by Diana Athill
Alongside the drive leading down to the lower stable yard there was a tall beech hedge, looking at first sight like the garden’s end. It was in fact the beginning of the most important part of it: the kitchen garden. Just through the gate in the hedge there was on the left an apple orchard and on the right a rather disorderly space containing the aviary in which Gran’s ringdoves lived, the big frame in which her parma violets were grown, the melon and cucumber house, and in the background (I think) various kinds of manure and compost heaps. The parma violet frame was impressive. I suppose they are not easy to cultivate (one never sees them nowadays), but Mr Wiseman was clearly an expert: the intensely fragrant flowers were large and grew profusely for what seemed like the whole year. They were Gran’s favourites. Beside her chair in the drawing room there was always a silver bowl full of them. It can’t really have been there all through the year, but it is impossible to picture her sitting there without it . . . and any violet I have sniffed at since then has been a sad disappointment.
Once you were past the melon house you came to the walled garden proper, with the other greenhouses and the long, low potting shed on your right, which was always in perfect order and, unlike most modern potting sheds, contained no chemicals except for a small sack of Epsom salts. Muck, leaf mould and the hoe: those were Mr Wiseman’s weapons (with, of course, other hands to wield the hoe; its chip-chip-chip was almost always to be heard). In the eighteenth century William Cobbett wrote a didactic book about gardening which included a plan of the ideal kitchen garden. Many years after I had grown up and was living in London, I came across it, and to my delight recognized the Ditchingham kitchen garden in every detail; except that where we had the melon house, he had a most elaborately composed ‘hot bed’ on which to grow melons. The Ditchingham garden had quite obviously been laid out according to the instructions in his book, with that one improvement added.
It was walled on three sides, the fourth being sheltered by the apple orchard and the large cage for soft fruit, where the raspberries, strawberries and currants could flourish, protected from birds. A stream bisected the garden. Before the stream came through the left-hand wall, and after it went out through the right-hand wall, it was just a large ditch with water at its bottom between rough grassy banks. For the width of the garden it was a smooth little canal, full to the brim between brick banks. This was achieved by a weir at the point where it left the garden, which controlled the water’s flow to the exact extent that produced a full canal and a gentle outflow over the weir. The canal was crossed at three places by little iron bridges – the bridge nearest the weir had a plank bridge beside it, the purpose of which I don’t know, although it was certainly more comfortable than its iron neighbour to sit on, with feet dangling in the water, during our many tadpole and newt fishing sessions. On one side of the canal was a wide herbaceous border, handsome although it was there only for picking, as were the sweet peas. The rest of the walled garden was devoted to exquisitely grown vegetables, and the walls to espaliered fruit.
A well-cultivated walled kitchen garden is beautiful. It has a peculiar serenity derived from its purpose, not unlike that of a church, which you feel as soon as you enter it . . . or rather, that was how it used to be, when its purpose, the sustaining of a household, was real. For a good many years now, that purpose has ceased to exist, wiped out by the patterns of modern living, so it is pointless to regret the fact that Ditchingham’s kitchen garden has been replaced by a very lovely pleasure-garden; but I feel it a privilege to have known it while it was still fulfilling its original purpose, because it was – it really was – a wonderfully thought-out and maintained fabrication of great beauty. There was not a single part of it that did not function exactly as it was meant to.
That was no thanks to us, the children, though we did play our parts properly up to a point. There were certain things which we were supposed to do, and we did them. During summer, for instance, it was the custom that the women and children of the house picked the strawberries and raspberries that were to be eaten that day, collecting them into big, cool cabbage leaves, and they also picked the sweet peas, which had to be done regularly if they were to be kept flowering as long as possible. No hardship there – indeed, a good deal of pleasure, particularly among the raspberries, because there was no rule against nibbling as you went along. Strawberries were slightly less enjoyable because of the necessary stooping or squatting. Towards the end of the season it did become a bit of a chore, particularly with the sweet peas because their stalks became shorter and shorter, which made big fat bunches less rewarding, but I don’t remember ever thinking of going on strike. However, although we didn’t leave undone that which we ought to do, we did do a good many things we ought not to do, particularly Pen and me, who prided ourselves on being connoisseurs of peaches.
The peaches grew against the far wall (against which the vinery was built: it faced south so got the full benefit of the sun). Next to the peaches were the huge yellow pears greatly valued by Gramps, each of which would be wrapped in white muslin by Mr Wiseman to protect it from wasps. Pen and I never stole a pear because, I suppose, that muslin bestowed on them some kind of semi-magical untouchability, but we kept a sharp eye on the peaches, and struck as soon as they were ripe. There was a convenient little door in the wall near where they grew, leading into the Cedar Walk, the strip of ornamental woodland that girdled the kitchen garden and was the end of the garden as a whole, and having grabbed our chosen peaches we would dart out of the door into the Cedar Walk, where we could guzzle them in safety. ‘I’ll tell your granny on you!’ Mr Wiseman would roar if he saw us, but it wasn’t that threat which alarmed us because we knew how mild Gran’s scolding would be; it was the force of Mr Wiseman’s anger. To him we were pestilential little nuisances who deserved a good smacking, and we felt it.
