My Animals (and Other Family)

by Phyllida Barstow

  Before any decision was taken, in 1947 we were gripped by the coldest winter weather anyone could remember, its discomforts exacerbated by postwar shortages of every description – food, electricity, transport, fuel. There were powercuts and much cursing of the Labour government: as the Minister responsible for power, Mr Emmanuel Shinwell came in for particular excoriation in our household. My parents had been shocked and astonished when Winston Churchill had been thrown out of office in the General Election after the war, and in their eyes Mr Attlee’s government could do nothing right.

  For us children, the extreme cold was fun. The Rectory pond froze for weeks – plenty long enough for us all to learn to skate – and we tied a toboggan behind Dustyfoot and made her drag us round the back road behind Hadham’s main street. There was no means of braking the sledge except by digging your feet into the snow, and as it grew more icy we became adept at baling out quickly when it threatened to run on to Dusty’s heels because she had no inhibitions about kicking. My circulation has always been poor and I suffered torments of itching from chilblains on fingers and toes, though I was far too squeamish to adopt what Mummy claimed was an infallible remedy and pee on them.

  All the grown-ups were run down both physically and mentally by the long strain of the war, and for them the bitter winter which led inexorably to illnesses seemed the last straw. One after another we children went down with whooping cough and, since it was a struggle to dry sheets and towels fast enough to keep our beds fresh, the whole house smelt of sick.

  Another supposedly infallible remedy current that winter was that breathing the air near a gasworks cured whooping cough so Mummy, who had considerable faith in old wives’ tales, took us to the nearest – outside Bishops Stortford, I think – and made us walk all the way round the perimeter fence guarding the huge cylinder on a cold February afternoon, exhorting us to breathe deeply. Far from curing us, the exercise made us cough all the harder, and for weeks the wretched illness dragged on with no improvement.

  Emptying buckets and carrying laundry up and downstairs, Daddy must have longed to be back in the Army and one day, suddenly deciding he had had enough of sickbeds and shortages, he announced to our amazement that he was taking us to Switzerland for the remains of the school term. Hang the expense – we were all going to St Moritz. When? In three days’ time.

  It was a long complicated journey which involved car, train, taxi to Waterloo, boat train, storm-tossed cross-Channel ferry, two French trains, the second a splendid wagon-lit with couchettes, and finally a sparkling clean, wooden-seated, typically Swiss little electric chuffer that hauled us up to the snowy slopes. True to form I was sick on nearly every stage, but this in no way detracted from the glamour and strangeness of it all. The war had ensured that none of us children had ever been abroad, and Mummy had last crossed the Channel in 1938. Like English travellers at the end of the Napoleonic wars, we were hungry to expand our horizons, and ready to marvel at everything we saw.

  To my sleepy eyes as we emerged at night from the ferry’s bunks after a rough crossing, the French train with its engine belching sparks looked monstrous, far bigger than the ones we were used to, its wheels and pistons dangerously near our legs because there was no platform. While Daddy dealt with the tickets, Mummy hustled us aboard. Having spent much of her childhood in Normandy, she spoke fluent French and I remember my pleasure in realising that books we’d ploughed through at the Barn School about tiresome Madame Souris and her très jolie maison formed part of a language that people here understood. Obviously there wasn’t much call for remarks about Mme Souris on a French train, but it might come in useful some time.

  The next great surprise was the food: rich, lavish, and delicious. As the train rattled through Northern France, we sat in its dining car in a state of gluttonous delight, gorging on fish mousse that melted in the mouth, thick steaks charred on the outside and almost raw within, and puddings swirled and swathed in cream. It was a revelation. Accustomed as we were simply to refuelling ourselves with whatever could be cooked with dull wartime rations, neither Gerry nor I had ever imagined that eating could be such a pleasure.

  How could it be that the French, who had been under the Nazi jackboot for most of the war, had access to food so infinitely superior to that eaten by the poor saps across the Channel? We knew nothing of the tacit agreement whereby the occupied French continued their lives in considerable comfort despite the jackboot so long as they agreed not to rock the boat, which was why the activities of the Resistance were regarded with grave disapproval by les honnêtes gens who had no wish to jeopardise the delicate unspoken accord between themselves and the occupying power. Our parents, however, were well aware of it.

