My Animals (and Other Family)

by Phyllida Barstow

  ‘No body,’ he said contemptuously. ‘Give it a cold perm,’ he told an acolyte, and drifted off to schmooze a more important client.

  The cold perm took hours and completely changed my appearance, the wiry curls ranged in such rigid rows that I hardly dared brush them. I bore it for ten days before attempting a wash which made every tightly-crimped hair stand straight out from my head until Mummy damped the whole thing down and rolled it into flat snails, secured with kirbigrips and firmly netted. So dense was the ironmongery that I could hardly get my head on to the pillow.

  ‘Il faut souffrir pour être belle,’ she laughed with what I considered a lamentable lack of feeling.

  Such hiccups apart, the cocktail party stage of the Season was fun. Every day more invitations on stiff white cards dropped through the letterbox of Daddy’s flat at 10, Wythburn Court, and I was kept busy writing acceptances and thanks in succession. There were two or even three separate parties every night and they nearly always finished with some agreeable young man asking what I was doing for dinner. Should we go to a restaurant? On to a nightclub? The Four Hundred in Leicester Square was a favourite place to dance, though you were mad to eat there because it was so expensive. I thought it the ultimate in glamour, with its red flocked walls and red plush seats, heavy with gilt sconces and mirrors, but on one occasion when I had lost a single pearl and amethyst earring which Mummy had given me, and went back to retrieve it the next morning, I was startled by how squalid it looked in daylight, all its glitter tarnished, the plush worn through, and reeking of last night’s cigars.

  I hate to think how much of their weekly earnings those agreeable young men spent on wining and dining girls like me, for no more tangible quid pro quo than a few hours shuffling round a dance-floor – far too crowded to do more than rock from foot to foot – followed by a chaste peck on the cheek at the outer door of Wythburn Court, since the mere mention that Daddy would be waiting up for me was enough to inhibit any request to come in for coffee. I liked them all but none exactly made my heart go pitapat, and though Mummy once informed me – in a tone so elaborately casual that it must have concealed acute embarrassment – that she’d been told only one debutante in three was a virgin at the end of the Season, as far as I was concerned she had little need to worry since I had neither the inclination nor the opportunity to leap into bed with any of these essentially callow young men.

  In pre-Pill days, the danger of becoming pregnant was a powerful turn-off, too, simply not worth the risk of sleeping around. One heard stories of girls whose dances were postponed or cancelled because of ‘emergency appendicitis’, and people would nod wisely. Everyone knew what that meant.

  We gave two cocktail parties ourselves, and I remember feeling proud that my parents – especially my mother – looked so much younger and livelier than the decrepit old wrecks other girls were burdened with.

  It was a strange, topsy-turvy existence. After a flurry of high living, late nights, full war-paint and best clothes in London, we would dash down to Fforest Farm where Mummy would instantly slough off her society image and revert to being a struggling Radnorshire farmer, battling with the elements, absorbed in the welfare of sheep and cattle, as if hobnobbing with Duchesses and gilt-edged invitations to Buckingham Palace played no part in her life at all.

  Three or four days of gumboots and heavy sweaters would follow, then back we’d whizz to London for more parties, more dresses to try on, appointments with hairdressers (I still couldn’t handle my new perm), sessions with society photographers keen to fill the ‘Girls with pearls’ page at the front of Country Life, (I never made it there) and advice from beauticians (pretty futile, considering what they had to work on) while all the time my Presentation at Court stalked nearer like the hound of heaven.

  Sad to say, after all the anticipation the whole business was a disappointment. Interminable waiting in our taxi in The Mall on a rainy Spring afternoon was followed by an equally slow and boring interlude while the girls to be presented were shoved and shuffled into alphabetical order in the long corridor whose double doors opened into the Throne Room. I was wearing a very beautiful square-necked cocktail dress of blue-grey shot silk, full in the skirt and so tight in the bodice that I dared not laugh or sneeze for fear of splitting a seam, and my shoes were so pointed that prolonged standing was agony.

