My Animals (and Other Family)

by Phyllida Barstow

  Then there was the question of how to spend a weekend in London. Far from there being too little to do, there was such a bewildering choice that I would find it impossible to decide whether to go to a film or a museum or exhibition or concert or play, whether to ring up a friend or go shopping. I would fiddle around in the flat, reading old Georgette Heyer paperbacks and eating yoghurt and potted shrimps, which Daddy always ate for breakfast in the touching belief that they were not only slimming but would make you live for ever. Morning would turn into afternoon, afternoon into evening, and finally it would be time to go to bed having wasted the entire day.

  As the hours ticked by I would become ever more zombified, until I settled for the same solution as A.A. Milne’s shipwrecked sailor. And so in the end he did nothing at all/ But sat on the shingle wrapped up in a shawl/ And I think it disgraceful the way he behaved/ He did nothing but sit there until HE WAS SAVED!

  The sound of Daddy’s key in the door would galvanise me into normal life again, and I would feel so ashamed of having wasted the whole weekend that I would invent a completely fictitious account of what I had done in the last two days.

  Back at the Fforest, new horses more suited to carrying grown-ups were gradually taking over from the few old favourites such as Taffy and Sally who had survived Mummy’s economy drives.

  Daddy weighed fifteen stone and had a dodgy hip, so it had taken much expenditure in trial and error to find a horse on which he would enjoy pottering about the farm at weekends. Time and again Mummy would acquire an allegedly well-mannered, surefooted weight-carrier, only to discover that it was too keen, or joggled his hip, or refused to stand still while he got on and off, and back it would go to Hereford market. When at last she bought Peter, a big bay horse with white socks and a dash of Clydesdale blood, who had none of these defects, it was something of an Eureka moment, and for about six months everyone was happy.

  Then Daddy woke one morning with his eyes full of tears, having dreamed – as he told Mummy – ‘That you sold Peter and bought some rotten little thoroughbred for Phyllida.’

  Of course she indignantly denied planning to do any such thing, but as it turned out, Daddy’s dream was as prophetic as Joseph’s. While checking the sheep one day, Harold the tractor-driver caught sight of Peter chasing a bunch of calves about the field on the other side of the road, and before he could intervene, the horse cornered one and deliberately smashed its skull with a pawing stroke of his ironshod hoof.

  That was a very black mark. The calves were removed out of harm’s way, and everyone watched anxiously to see if the act of violence was a one-off. Alas, no. Peter was next seen chasing sheep, who shouldn’t have been in his field but had filtered through a glat in the hedge. A week or two later he turned his attention to the other ponies in with him, harassing them, biting and striking out with his forelegs like a stallion, and the sad truth became apparent that some kind of mental – or possibly sexual – kink meant he simply wasn’t safe with other livestock.

  Scanning the ‘Horses for Sale’ and ‘Wanted’ column in the Hereford Times Mummy spotted a farmer offering to exchange a five-year-old thoroughbred mare for a strong cob, and the opportunity seemed too good to miss. While Daddy was away in London, Peter went off in the trailer to his new home, and Mummy returned triumphant with a beautiful gentle chestnut called Pendant, by a high-class sprinter named Golden Cloud, out of a middle-distance mare, Mary’s First. The story was that she had been left with the farmer in settlement of a debt, but wasn’t up to his weight.

  ‘He said Peter was just what he was looking for,’ said Mummy, and no-one quite cared to ask whether she had made Peter’s new owner aware of his failings.

  Unfortunately, it soon turned out that Pendant had failings of her own. She was the first thoroughbred I had ever ridden and her smooth surge of speed was an eye-opener. As we zoomed round the paddock wild fantasies entered my head. We would win the flapping races at Erwood, the Hereford All-Comers, the Newmarket Town Plate, but the moment I pulled her up to open the gate these hopes collapsed. Her sides heaved in and out, then she seized the gate’s top bar with her teeth, braced her neck and gulped in air as if in the throes of hiccups.