Stealing the grapes was much harder. The vinery door was often left open to give them air, and there was a stepladder handy, but manoeuvring the ladder into place, climbing it, choosing the place in a bunch where the nipping-out of a grape would be least noticeable (taking a whole bunch was unthinkable) – all that made darting impossible, so we did it very rarely. And as far as I was concerned there was a slight impulse to be protective of the grapes, because Gran had taught me how to thin them. They, like the roses, gave her the chance to get her hands on her garden. If the bunches were to reach perfection, halfway through their ripening a good half of the grapes had to be cut out, so that none of those left touched a neighbour. The result looked terrible, poor skinny little bunches which must surely perish; but, ‘No, no, don’t stop,’ Gran would urge, and of course she was right. The bunches when fully ripe were marvellously shapely groupings of big plump grapes, each one perfect within a perfect whole. It was hard to decide which was more delicious, the green or the purple. I think it was really the green, because they were true muscats, but the purple were so beautiful that one seemed to be tasting their appearance.
The other things we stole were not the figs, but gooseberries. The fig tree grew next to our escape door and bore a lot of fruit because, according to Gramps, it had been planted properly with a dead donkey under its roots; and it may have been the thought of that poor donkey that prevented me from liking figs very much until I was older. The gooseberries were in a second fruit cage at the edge of the lower orchard (cooking apples and quinces), which was outside the walls of the kitchen garden – a sort of overspill. There were little hard green gooseberries, good for cooking but very sharp uncooked, small round red ones which were pleasant enough, and very large golden ones which were sweet and succulent. Stealing those was boring because no one minded – they were not considered precious – but we did it quite often when the Golden Balls were at their best. Apart from them, the lower orchard offered no temptations, but one tree became, to me, special. When I reached my teens we lived for some years in the Hall Farm, just across the park from Gran’s house, and walked back and forth between the two houses every day, often more than once
, passing through that orchard every time. Close to the path, just before one crossed the stream to cut through a corner of the Cedar Walk into the back park, there was a very old apple tree which leaned over the path and bore huge emerald-green cooking apples. One day, as I stooped to go under its branches, I came face to face with a group of these apples, and for some reason was suddenly acutely aware of how amazing they were. I stood quite still, gazing at them – gazing and gazing. It was as though I could hear them Being, as though something must be about to happen because of them . . . I think it was the nearest I ever came to a mystical experience. It didn’t happen again, but left me with a secret respect and affection for that tree – and may have been the beginning of a feeling that trees are as much living things as animals are, which I have to this day.
In the Cedar Walk, of course, the trees ruled. You entered it from that lower orchard, or from the kitchen garden, or from the back drive. At that end it was a dense, almost impenetrable mass of yew, laurel and box, but it allowed itself certain frivolities: beside the gate into it, for example, there were two sources of exceptionally sweet scent, a sweet briar and a syringa (nowadays we would call it a philadelphus), and you soon came to a neat little island of lawn at the centre of which there stood a tall and shapely red may tree, an elegant surprise. Opposite there was a sprawl of honey-scented yellow azaleas, and then a group of bamboos on the edge of the stream, where it was just about to slip under the wall and become the kitchen garden canal. Across the stream the Cedar Walk proper began, announced by two handsome beeches, one on either side of the broad, mossy path, and then came the cedars, spaced out beside the path – I can no longer remember how many of them, but think it was six or seven. Between them and the kitchen garden was a small forest of tall yew trees, not densely crowded together, but enough of them to produce a darkness, and on the other side of the path a narrow strip of shrubs and smaller trees separated the Walk from the park. Where it came to its orchard end there was a group of rhododendrons, a big holly tree, and a row of smaller beeches beside the stream, on one of which we had all carved our initials.
The Cedar Walk had been planned and planted by someone who was never going to see it – not him, nor his children, nor even his children’s children, though they would have had a clearer view of what it was going to be. What amazingly generous confidence in the future those eighteenth-century landscape designers had! By the time my great-grandfather bought the house their dream had become reality: there was this serene, sheltered, splendid walk where the ladies of the house could take healthy exercise without dirtying their shoes, and the gentlemen could retire to think their thoughts inspired by woodland privacy. (When during the Second World War the house was taken over by the Army, one of the officers who was there for a while told me that he imagined himself pacing that walk with a copy of Horace’s Odes in his hands. Need I say that I fell in love with him.) We children, when we stalked each other, birds’-nested, climbed trees, dammed the stream or just idled in the Cedar Walk, were inhabiting a two-hundred-year-old dream: a place planned to support not only its inhabitants’ bodies, but also their minds – perhaps even their souls. And we were too young to perceive how near that dream was to reaching its end. How profoundly lucky we were! And how lucky Ditchingham Hall has been to pass into hands that can steer it out of that disappearing dream into a life that belongs to the present.
