My Animals (and Other Family)

by Phyllida Barstow

  That summer every British officer had as much riding as he wanted. The regiment organised gymkhanas and mounted games, and a good time was had by all. Only years later did Daddy describe to me the grim aftermath of this happy interlude, and time had done nothing to lessen his anger.

  In a disgraceful piece of political chicanery, the British government agreed to the vengeful Stalin’s demand that they should hand over their Cossack prisoners for forced ‘repatriation,’ even though none of them had ever been to Russia.

  The prisoners were under no illusions about their fate. Some hanged themselves. A very few – with the connivance of British guards – managed to hide in the PoW camp long enough to escape the round-up. For the rest, officers and men were forced onto separate trains and sent to certain death at the hands of the Communists. The episode remains a black stain on British honour.

  Back to ‘the £70 pony.’ Considering that, throughout the war, a single £5 note sent by registered post from Daddy’s bank covered all Mummy’s weekly expenditure, to pay £70 for a child’s pony, sight unseen, seems reckless extravagance, but Taffy came strongly recommended by a trusted friend, and like so many reckless extravagances, she proved to be worth every penny. Her previous owner had been a boy who, when he reached his teens, suddenly shot up to six foot. ‘He looks ridiculous,’ said his mother mournfully. ‘His feet nearly touch the ground, but while we’ve got Taffy, he won’t ride anything else.’

  She must have been about nine when we bought her, a bright bay with a bold, confident, can-do look about her, and she came with a much-creased certificate signed by a vet and declaring her height to be 13.2 hands, although she looked bigger – more like a small horse than a pony. Time and again in the next years, ring-stewards would challenge her right to compete in 13.2 classes, but crafty Taffy would spread out her legs and dip her back, and scrape under the stick. She was nice-looking, not particularly beautiful, but unlike our other ponies she was absolutely straightforward, no nasty tricks, no hang-ups about traffic or anything else, and she jumped like a dream.

  Until then, jumping had hardly figured in our riding activities, and I had no idea what fun it could be.

  Oh, Taffy, my Taffy, there’s none to compare!

  Oh, Taffy, my Taffy, you float through the air!

  I sang in an ecstasy of love and admiration. ‘Float’ was perhaps coming it rather high, for Taffy was too cavalier in her attitude to flimsy coloured poles to be much of a show-jumper, and in the ring she usually collected faults in double figures, but the glorious thing was that she would have a go at anything. With neither hesitation or deviation, she would canter determinedly up to the obstacle and launch herself over it. You hardly felt her take off or land, but hey, presto! there you were on the other side. Needless to say, she was the perfect hunter: keen but biddable, and even when I fell off (which happened quite often) she would stand like a rock to let me remount.

  Thanks to Taffy, I quickly became over-confident, but a chance invitation to ride Cadwal, a handsome young Welsh Section A stallion, at a local show soon exposed my limitations.

  Mrs Peebles, his owner, wanted to sell him as a child’s pony, and gave such a glowing account of his looks and virtues that I would happily have hopped up on him for the first time in the show-ring, but luckily Mummy insisted on a trial ride. She and I drove Dustyfoot in the governess cart over to the farm a couple of miles away, where Mrs Peebles was waiting with Cadwal ready saddled. He was iron-grey in colour, with one wall eye, no more than 12 hands, like Micky, but full of power and presence, from his sharply-pricked ears to his long kinky tail.

  He snorted suspiciously at the handful of oats I offered, scattering them to the wind, and Mrs P said quickly, ‘Don’t go spoiling him, he’s not used to it. Come on, now. Up you get. We’ll go round the field together till you get the feel of him.’

  She held his head while I mounted, for which I was grateful because the moment I settled on his tense, resistant back I had the doomy sense that we weren’t going to see eye to eye.

  All went well as Mrs Peebles on her steady cob led me down the lane, and into a ploughed field surrounded by high blackthorn hedges with a narrow rutted track round the perimeter.

  ‘All right?’

  I felt thoroughly insecure, but it seemed rather wet to say so.