  ‘Wind-sucker,’ said Mummy regretfully when I reported this odd behaviour. ‘So that was why he tied her up so tight in the trailer. Pity… it did seem a bit too good to be true. Well, we’re stuck with her now. We’ll have to see what we can do and keep her away from the other horses or they’ll all copy her.’

  This was much easier said than done. We tried putting a special collar on her that tightened on her windpipe when she sucked air, but it made no difference. She would latch on to any horizontal that she could get her mouth round – the stable door, the bars of the bull-pen, even a branch would serve the purpose – and rock back and forth in apparent ecstasy as she gulped, but it blew out her belly and did her wind no good at all, and it proved impossible to get her fit. She reminded me very much of Cally – so beautiful, so deeply addicted, so difficult to help. Eventually Mummy decided to put her out to grass with the pensioners who weren’t likely to catch her bad habits, and there her career stagnated until Bridget came to the Fforest.

  ‘Why not get her in foal?’ she said. ‘Of course, you’d have to wean it early, before it started to copy her.’

  What then? wiser heads might have asked, but I leapt at the suggestion. Pendant was too young and beautiful to be put down simply because she was a bouche inutile, but reading the runes I guessed Mummy’s thoughts were going that way. We found out that a stallion called Iena II, who had won several races, was working that season for the Hunter Improvement Society and doing a round near Ledbury, serving mares for a fraction of his usual fee, so I made an appointment to meet him at the farm where he stopped to bait – lunch – when Pendant came in season.

  Looking back, I can see we were incredibly lucky that the whole operation went so smoothly. Iena’s handler was a tall, taciturn weather-beaten man of sixty-odd named Ted. Six days a week he would leave his permanent base at Ludgershall, where mares had been brought overnight to be served, and lead the stallion by tracks and minor roads to the Howe, some eight miles away. There they would feed and rest, after which Iena would serve any mares waiting there for him, and set off again on a circular route to another collecting point, repeat the process, and return to Ludgershall for the night. Both horse and man looked lean and extremely fit on this routine.

  We had about an hour to wait before they turned up at the Howe, Ted swinging up the lane leading a dashing, long-legged dapple-grey with black points, who danced along beside him as if on steel springs. As soon as Pendant scented the stallion she began to neigh, tossing her mane and stamping restlessly.

  ‘Aye, she’s ready,’ grunted Ted, peering into her loosebox.

  He fitted felt shoes on to her hind feet as a precaution, but there was really no need. Far from kicking her suitor, she received his overtures with every sign of pleasure, giving little playful squeals and grunts as he nipped and nuzzled her, and standing like a rock when he mounted, his long, well-muscled neck stretched in an arc over her as he gently gripped her crest with his teeth.

  There were no other mares waiting, and Ted gave the lovers ten minutes’ grace before quietly leading Iena away, while Bridget and I sighed at the romance of it all and put Pendant back in the trailer.

  The whole episode seemed so like a dream that we could hardly believe anything tangible would come of this brief encounter, but eleven months later almost to the day, Pendant foaled a neat little filly, almost black at birth but later dapple-grey like her sire, whom I named after another of Napoleon’s great battles, Borodino.

  I’m afraid the fact that I can’t remember what happened to Pendant thereafter suggests she was indeed put down soon after her foal was weaned. All that was far in the future, however, as the Season began to peter out after glorious Goodwood. Debs and their Delights ebbed away from London as sun-and-sea based holidays beckoned. Suddenly, unnervingly, the d
ate of my own dance at Chapel House was upon us.

  We had chosen the Friday before August Bank Holiday, (then at the beginning rather than the end of the month) which was traditionally a time of parties and jollification in the Wye Valley, its central event and principal raison d’être being the two-day needle match between Builth Cricket Club and a scratch XI raised by David Gibson-Watt, the local MP who was also Secretary of State for Wales. Up and down the Valley, friends and neighbours had responded nobly to Mummy’s dance invitations, offering to entertain house parties throughout the long weekend, and an immense amount of correspondence both written and telephoned had gone into distributing equal numbers of girls and boys among the houses, briefing guests on where they were staying, train times and so on, and their hosts on whom to expect.