  Very slowly the queue advanced towards the dais where the Queen was sitting looking dutiful and remote, never a glimmer of a smile. As each debutante sank into her curtsey, the powdered footman at the door called out her name, but as he soon got out of step with his list, most were incorrectly identified. I was labelled ‘the Hon. Harriet Barnsley,’ who had actually curtseyed three before me.

  The only moment of drama came when a very short, stout girl just in front of me, who was wearing unwisely high heels, skidded on the polished boards and fell with a heavy thud, flat on her back between the two footmen stationed either side of the door into the Green Drawing-Room. And did they rush to pick her up and dust her off? Not a bit of it. They went on standing rigidly, like a couple of stuffed dummies, while the poor girl struggled to her feet and crept away looking utterly humiliated.

  That small incident seemed to me to characterise the whole performance: stuffy, pretentious, inhuman and sadly out of date. Even the famous chocolate cake by Joe Lyons tasted stale.

  ‘Rather a damp squib, I’m afraid,’ said Mummy, throwing her hat on the taxi’s spare jump seat and fluffing her hair with her fingers. I was glad she’d said it before I was tempted to.

  ‘Well, at least some of the girls were pretty, and that’s more than you could say of their mothers,’ Daddy said with a deep chuckle.

  We were none of us surprised when a couple of years later the Queen decided to do away with presentation parties altogether. It must have been even less fun for her than it was for us, and thereafter debutantes made their curtseys to a cake at a charity ball.

  Keeping the show on the road at Fforest Farm during these months when Mummy was so much in London was an agricultural student of a very different calibre from any who had come to us before. Bridget was in the middle of a farming course at Moulton College of Agriculture, and her mother had, at Celia Fleming’s suggestion, written to ask if she could get a few months’ practical experience working at the Fforest.

  She had arrived while I was still in Paris, and in one of her letters Mummy described her as: ‘not pretty but with a lot of oomph, a neat figure, big blue eyes and the most wonderful curly hair which she washes half an hour before a party and gives a shake, and is ready to go…’

  She was the 22-year-old daughter of a publisher, and his wife who taught French at a school near Henley-on-Thames, and since their own interests were almost entirely intellectual they had never quite understood Bridget’s obsession with animals, particularly horses. After helping around the local stables in return for riding lessons she had, with difficulty, persuaded her parents to buy her a grey Anglo-Arab mare. When Grey Owl went lame she bred a replacement and it was this handsome bay youngster who had accompanied her to Fforest Farm.

  Mummy always allowed the girls who worked for her to bring their horses or dogs, and I think this relaxed attitude to animals en masse attracted Bridget as much as her parents’ relaxed attitude to guests who spent all day with their noses in a book attracted me when I visited her home near Nettlebed.

  For the moment, though, she was very busy imposing proper standards of agricultural efficiency on our few remaining milking cows, weighing their rations according to their yields instead of carelessly dumping a couple of scoops of nuts into each manger as had been my habit, maintaining meticulous hygiene in the dairy, and keeping scrupulously exact records of the amount of milk produced each day instead of topping up the churn with water to bring it to a round figure as I often used to when in charge of the cow-shed.

  She was quick and clever and efficient, loved riding about the hill and giving a hand with the shepherding, and she and Mummy got on like a hous
e on fire. Her downbeat, laconic turn of phrase often made us laugh.

  ‘What have we got for dinner?’ I remember Mummy asking her.

  ‘Well, there’s this rotting stew,’ drawled Bridget, taking the remains of a rather good Sunday roast from the larder, and instantly rotting stew was adopted into our own family-speak.

  Her brother Duff was the same age as Gerry and David and had been in the same house as them at Eton. Along with the rest of their year, all three were now doing their National Service, and having survived their Basic Training were serving in the British Forces in Germany, Gerry with the Royal Horse Artillery at Osnabruck, and Duff and David with the Coldstream Guards at Krefeld.

  One day I found Bridget chuckling over a letter which she passed to me to read. Duff, who had never shared her interest in horses, had been persuaded by a brother officer to come for a ride on one of the Saddle Club’s hacks, and all went well until his mount, who had been schooled for dressage, reacted to some aid Duff didn’t know he’d given it, by performing a high-stepping passage across a field of cabbages. The more he tried to make it go forward, the more it danced sideways, and he tried desperately to keep his seat while making apologetic placatory gestures to the owner of the cabbage patch who was yelling abuse and waving his hoe.

