field was close to our playground, and hastily summoned me and a strong sensible friend called Joanne out of school to help get her back to Gaytons, a distance of nearly two miles.

  It was a slow anxious business for me to lead her along the back road behind the main street, whinnying and reluctant to go forward, with her head turning constantly to make sure her foal was still following, while Joanne and Mummy bundled him along between them. When we turned in through the double gates into the sunny Gaytons yard, the little colt dropped down and lay flat on the cobbles, utterly flaked out.

  For the rest of that Spring and Summer, Jock Scot (as we named him) accompanied his mother wherever we rode, and became splendidly blasé about traffic, wandering nonchalantly into the path of lorries rumbling through the village, confident that they would stop, unlike poor Sally who still went into a quivering jelly at the sight of anything bigger than an Austin 10.

  Suddenly the war was over, we were told, and we had won, but everything went on much as before. Daddy was still abroad. Rationing was tighter than ever, and the grown-ups talked wistfully about getting things on the Black Market, particularly petrol and nylon stockings, though I don’t think either Mummy or Aunt Nancy knew how to contact the shady purveyors of such coveted goods.

  After VE Day was declared, there were low-key celebrations in the village. A fancy-dress parade with a prize for the best decorated bicycle, children’s races, a tug-of-war, and a competition in which the biggest boys and one dauntless girl tried to sandbag one another with pillows while seated on a greasy pole over a stream. Of course she won, to the accompaniment of much muttering. ‘Couldn’t hit a girl, now, could I?’ grumbled a bad loser.

  The local Home Guard and anyone else with a uniform marched to church with banners and brass bands for a service of thanksgiving, but although the Scouts and Guides were invited to accompany them, the Brownies were not, to my infinite chagrin, since I had polished my little brass badge within an inch of its life in the hope of joining the parade. Instead, we sat at the back of the church in our everyday clothes, and I think this was the first time I realised how scruffy our family looked compared to others.

  Just in front of us sat our school friends Dione and Kirsty, wearing – as they did every Sunday – identical blue velvet berets over their neat blonde plaits, well-cut tweed jackets with velvet collars, swinging kilted skirts pinned at the side, with little leather straps at the waist, long beige socks with tasselled garters peeping out of the turnover tops, and polished brown shoes, again with a tasselled flap. The whole outfit was smart, practical, carefully put together – and then I looked down the row at my siblings and cousins, by comparison a tatterdemalion crew with cardigans over our usual blue Aertex shirts, the boys in grey flannel trousers and the girls in skirts that were either too long or too short, having been passed on by cousins to whoever was nearest in size, ankle socks, far from clean, ditto our scuffed shoes. The contrast was striking: not the result of penury, as one might have supposed, but of Mummy’s basic lack of interest in clothes, and underlying contempt for fashion.

  She herself was so beautiful that she could get away with wearing superannuated garments that Aunt Nancy, for example, wouldn’t be seen dead in, and she regarded with amused contempt other women who agonised over the scarcity of clothing ‘points,’ and tried to keep their wardrobe up to date. She had a few well made good quality clothes bought in London before the war – a sealskin coat, for instance, and coats-and-skirts by Nissen – and wore them to the point of disintegration, confident that her own looks could carry them off.

  Much the same was her attitude to beauty care. At night she washed her face with soap and water, and allowed it a dollop of whatever greasy substance came to hand – vaseline, olive oil, Nivea creme, lanolin – then secured two ‘snails’ of hair with kirbigrips just above her ears, and that was that. In the morning more soap and water, a touch of lipstick rubbed into the cheeks in lieu of rouge, and a dusting of loose powder before the snails were brushed out in curls and the rest of her hair swept back from her strong widow’s-peak, and she was ready for the day. No woman felt properly dressed then without bright red lips, and Mummy was expert an ‘putting on her mouth’ in any situation – even when driving – without the help of a mirror.

  ‘What I could have done with your face!’ Nancy once exclaimed with a mixture of exasperation and regret. She herself was handsome rather than beautiful, with large, flashing, deep-set eyes and strong dramatic features which could have been Italian or Greek, whereas Mummy’s beauty was emphatically English. Through force of circumstance, they had worked well in harness during the war and overcome all sorts of difficulties, but they didn’t really have much in common and – apart from a shared love of painting – their cultural tastes were very different.

  Take music, for instance. Though Mummy had a good enough voice and enjoyed singing, she was indifferent to classical music and found Nancy’s enthusiasm for opera, with its ridiculous plots and endless repetitions, quite inexplicable. Why did they drag everything out so long? Why couldn’t they just get on with the story? All right, Mimi – or Gilda, or Aida, or Violetta – was dying, everyone had grasped that, but why must she make such a tremendous fuss?