  A marquee was hired and sited on the terrace and lawn between the house and chapel, with the corner where the venerable Mr Pilbeam’s band would sit perilously poised over the Whee-air Jump. Daddy persuaded five of the staff from the Garrick Club to take charge of the wine, both flowers and catering were provided by local firms, and all crockery and cutlery was firmly stamped Shufflebotham. (Years later coffee spoons with this logo would still be turning up in the flowerbeds.)

  The weather looked promising. Everyone was pitching in to help in a thousand ways, and I felt confident that this dance, at least, was going to be fun from start to finish. No question of facing a roomful of strangers and wondering what to say. Here we were at home, secure among friends. Everyone knew everyone else in the Wye Valley, and no-one would dream of making snarky remarks if the drink ran out or the band played the wrong tunes.

  Another cause of pleasure was my dress. Granny had given me a dream of a ballgown, made to measure by her own London milliner, Leila Read, who had translated my vague instruction that it should look like a cascade of water flowing over the Claerwen Dam into a most glorious creation. Descending tiers of gold-edged, gold embroidered white muslin flounces swirled out from a strapless bodice, perfectly fitted, with a dark blue ribbon under the bust and the cleavage defined by a pink rose. As soon as I tried it on, morale soared. It was the most beautiful dress I had seen all through the Season.

  Mummy and Daddy checked lists and ticked off their Jobs to Do memoranda. ‘Have a think about what we might have forgotten,’ Mummy said, and we all racked our brains and shook our heads. As far as we could tell, every angle was covered, nothing left to chance. Nevertheless one large fly lurked in the ointment.

  Immersed in preparations for the dance and shamefully uninterested in politics anyway, I had been only peripherally aware of rumblings of trouble over the Suez Canal. I knew that Egypt resented British suzerainty there, and that we were determined to hang on to it. But all the same it came as a surprise when President Nasser, who looked like a dark, leanjawed wolf, announced on July 26th that he had nationalised the Suez Canal Company.

  The British press was outraged and went into full jingo mode. All the following week the Suez Crisis dominated the headlines, the general opinion being that the Egyptians wouldn’t be able to run the Canal Company for toffee nuts and would soon have to hand it back.

  None of this seemed to affect us directly but on August 2nd, the very day before my dance, the picture changed abruptly. The Government announced the recall of reservists, and all leave for the Armed Services was cancelled as preparations were made to take the Canal back by force.

  This threw our carefully planned house-parties into chaos. The sudden absence of soldiers and sailors (I didn’t seem to know any airmen) opened up great gaps in the guest list, since we had been relying on Gerry and David and many of their handsome, uniformed friends to balance the hordes of debs I had invited from London.

  Prospects for the dance looked black, but Mummy wasn’t beaten yet. Like the feastgiver in the parable whose guests refused his invitation, she began to comb the highways and byways for replacements. Up and down the Wye valley, any man with a dinner jacket in his wardrobe, from sprightly eighty-year-old generals to boys still at school, was hastily telephoned and invited, and bless their hearts they rallied round with a will.

  And then on the six o’clock news, when all the placements had been rearranged, we heard the invasion of Suez had been put on hold. Our military guests could have come after all – but then, of course, it was too late. Even if they left London at once, they would be stuck at Hereford around midnight. Of all the missing National Servicemen only David Caccia actually made it, arriving by taxi from Hereford just as the dance was running out of steam at 2 am. It was an heroic effort and he said it was worth it, even though he was dead tired and the fare cost him £12 – in those days an enormous sum.

  I suppose in the end it all went pretty well, though when we came to compare notes afterwards, each of us had such diverse memories that we might have been at different dances. I remembered with horrible clarity the thin plume of smoke rising from a glowing cigarette stub that had fallen on the drawing-room hearth rug, and the scramble to stamp it out. Mummy recalled the frightful crash as a waitress misjudged the length of the scullery draining-board, and put down a whole tray of glasses just off the end of it, and also her tussle to get the band to play an extra hour after the agreed time. Daddy’s worst moment had been finding one of the waiters stretched out on Granny’s chaise longue among the ladies’ coats, totally blotto. With the help of a neighbour, he had manhandled him downstairs and into the old servants’ hall, and wedged the door shut until the last of our guests had departed.