  The sleeper into which we were ushered by a porter when we changed trains at Lyons had neat little double-bunk couchettes with clean smooth sheets and ingenious basins hidden under the dressing-table. I was allocated the top bunk and drifted in and out of sleep amid the shouting and whistles, muttered exchanges with ticket collector and frontier police, heavy clanking over points, and sudden flashes of orange light as we passed through stations. We awoke to blue sky, dazzling white snow, and jagged peaks so high you could hardly bend your neck back far enough to see their tops.

  ‘The Alps,’ said Daddy, sliding open the window to let a piercing breath of mountain air slice through the couchette’s overnight fug. ‘Come and have breakfast. There are only two more stations before we get the electric train.’

  We stayed at the Posthaus, a family-run pension at Celerina, then a small quiet village a few miles from St Moritz itself, near the end of the Cresta run. In the brilliant sunlight reflecting off snowfields, everything had an unreal, toy-like perfection. Wooden chalets had brightly painted barge-boards, horse-drawn sleighs had tinkling bells. There was no motor traffic on the smooth, packed-snow tracks and, with nothing to make it dirty, everything looked unnaturally clean. A greater contrast with dingy, grimy Britain at the fag-end of winter could hardly be imagined. Our spirits soared and the whoops disappeared within days.

  Our host at the Posthaus was called Hansel, and Trudi was his tubby, ever-smiling wife. We were the only family staying with them at the time and as well as giving us the pick of their comfortable rooms, each with its view-facing balcony, they bent over backwards to make our holiday fun. He was sturdy and thickset with the blunt, craggy features that you see on a carved wooden bottle-top, and wore green lodencloth breeches and a stand-collared jacket, while she was a marvellous cook, and always wore a checked pinafore over her dark dress. Both had a few words of English and, judging by the visitors’ book in which they pressed us to write, had entertained swarms of English tourists before the war, during which neutral Switzerland had not exactly covered itself with glory. It was clear that they both looked forward keenly to the revival of this lucrative business and hoped the Barstow family represented its first green shoots.

  Through the swing door from Trudi’s kitchen came tray after trolley after tray of wonderful food. As morning sun flooded the light, bright dining-room with its wooden tables spread with white cloths gaily embroidered in cross-stitch, crisp rolls with luscious snails of pale unsalted butter would appear, and black cherry jam lumpy with globs of squishy fruit that exploded in your mouth – a far cry from the carrot-and-woodchip gunge we were accustomed to spread on our bread and marge. There were croissants that crumpled into melting flakes when you bit into them, and proper coffee for the grown-ups. For us, there was something even better: thick, rich hot chocolate, like a whole bar melted in the cup, and this was for breakfast. We could hardly believe our luck.

  ‘Eat. Is good,’ said smiling Trudy, watching us guzzle. ‘Viel gut.’

  It sounded like ‘feel good,’ and even more delightful was the discovery that the words, ‘Bitte, Schockolade,’ produced not bitter chocolate, which I disliked, or even a bit of chocolate, but a noble slab of the sweet-to-sickliness nut-laden milk variety nestling alongside the salami and cheesestuffed rolls and hard-boiled
eggs of Trudy’s packed lunches, which we would eat on the sunny wooden balcony of the cafe at the top of the nursery slopes after a morning at ski school.

  The first morning Hansel took us to his cousin’s sports-shop, a virtual forest of tall coloured skis, luges of every description, and padded jackets with matching trousers, at which Mummy cast covetous glances, though she confined herself to buying us padded waterproof gauntlets and bright woollen headbands with flaps to protect our ears. The shop was so small and so full of kit that it was almost impossible to move, the whole place redolent of hot wax.

  One at a time, the cousin fitted us for boots and skis, closely supervised and advised by Hansel. The skis themselves were long and narrow, your height plus your upstretched arm, and awkward to carry as they cut into your collarbone and shoulder. They were not easy for beginners to manoeuvre. They had grooved bottoms and metal edges, and after every day’s skiing you had to rub them with wax – different colours for different types of snow – and put them to dry overnight in the warm basement at the pension.