  Nancy was sophisticated, well informed, widely travelled. She had a large social circle and a sharp tongue – ‘A baby? I thought she’d have a litter,’ she once remarked of an friend who had forfeited her regard by marrying an admirer of her own – so to her life at Much Hadham must have seemed pretty parochial once the war was over, and it would have been strange if the sisters-in-law had not begun to get on one another’s nerves. As the British cultural scene began to revive, and Uncle Harold’s career in the Diplomatic Service moved ever upward, she and her children returned to live in London, and we Barstows expanded gratefully into the extra space.

  From then on, we only saw David and Clarissa during the long summer holidays which we all went on spending in Wales, sometimes camping, sometimes at Chapel House or a rented cottage, but whenever we all got together the old, easy, quasi-sibling relationship reasserted itself as if it had never been disrupted.

  The ponies always came to Wales, too. Not in a l
orry, but travelling in great style and comfort by rail from Hadham station to Builth Road in a special wagon adapted to the needs of horses, with a ridged floor to prevent slipping, a manger, water-bucket holder and, beyond a sliding panel, a groom’s compartment in which Gerry once made the journey to see what it was like. (‘Rather fun,’ he reported. ‘Lots of time to read.)

  It was a cross-country route, starting in the hands of the LNER (London and North Eastern Railway) then transferring to the care of the GWR (Great Western Railway.) There were two scheduled stops for watering, scrupulously observed, the loosebox always arrived at the right time, and the whole operation cost remarkably little.

  The ponies travelled loose, with head-collars in the groom’s compartment in case they were needed, they ate their hay-nets quite placidly and never seemed to sweat up, despite all the bumping and banging as the box was shunted in and out of sidings, and attached to different trains, though the time they reached Builth Road they were very keen to stretch their legs on the way home.

  If the Much Hadham VE Day celebrations had been muted, those marking VJ Day in August, 1945, when atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki precipitated the Japanese surrender and brought the war to a real conclusion, were something I shall never forget, though bunting and fireworks had little to do with their impact.

  We were camping at the time in the Alltmawr field above the Chapel House orchard, with three sleeping-tents – for boys, girls, and Mummy – a store tent, and a kitchen tent all neatly pitched with their backs to the prevailing wind in the best Baden-Powell style, a camp-fire ringed with big smooth stones, and a latrine tent with two wooden bars over a shallow trench pitched at a discreet distance. Carrying up all the camping gear had taken the best part of two days, the ponies’ loads continually slipping as they plodded up the winding track and I, a lazy, inefficient child who was going through a bolshy phase, had felt outshone by Clarissa, who was always extremely helpful and quick in the uptake, seeing what needed to be done before she was told to do it, whereas if not given definite orders, I would try to sneak off and read.

  Lying in my sleeping-bag on the hard, hard ground on our first morning under canvas, I heard rain drumming on the roof of the tent, and idly traced my name on the side which, in those days of primitive waterproofing, we had been specifically told not to do. Sure enough, by the time Mummy came to roust us out of bed, water was trickling through in a steady stream, and with the writing a dead giveaway, it was no good pretending that Olivia or Clarissa was responsible.

  So the morning began badly, and got worse. I managed to burn the porridge over the camp fire, making it taste truly disgusting, and when sent to fetch milk from the Abernant dairy, I tripped over and spilt half of it. We were meant to rest on our camp-beds in the afternoon, because of the celebration supper and fireworks that evening, but as soon as Mummy had gone down to Chapel House to confer about the travel arrangements, David and I slipped away to explore the wooded gorge just below our encampment, at the bottom of which was an old mill.

  The upper reaches of the millstream were shallow, but as the gorge became steeper and shaped more like a funnel, the water tumbled over rocks in a series of mini-waterfalls, and the slope of the wood ever more precipitous. At the narrowest point was the mill-race, where the channelled water would have swept through with enough force to turn the great wooden wheel.

  That was long gone, but still the water flowed deep and strong between the sheer sides it had carved out of the rock. As we scrambled along the crumbly overgrown bank some fifty feet above it, I began to lag behind, unable to keep up with David who was swinging from one handhold to another as nimbly as a monkey.

  ‘Come on!’ he urged, glancing back. A moment later he rounded a shoulder of hill and disappeared.

  ‘Wait!’ I called, reaching out for a projecting root, but as I put my weight on it, the rotten wood gave way and to my horror I began to slide downhill towards the precipice that overhung the mill. Desperately I snatched at ferns, stones, branches, but nothing arrested my slide. Down, down I went, bringing with me a small avalanche of powdery earth and leaves which preceded me over the drop just as I came to a stop with my legs actually overhanging the lip of the precipice.

  Far below – how far? Twenty foot? Thirty foot? Quite enough to break my neck – I could see the swooshing water and shiny rocks with their fringe of weed, and the jagged walls of the ruined mill. Far above were the scrubby trees which offered the only possible handholds for me to climb back to safety.

  I don’t know how long I sat frozen with fear like a treed cat, but it seemed an eternity and the memory still haunts my dreams. David had gone on, thinking I was following. How long would it be before he noticed I wasn’t there? I was too frightened even to shout, and in any case my voice wouldn’t have carried far against the noise of the water.