  ‘Good. Follow me, then. We’ll trot down to the bottom, and have a canter up the far hedge.’

  Off she went, her cob’s hoofs throwing up clods of mud, and I followed right on her tail, unable to hold Cadwal at a proper distance. He tucked his head in to his chest and stiffened his crest while I bounced uncomfortably, digging the knuckles of one hand into his withers and yanking against it with the other, but two could play at that game and Cadwal was an expert. If it hadn’t been for the cob’s fat hindquarters blocking the track, he would probably have bolted then and there.

  We rounded the end of the field at a butcher-boy trot, with Cadwal resolutely refusing to break into a canter.

  ‘Use your legs!’ shouted Mrs Peebles, lolloping along on the cob.

  ‘I can’t!’

  ‘Don’t be so feeble!’

  In desperation to stop the relentless bouncing, I whirled the end of the reins and slapped Cadwal on the shoulder. The result was immediate. Down went his head. Up went his heels, and I flew face-down into sticky black plough. It was soft enough and no harm would have been done if only both feet had come out of the stirrups. Unfortunately, one of them stuck fast, and Cadwal continued on his way with me bumping along the ground at his side, and roaring at Mrs Peebles to stop.

  My jacket and shirt rode up as I was dragged for what seemed like miles but was probably just a hundred yards or so, unable to free my foot, with Cadwal, now thoroughly alarmed and just as anxious to be rid of me, kicking out sideways. Luckily he was unshod and in no position to do much damage, and when at last my shoe came off and Mummy rushed to my aid, although I looked a mess of mud and blood I had suffered nothing more serious than scraped ribs and a severe dent in my pride.

  Mummy, too, had had a nasty fright watching from the gateway as her elder daughter was dragged through the plough. ‘Stupid woman,’ she said as steady, sturdy Dustyfoot jogged gently homeward. ‘That pony’s only half broken. She’ll be lucky to sell him like that.’

  Daddy came to England briefly in the spring of 1945, and Mummy rushed to spend two nights with him in London, but there wasn’t time to visit Much Hadham, and when he was finally demobbed in the late autumn, it was so long since we had seen him or he us that the actual moment of reunion was tinged with awkwardness. In three years we had changed a lot, and so had he. The slim, serious, music-and-literature loving young solicitor who had gone to war returned two and a half stone heavier, his complexion was florid and hair that had been receding in 1939 was now almost gone. Most striking of all was his air of authority, a kind of jovial imperturbability that nothing could seriously disturb. He had seen the war through from beginning to end, coming out of it not only unscathed but with honour. Nothing would ever be so bad again – and the whole horrible business was now over for good.

  We were staying at Chapel House at the time, and so were the Caccias, but once he had sorted out which were his children and which his nephew and niece, we quickly slipped into an easy relationship, and Gerry was at last relieved of the burden of being the Man of the Family.

  The biggest change was in Mummy. Ever since 1942, she must have been under intense and wholly unacknowledged strain, organising, working, handling finances, taking family decisions, and secretly worrying that she might be widowed right up to the last day of the war, and now that long dreary ordeal was ended and she had her husband to lean on and laugh with again she seemed years younger – happy, jokey, even frivolous – as they both flung themselves into making up for the time they had missed.

  There were no more spankings that I remember, and fewer sudden outbursts of anger. ‘Aequam memento rebus in arduis servare mentem,’ Daddy would say when she looked like go
ing off the deep end about something, and although at the time I had no idea what it meant, it had a miraculously calming effect.

  He didn’t often talk about the war, and the only bits we managed to weasel out of him made it sound like one long adventure in the company of brave kindred spirits, dangerous at times but essentially very good fun. He was always humming and singing, and his big booming laugh echoed from one end of the house to another. On long car journeys we could sometimes persuade him to teach us regimental songs ranging from the innocuous (The HAC have Dirt Behind their Ears and Marching up the Valley of the Arno) to the definitely-unsuitable-for-children: (Messalina, she was the Dirtiest Roman of Them All) which would make Mummy say, ‘Johnny!’ in such pretended horror that we never heard the song right through.