  The inevitable happened. He lost his balance, the horse deposited him in the mud and galloped for home, leaving him to creep back to barracks past the grinning sentries…

  I laughed and handed back the letter, and Bridget said thoughtfully, ‘You know, you ought to meet my brother. I’d sure you’d get on well.’

  I gave a non-committal grunt because as it happened I had already met him two years earlier at Eton’s Fourth of June celebrations and, in my censorious teenage way had formed a low opinion of his manners. After a lavish picnic lunch with strawberries and cream on Agar’s, we had been strolling round the cricket field, when my parents stopped to speak to his. In front of their canvas chairs a boy with wildly curling fair hair was sitting cross-legged, wholly absorbed in the game. When called by his mother to come and say hello, he did exactly that, smiled, shook hands, and instantly returned to watching the cricket without giving a second glance at my fashionable finery: a head-hugging hat made entirely of blue and pink petals, white gloves, a cornflower-blue starched shirt-waister whose full skirt was puffed out with net petticoats in the latest style, stockings with clocks round the heel, agonisingly tight shoes, the lot.

  I felt obscurely rebuffed and had no particular wish to renew our acquaintance. Besides, during this glorious whirl of parties, my address-book, which had up to now been a man-free zone, had suddenly filled with the names and telephone numbers of chaps in their twenties, with jobs in the City and membership of London nightclubs, all looking – even if in a somewhat desultory fashion – for a soul-mate, helpmeet or wife. Beside them my brother’s friends, too cash-strapped to take a girl out to dine and dance, had begun to seem mere boys, and most of them were in Germany anyway.

  From time to time they reappeared on leave, with very short haircuts and lots of new jargon. Gerry, that pillar of rectitude, winner of the Sword of Honour at his passing-out parade, brought a party of friends down to Fforest Farm and produced from his kitbag a thunderflash ‘left over’ – ahem – after a training exercise. On market day, when Mummy had taken a trailer of pigs in to Hereford, we went on to the hill above the farm to try it out. The boys took it gingerly from the rucksack, and spent some time deciding where to dig the hole with the dear little collapsible spade Gerry had brought in his pack.

  ‘Stay here and don’t move,’ he ordered, leaving us in a patch of bracken. He and Richard walked off and disappeared over the brow.

  We waited for what seemed a very long time. They weren’t far away, because we could hear them arguing and giving one another instructions. It sounded as if they were having trouble with the fuse.

  At last we heard Gerry say: ‘That’s it! Now, light it – quick!’

  We watchers had been creeping stealthily forward on hands and knees like disobedient gundogs. We saw Gerry and Richard bending down staring at the ground, then they straightened suddenly, chorused, ‘Retire briskly. Do not run!’ and sprinted back towards us. Panting, they flung themselves down in the bracken.

  All the girls clapped their hands over their ears and again there was a long, breathless wait. Nothing happened. Gerry and Richard looked at each other questioningly.

  ‘Must be a dud,’ said Richard, shrugging.

  Gerry nodded. ‘Or perhaps the fuse went out.’

  He stood up. ‘I’ll go and –’

  Before he could move there was a dazzling flash of white light, followed by an ear-splitting ker-umph!

  Clods of turf erupted like a black fountain, some of them landing very close to us. Curlews and gulls took off in a cloud from a nearby pond and, startled from their afternoon doze, sheep and ponies bounced out of the bracken and galloped away to the horizon.

  ‘Definitely not a dud,’ said Richard with satisfaction.

  As the Season advanced and the days lengthened into early summer, cocktail parties gave way to Coming Out Balls, mostly in London to begin with – 6, Belgrave Square and Londonderry House in Park Lane were favourite venues – and then, more memorably, up and down the country. I say more memorably because there is only so much a hostess can do to make a dance in a rented house unique and splendid, whereas every country ball was different and usually involved staying with generous neighbours of the hostess, who went to great trouble and expense to entertain the parties of four, six, possibly even eight young strangers parked with them for the weekend.