  Then the corner of my eye caught a movement, and a moment later I heard his voice above and to the left. ‘Don’t move. Don’t look down.’

  He kept talking as slowly, cautiously, he inched downhill, traversing the steep slope at an angle, testing every clump of bracken or tuft of grass as he came. At last he was close enough to reach out and flip the sleeve of his shirt into my hand,. ‘Hang on to that,’ he said. ‘Wriggle back a bit.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Yes, you can.’

  ‘I’m going to die,’ I wailed.

  ‘No, you’re not. Come on! I’ll pull you up. Get hold of the bracken roots. They’re the toughest.’

  I still sweat at the thought of crawling back up that slope, slipping from time to time, clutching brambles, bracken, anything that promised the least support, but at last we made it to the top and collapsed on the blessedly flat turf.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ asked Mummy, spotting us there as she walked back to the camp. ‘You’re meant to be resting.’ She looked at me more closely. ‘How did you get so dirty?’

  ‘We were looking for a better place to get water,’ said David, an inspired excuse because the campsite’s principal drawback was the lack of a handy source.

  ‘Did you find somewhere?’

  We looked at one another, and David said, ‘Not really…’

  ‘Oh, bad luck! Never mind. At least you tried.’

  We basked in her approval, transformed from naughty, disobedient children to enterprising resourceful campers, and no more was said about missing our rest.

  That evening we went to Builth, where celebrations were taking place on the Groe – the public park on the Breconshire bank of the Wye. Long tables draped in sheets were flanked by narrow wooden benches, and spread with festive fare: sandwiches with the crusts cut off, some with fish paste, others with jam, potted meat, or sandwich spread which looked like sick but was my favourite because of the vinegar. There were jugs of orangeade and lemonade, cups of tea, iced buns, a sparsely fruited cake, and paper cups full of brightly coloured jelly.

  There was probably something in the way of strong drink to get the grown-ups going, and when everyone had finished and the tables were cleared, members of a local male voice choir made their way up to a stage and started the singing, which went on for a long time. We stuck it out through a dozen choruses, solos, duets, getting very chilly but determined to see the fireworks, though when at last they were set off on the far bank of the Wye, they were disappointing, as fireworks usually are – bang, fizz, twinkle and out.

  It must have been after ten by the time we got back to Chapel House, and stumbled shivering and yawning out of the fug of the car into cold, starlit night. Mummy led the way with her big torch, and we straggled behind her, following the wavering beam up the winding lane to the flat top of the Alltmawr field. Everyone was cold and tired, longing to dive into a sleeping-bag and crash out, but a sudden exclamation from Mummy dashed that hope.

  ‘The tents! They’ve gone!’

  They hadn’t, but there wasn’t a single one standing. As Mummy swept the beam back and forth, we picked out bit by bit the ruins of our ca
mp – billows of collapsed canvas, poles, and tangled guy-ropes. Bedding dragged into the fire. The suitcases in which we kept our clothes burst open, their contents scattered. The store-tent completely demolished, tins and bottles smashed, and long streamers of loo-paper draped over everything. It was a scene of total destruction.

  Mummy was the first to speak. ‘How could they?’

  ‘They must have known we’d be out,’ said Gerry in a low, shaken voice. ‘So they waited till the coast was clear.’

  It was horrible to think of someone lurking about, waiting to despoil our nice little campsite.

  David walked towards the remains of the fire, tripped over something large and warm, and let out a yell. ‘Who’s that?’

  At once there was a loud, indignant snort which made us all jump, and then the darkness seemed to erupt with huge black bodies as half a dozen bullocks lumbered to their feet and charged off down the hill, loo-paper still trailing from their horns. We burst into hysterical laughter, clinging together as our fright dissolved in a frenzy of relief and hilarity.

  ‘Well, obviously we can’t sleep here tonight,’ said Mummy at last. ‘We can do the clearing up tomorrow,’ and without a backward glance we left the scene of devastation and ran down to seek shelter at Chapel House. It seemed a fitting end to the VJ celebrations.

  It was not until the late autumn of 1945 that Daddy was at last demobbed, and by then I had a new and very special pony – a real Rolls-Royce of a pony whose purchase had stretched the family budget almost to breaking-point. ‘I can’t wait to see the £70 pony!’ he had written, tongue in cheek, from the valley of the Gurk in Austria, where 12 RHA had been put in charge of the horses and grooms of a regiment of Cossacks, descendants of White Russians who had left their homeland when the Communists assassinated the Tsar during the First World War, and had fought for the Germans in the Second. It was a problem to find accommodation for 2,000 horses, and Daddy described how, being unable to picket so many, he ordered them to be turned loose into an enormous rope enclosure. Carrying halters, the Cossack grooms would go confidently into the milling throng, and call out their own horses, just as a huntsman draws his pack before a day’s hunting.