  Boots at that time were just ankle-high, with a deep groove at the back into which was positioned the loop of the spring-binding bolted to the ski. To put on the skis, you had to kick your toe hard between two metal clips, then bend forward and press down the lever that tightened the loop of the binding and held your boot firmly in position. At least, that was the theory. In practice, I found it almost impossible to exert enough pressure on the lever to tension it tightly enough, with the result that my skis were always coming off unexpectedly.

  ‘Achtung! Ski verloren!’ I learned to shout as the liberated and potentially lethal board flew like an arrow down the slopes, but luckily these were sparsely populated in 1947 and lost skis seldom caused any damage, though dot-and-carrying down the hillside to retrieve them was a great nuisance.

  There was a good deal of debate about whether to fork out a fortune for an English-speaking guide from the Ski Club of Great Britain or to opt for the local ski-school, where the instructors’ English would be fractured but they would at least be locals. In the end we plumped for a small class with two instructors, stolid Swiss-German Dieter in the morning, and dashing, dark Swiss-Italian Ludo after lunch.

  Dieter was endlessly patient as we fell and fell again before getting the hang – more or less – of snow-plough, stem-turns, and side-slipping, which last manoeuvre I found particularly difficult.

  His mournful foghorn bellows of, ‘Berg ski vor!’ followed me about the slopes as I continually leaned into the slope instead of out over the drop. ‘Vite on the louwer ski, Fräulein!’

  At six, Olivia was too young for ski-school, but she got closer to the country than either Gerry or me, since her Swiss nannie/au pair, the wild-haired, high-spirited Lisa Schneller, not only took her to spend a few days with her own parents in a nearby village but, when they rejoined us at the Pension, used to take her up on the drag-lift between her own skis, and then swoop down the nursery slopes together, with Olivia shrieking with delight.

  We would all meet up to eat our packed lunches, and sunbathe in deckchairs, faces upturned to the blazing sun without so much as a smear of protective cream until our ear-tips blistered and Daddy turned a dangerous shade of magenta.

  Though Mummy had skied as a teenager and was reasonably competent if inelegant, skis well apart as she zigzagged in slow parallel turns, he was a complete beginner, recklessly brave and seldom in control, a fifteen-stone unguided missile before whose path whole ski-school classes scattered like blown leaves. You could pinpoint his position by successive explosions of snow, deep craters at the side of the piste, and resounding shouts of laughter.

  In the afternoons we skied en famille, led by the dashing Ludo down long easy runs – Chanterella, Corviglia – that generally ended in St Moritz itself, where we joined the chattering, sunburnt crowds thronging the tables at Hanselmann’s, or the old-style Chesa Viglia, to gorge on eclairs and mille-feuilles oozing whipped cream before skiing down to Celerina along the shiny hard-packed piste beside the Cresta Run.

  Like all the best holidays, time went too fast. I knew nothing of Dr Faustus but would have echoed his plea, ‘O lente lente currite, noctis equi,’ as the final week galloped towards our last day. The ski-school held tests on Saturday morning, followed by races in the afternoon, and Dieter wanted me and Gerry to take the easiest test, and win the infinitely covetable badge with a bronze Swiss cross on a tiny shield.

  Gerry performed creditably and got an approving nod from the examiner, and a pat on the back from Dieter. Wobbly-kneed with excitement, I made a complete hash of every manoeuvre, fell headlong when I tried to turn, and practically did the splits in the sideslip, digging in my edges and bringing down flurries of snow. The examiner looked dour.

  ‘Now the Schüss,’ he said curtly. ‘Without turning, go directly to the ski-stick.’

  Off he swished, and planted a ski-stick a fair way down the slope just where it began to level out by the drag-lift.

  ‘Go!’ urged Dieter, giving me an encouraging grin.

  Grimly determined not to fall again, I fixed my eyes on the stick and pushed off as hard as I could, crouching low, feeling the wind sting my cheeks and dry up all the spit in my mouth. I was hypnotised by that stick – it drew me like a magnetic force ever nearer, ever faster. On the hillside behind me, Dieter was shouting something as I hurtled towards the one slim straight pole on an otherwise empty slope until my skis went either side of it. The handle struck me in the face. The spike at the bottom flipped over and buried itself in my leg.