  He was so determined to put the war firmly behind him that it took a long time for me to realise how hotly his anger still burned against the nation that had robbed him of his brother, his first years of marriage and his children’s childhood; and his underlying contempt both for the French and for our American ‘cousins’ who had been so painfully slow to join the struggle against Hitler.

  Although Taffy had stolen most of my heart, I was still deeply into rabbits. Degrees of kindred and affinity had to be closely considered when contemplating matings, for though the Rabbit Breeder’s Handbook, my Bible, permitted relationships between kissing cousins, full-blown incest – whether pharaonic or father-daughter – was strictly taboo, though sometimes difficult to avoid.

  Immersed in the Angoras’ complicated love lives, I completely failed to notice that Mummy, too, had changed shape, and any reference to her pregnancy must have gone right over my head. I was therefore astonished and far from pleased when, after Mummy had taken a brisk and uncharacteristic run up to the allotments one December evening, Olivia and I were told that we must go to her bedroom after breakfast the next morning to meet our new baby sister, Miranda.

  Aren’t we enough for her? was my immediate jealous thought – a fairly universal one among older children – but although the baby was quiet and good and hardly impinged on my convenience in any way, she unfortunately brought with her an absolute harridan of a monthly nurse, who took a sadistic delight in telling us our ‘noses would be out of joint now,’ and similar nasty digs designed to emphasise our loss of status. She bossed us around and made dictatorial rules about meals and bedtime which were not, strictly speaking, anything to do with her, but our own minder at the time, a gentle, artistic soul named Irene, who had been engaged as a sort of gardener-cum-mother’s help, was incapable of checking her tyranny.

  Furious and resentful, I responded in the classic way by becoming rude and naughty, teasing and tormenting Olivia and also Josie, the daughter of Cope, who had been Daddy’s army batman, and his wife, who had now become our cook. Josie was a pretty, plump child with long dark ringlets, easily moved to tears by my bullying, and it may have been partly anxiety lest the Copes should decide to leave that prompted Mummy to arrange for me to weekly-board some fifteen miles away near Ware with Mrs Baird, and do lessons with her granddaughter Johanna and three other girls, two of whom, oddly, had the same-sounding name, though Moona was Irish and Muna a rolypoly little Egyptian.

  I remember a long, dim, melancholy house covered in creeper, with a wide gravel sweep overhung by sodden bare branches (it must have been winter.) Mrs Baird seemed immeasurably old, her voice faint and querulous, and the only animal in the household was definitely not child-friendly: a yappy white terrier with pink skin showing through his sparse, wiry coat. No wonder, because he was washed daily, poor brute, and scratched continually – eczema, probably – and if Pixie Sykes, our governess, hadn’t taken him with us on our ultra-boring ‘botanical walks’ through the flat, cold, featureless Essex countryside, he would hardly have stirred all day from his favoured position under the legs of his mistress’s armchair.

  Pixie was not the elfin figure her name suggests, but a short, sturdy, lantern-jawed little woman with iron-grey curls, ruthlessly netted at night. She dressed in twin-sets, pleated skirts and sensible brogues. She was not an ambitious or talented teacher, limiting her curriculum to English literature, botany, music, and the most basic of maths. Nor did we work long hours, just between half past nine and twelve and an hour in the afternoon, followed by one of those dire walks.

  This left us plenty of time to amuse ourselves as we pleased, providing we didn’t make too much noise and disturb Mrs Baird, so we read and ragged and gossiped, and played a game we called ‘Slave Girl’, loosely based on a story I had read about harem life in Abyssinia, in which the heroine was captured and tied to a bed so that the robber baron could have his wicked way with her.

  We knew instinctively that the grown-ups would not approve of this game, and Johanna often warned me and Moona to watch out lest Pixie should catch us at it. She was a renowned passage-creeper at night, but during the day she spent so much of her time ministering to Mrs Baird that we thought we were safe enough – and so we were until the day when she did, indeed, walk in on us in Moona’s bedroom, and there was hell to pay.