  So ended my Season, for although the parties continued sporadically for the rest of the summer the shades of the prison-house had begun to loom. It was time, high time, I began to earn my living.

  Ever since, at the age of nine, I had won a competition in Collins Magazine, which required you to match close-ups of animals’ eyes to the proper owners, I had wanted to be a journalist.

  In the intervening years I had never wavered from this somewhat arbitrary choice, and that was why my parents, who admired consistency, had given me a portable Olivetti typewriter on whose strangely spongey keys I learned to touch-type at fair speed while I was still at school. Short-hand – also essential to a journalist – was not so easily acquired, but I jibbed so hard at the suggestion of going to secretarial college that Daddy persuaded his partners in Trower, Still, & Keeling to find me a job in their typing pool where I would, he hoped, pick up this useful skill.

  A vain hope, alas. Like maths, shorthand simply refused to stick in my mind. I couldn’t get the hang of listening to the sounds of words without bothering about their sense, and though I could produce a fairly accurate draft of what had been dictated by relying on my memory, it wouldn’t actually be what had been said, and this drove the two young articled clerks for whom I worked to tooth-gnashing distraction. They hadn’t the clout to fire a partner’s daughter, but I know they would have liked to, and they encouraged me to take time off to go for interviews with magazine editors, hoping no doubt to get rid of me as soon as possible.

  Aunt Nancy, then Ambassadress in Washington, had powerful friends in the world of fashion, and kindly pulled strings to secure me an introduction to Beatrix Miller, then editor of Vogue. I found her frankly terrifying, with her glossy hair and quick, sharp questions, very grande dame in her enormous, pale-carpeted, minimally furnished office, and I was relieved when she said she didn’t think I was suited to work on Vogue.

  Much more to my taste was the interview which Michael Gilbert, one of Daddy’s partners who also wrote detective stories, arranged for me with Miss Sutherland (Peggy to her friends and DMS to everyone else in the office), who not only edited the monthly magazines Woman’s Journal and Argosy, but was also the only female director of the Amalgamated Press. She was far more approachable than Miss Miller, seemed pleased when I admitted that reading was my favourite pastime, but taken aback when, offered the choice of a job on one of her magazines, I unhesitatingly plumped for Argosy.

  This was regarded as something of a backwater by
the fashionistas of Amalgamated Press, but it suited me just fine. From Monday to Friday, from 9.30 to 5.30 with just an hour off for lunch, I devoured short stories submitted by literary agents or aspiring authors, wrote reports on them, and either sent them back whence they came or supervised their inclusion in the next month’s magazine. For what hardly seemed like work at all, I was paid £8. 17s per week, a splendid advance on the fiver from Daddy’s office, and though I sometimes left the office feeling quite woozy from spending so much time in fictional worlds, the half-hour bus journey from Farringdon Street to Marble Arch – it cost 3d. – had the effect of bringing real life back into focus.

  It was a leisurely, civilised introduction to journalism. The staff was small, friendly, and entirely female, consisting of the editor and her secretary plus a features editor, chief sub-editor, and two sub-editors – me and another girl my age – but considering that the format of the magazine never varied apart from the colour of the cover, and its content was entirely written by outsiders, we could and should have done twice the work in half the time.

  Down the corridor the offices of Woman’s Journal were an entirely different environment, full of drama, hustle and bustle, with photographers dashing in and out, people telephoning with their spare hand blocking the spare ear to shut out the din, doors slamming, the Chief Sub throwing tantrums, heaps of dresses draped on chairs and desks, an air of urgency and expectancy whenever the door of the Editor’s office was flung open. A tremendous fuss was made over things that I couldn’t see mattered: whether the figures referred to in a caption were numbered from the left or right, or whether the Cookery Pages were before or after the Fashion Pages in the front of the book. It was a relief to retreat to the three rooms occupied by Argosy where only the rustle of turning pages and an occasional telephone call broke the silence.