  It made a small hole in my gaberdine ski-pants, a bigger one in my woolly tights, and a large ragged rent in the skin of my inner thigh.

  ‘Naturally you are insured, Madame?’ the examiner asked Mummy, who had pushed her way through the forest of legs topped by red-brown faces surrounding me as I lay writhing and gasping.

  Luckily we were. Within minutes I was strapped head-down on a blood wagon – a considerable thrill – and whisked away to the wood-smelling hospital where the wound was cleaned and examined.

  The doctor was fat and bespectacled, with a cynical French mouth. ‘It requires stitches,’ he announced laconically, reaching for a needle.

  Up till then I had behaved fairly stoically, partly because although it looked a mess and was bleeding profusely, the wound didn’t hurt much and I was enjoying being the centre of attention. It seemed, in a way, to mitigate the disgrace of the ski-test. But the thought of that needle sewing my skin unnerved me completely.

  ‘No, no, no!’ I howled, kicking and struggling. ‘I’ll heal. I don’t want stitches.’

  ‘Control yourself, mademoiselle. It will not take long.’

  But I roared and wriggled and made it impossible for him to approach.

  ‘Que voulez-vous, madame?’ he asked Mummy. ‘Without stitches there will be a scar. It will not look pretty. What if she should become an instructeur de gymnastiques?’

  The thought of her clumsy uncoordinated daughter choosing so unlikely a career made Mummy laugh, and much to my relief and the doctor’s disapproval, she asked him to forget about the stitches. A nurse applied a dressing and I was driven back to the pension in a horse-drawn sleigh, which nearly made up for missing the ski-races.

  I lay on a chaise longue the rest of the day, being thoroughly spoiled. Trudi made special chocolate mousses for each of us, decorated with individual motifs drawn in whipped cream. I remember mine was a Christmas tree.

  Daddy gave me an edelweiss brooch which I had yearned for and Mummy had said was ridiculously expensive, and a little carved chamois standing on a rock. Gerry told me all about the races and who had won what, and showed me his bronze ski-test badge.

  Then he grinned and said, ‘Oh, and they asked me to give you this,’ and handed me a small box. My heart thumped incredulously as I opened it. Was it…? Could it be…? Surely not…?

  But it was. There on a scrap of velvet lay a second badge – a consolation prize, I suppose – but wh
o cared how it had been acquired? I certainly didn’t though, as it turned out, the French doctor was quite right. It was lucky that I was never tempted by a career as a gym instructor, because the ugly scar on my thigh has been with me for life.

  For a single term, in the spring of 1947, I lived at home and did lessons privately with Mrs Bentley, who was a wonderful teacher of all my favourite subjects– history, English literature, drama, geography, French – but as far as I remember we did nothing in the science line, and no maths at all.

  At Chapel House in the Easter holidays, I reduced poor Grandfather almost to tears by my inability to understand how to do long division. He had worked in the Treasury for forty years and gone on to be chairman of the Prudential Assurance Company, so maths to him were as natural as breathing, but unfortunately he was a hopeless teacher and as I tried to follow his instructions I became more and more confused.

  We were sitting at the small oval breakfast table in the dining-room, with April sunlight blazing in through the wide span of river-facing windows, and I began to sweat with anxiety as I tried again and again to divide one three-figure number by another. My brain seemed to seize up so I could hardly even add or subtract. Grandfather tried to be patient but I could tell he thought me deeply stupid as he copied out the sum yet again, made me watch as he worked it out, then set another for me to attempt.

  I just couldn’t do it.

  Praying that someone would join us and put an end to this torture, I fell back on what is still my default setting when people try to teach me the rules of Mahjongg after dinner or how to de-bug my computer. Bright smile, intelligent look, several slow nods.

  ‘Aaah! I see. So that’s how it works. Yes. Erm, so you mean I just have to do this, and that – whoops, no, that can’t be right…’ And nine times out of ten the impatient instructor will solve the problem him or herself, which is fine and gets me off the hook for the moment, but leaves me none the wiser.