  Since in those pre-disco days most country bands refused to break the Sabbath by playing after midnight on Saturday, these dances were held on Friday night, starting round about 10pm and preceded by a lavish dinner with your house-party. Drinking and driving were rarely frowned on, and in any case there was much less traffic about on country roads, so I never felt the least qualm about being driven to the dance by a young man who would in today’s terms be way over the limit. The only terror was that he would take some other girl home and leave me stranded.

  Getting out of the warm cocoon of the car and braving the lights, music and bustling throng of strangers was rather like diving into a swimming pool – all right as soon as you got your shoulders under and there was no going back. I would look desperately for someone I recognised in a sea of strange faces and feel completely rudderless, but at the beginning of the evening you could rely on being asked to dance by the male members of your house-party, which gave you a breathing space in which to identify other people you knew already.

  Supper, and judicious visits to the loo could be used to fill in wallflower moments, and round about two o’clock I would begin to look around anxiously for the man who had driven me to the dance. If he had vanished, the outlook was dire. Either I would have to ask for a lift from another couple, thus kyboshing any romantic plans they might have in mind, or seek out one of the weary chaperones charged with seeing that we all got home safely, and hang about endlessly while she checked and rechecked the scattered members of her house-party, then bundled all the stragglers into her car. Both options left one feeling a social failure.

  On Saturday it was almost a point of honour not to get up until noon, which did at least give your toiling hostess a bit of time for essential admin. Only the grandest houses had enough servants to cope with the needs of half a dozen guests, and often you would find your hosts polishing shoes or bringing in logs while the idle visitors sat about reading the newspapers.

  After a leisurely lunch, there might be a tennis or swimming party with other neighbours, plus a small informal hop with gramophone records and rolled-back carpets, at which romantic liaisons begun at the dance would firm up.

  It quickly became apparent to me that the young Englishmen I met at such parties were very very different from their French counterparts – truly another breed. It was useless to expect compliments or chivalrous ges
tures from them; but a house-party where most of the young men had been at school together would often turn into a non-stop running cabaret of jokes, fantasy, teasing and catch-phrases which made me laugh until I could hardly breathe.

  The year I came out, there was a particularly strong clique from Ampleforth, who had gone on to Cambridge, written sketches for the Footlights, and were very bright sparks indeed. They were asked everywhere, and their repartee at breakfast could be cripplingly funny. It was the same with Etonians or Wykehamists or men who had done their National Service in the same regiment: the better they knew each other, the faster and racier their wit, and since every hostess likes her party to go with a swing, they were often invited en bloc, and knew very well they would be expected to sing for their supper by keeping the table in a roar of laughter.

  House-parties and dances, race-meetings and cricket matches were jammed so close together that it was like bingeing on meringues, delicious at first but ultimately nauseating. As the summer advanced through Ascot, Wimbledon, Henley Regatta and Glorious Goodwood, I became increasingly glad of the chance to return for a few days of our normal bread-and-butter regime at Fforest Farm.

  For some reason, I never felt very well in London and if ever I had to stay there alone for the weekend, a paralysing gloom and inertia would settle on me, so I hardly had the energy to leave the flat. It was a kind of agoraphobia. Nothing seemed worth the effort of getting dressed and going out into the street.

  This may have been due, in part at least, to the extreme discomfort of the clothes considered suitable for town life. No question of slopping about in jeans and trainers: London meant tidy clothes – skirt, stockings, high heels, and very often hat and gloves as well – and that was only the outer layer. Underclothes were far worse. Even at this distance I shudder to think of cramming myself into the rubberised instrument of torture known as a ‘roll-on’ which had replaced my simple school suspenderbelts. Tube-shaped and constructed from particularly resilient elasticated mesh, it was worn next to the skin, under your pants, and kept in place by the four suspenders that connected with the tops of your stockings. All day long it squeezed you into a smaller size than Nature had designed, and every time you sat down it doubled over at the top in an agonisingly tight belt that had to be unrolled surreptitiously as you stood up again.