  Moona had me well trussed up on the bed, wearing nothing but my white cotton bloomers, and was standing over me whip in hand in the character of the brigand chief when Pixie suddenly opened the door and stood staring at us. There was quite a long silence, and then a torrent of accusation and reproach burst over our uncomprehending heads. She called us dirty and immoral, deceitful and shameful, and wouldn’t listen to a word of our stumbling explanations.

  ‘We’re acting a story,’ I wailed, but it did nothing to stem the flow. Finally, with the dreadful threat that she was going to tell Mrs Baird, she stormed out of the room, leaving me and Moona perplexed and shaken.

  Sex was never discussed in front of children in those days, and despite my years of rabbit-breeding, we were woefully, hopelessly ignorant about human desires and practices, and had never heard of sado-masochistic bondage. Even the mechanics of procreation were a closed book. If I had ever considered the matter (which I hadn’t) I might have guessed that our parents had gone about it in the same way as the Angoras.

  I was never a cuddly child, being sallow of complexion, thin and gawky in build, all elbows and knees. Indeed I looked on cuddling as an invasion of my personal space, and actively disliked being mauled around, especially if what had begun as fondling degenerated into surreptitious massage in a futile attempt to improve my bandy legs or some other less than satisfactory part of my anatomy. So although we’d had an inkling on some subconscious level that the frisson we got from games of ‘Slave Girl’ was not the kind of pleasure Pixie had in mind when she told us to go and enjoy ourselves, we would have been amazed to be told it was pre-pubescent sex-play, and couldn’t see why she was making such a tremendous fuss.

  For three days we waited anxiously for Mrs Baird’s reaction. When at last Moona and I were summoned to see her in the long dim cluttered drawing-room, we advanced into the gloom with shaking knees, and stood in silence for what seemed a long time before she spoke.

  ‘Pixie tells me you girls have been very naughty,’ quavered the faint querulous voice from its nest of rugs.

  Had we? Why?

  ‘Well?’ more sharply. ‘Speak up! What have you to say?’

  ‘Sorry,’ we said, choosing the safest option though we had no idea what we were apologising for.

  ‘She thinks I ought to send you away. To expel you.’

  Now that we could understand. At the time, His First Term by John Finnemore, and its sequel, Teddy Lester, Captain of Cricket were quite my favourite books, and I still regard the moment when The Lubber gets expelled as one of the high spots of schoolboy fiction. But the wicked Lubber had, among his many misdemeanours, set a mantrap that nearly took the leg off a choleric baronet, and richly deserved expulsion. Surely our naughtiness was not in the same league?

  ‘But I have decided to give you another chance,’ quavered Mrs Baird. ‘I will let you stay, providing you promise never to
do it again. Well? Do you promise?’

  Still baffled, we promised, leaving the room no wiser than we’d come into it, and that was the last time I ever saw Mrs Baird. Within the week, there was a night full of door-bangings and car-revving and scurrying feet, and when we came down to breakfast next morning Pixie told us, between sniffs and dabs at her eyes, that her employer had died in the night.

  So we were sent home after all, though not expelled, and Muna came to stay with us at Gaytons until her father could be summoned from Egypt. When he finally arrived – short, stout, oily and mustachio’d – Shawa Bey made an opportunistic pass at Mummy, and was indignantly repulsed despite his lavish presents of scent and nylon stockings. Daddy roared with laughter when he heard about this, and Muna and her father departed for home, never to be heard of again.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Old Dalby

  THE QUESTION OF where to continue my education caused a good deal of parental soul-searching. Having burned her boats with The Barn School, Mummy could hardly ask them to take me on again, and anyway there was at the time speculation that Miss Cookson planned to sell up and retire. At nine, I was still too young for the senior part of a girls’ boarding school, but rather too old to infiltrate into any junior section.

  Besides, it was the wrong time of year, since schools preferred pupils to start in the autumn term.