There was a time, after my uncle’s death, when it looked as though this was not going to happen. I remember walking in the park, looking at the empty house – it’s extraordinary how heavily the emptiness of a house declares itself – and finding it painful beyond words. Not for anything would I have gone into the abandoned garden, and my mother and my uncle’s other surviving sister could hardly bring themselves to think about what might be going to happen. The feeling was a strange one: not just regret that a lovely house might vanish, but a sense that all of our past lives that it had contained would vanish with it. Not a rational feeling on my part, given how far the realities of my life now were from anything to do with that place, but I was surprised at how powerful it was. It was a great relief when we learnt that my uncle’s daughter and her husband had decided to move into the Hall: a far from light decision, given its size, and how much it needed modernizing. It was as though something in ourselves, not just the house, had come alive again.
All this reminds me of an absurdity. I think I was thirteen. For some unremembered reason I was alone in the back park on a lovely spring day, sprawling on the grass among daisies, wallowing in the feeling of how much I loved this place. If only it could one day be mine! And I began to wonder if that could ever happen. Disregarding tiresome matters such as income, and supposing inheritance within our family would follow the same pattern as inheritance in the royal family, who – I asked myself – would have to die before it came to me? My mother being my grandparents’ youngest daughter, it soon became evident that it would be everyone, even my brother, because would he be likely to accept that I being older than him prevailed over his being male? Not a hope! He was as devoted to the place as I was, and even more ruthless. The whole lot of them would have to go except for my younger sister . . . and would it be acceptable for me to pray for such a holocaust? No, of course it would not. So: it would never, never, never be mine, and that was that.
One of our unfortunate governesses used sometimes to exclaim in despair, ‘Why, oh why, can’t you behave like Rational Beings?’ I think it was at that moment in the back park that rationality set in and began to replace daydreams with an appreciation of what I really owed, and still owe, to having spent so much of my youth in that dear place.
Post-War
It annoys me when someone describes this country in the late 1940s and 1950s as being dreary, an opinion usually based on the continuation of rationing for some years after the war’s end. People who see it like that can’t have lived through the war. Those of us still alive who did so see it differently.
I was twenty-one when the war began, twenty-seven when it ended, and during one’s twenties a year is much longer – very much longer – than it is in later life (I can vouch for the fact that by the time you are in your late nineties it flashes by in a trice). It appears from the records that some of the men responsible for running the war sometimes envisaged us losing it, but I don’t think many ordinary people did (God knows why not) and I’m sure I never did; but I did quite often feel that it was never going to end. Greyness, joylessness, sadness swerving in and out of despair, being forced endlessly to endure: all that had become what Life was. And I could see no end to it. Because I didn’t want to stop being alive, I avoided as much as possible dwelling on this miserable condition, but that didn’t stop me being in it. So when the war did in fact end, what I remember most clearly is standing in Piccadilly in a crowd of jubilant people, telling myself: ‘You’ve got to believe it, you must make yourself believe it – IT’S OVER,’ and realizing that that belief had not yet fully dawned.
That was on VE day (Victory in Europe). By VJ day (Victory in Japan) the wonderful truth of Overness was shining out, so much so that it blinded me to the horror of those bombs on Japan, and I was able to romp down the Mall with a group of friends to yell in wholehearted joy for the royals to come out on their balcony. The vast crowd gathered there was so benignly happy that there was no jostling or shoving, and although many people were forced to stand in the beds of geraniums in front of the palace, The Times next morning reported that none of the plants had been damaged. In spite of those Vs, it was not Victory that was being celebrated. It was peace, the return of Life to what it ought to be.
It is true that the return was slow, but how, after all that we had been through, could it have been otherwise? It would have been daft to expect speed. Much better to enjoy getting gradually better and better, getting more and more for each coupon in your ration book, knowing that before long you would be throwing that book away. It is true that on my first visit to Italy I did notice that shop windows in Flo
rence were full of things still absent from shop windows in London (oh, those pastries!), and that the people of Florence were ahead of us in repairing bomb damage; but all I can remember feeling about that is how much I enjoyed what I was seeing. Everything was enjoyable because I was abroad, I was travelling, as I had lost hope of doing. ‘But,’ says gloompot, ‘all you could take with you was a mere £25, the control of currency was so strict.’ Yes, of course. But was it not astounding how much you could do on £25, particularly if you were young? I was already too old for sleeping on beaches or under haystacks, as my younger cousins did, but I could happily make do with the most modest pensioni or bed-and-breakfasts and thought nothing of sitting up all night in trains – had in fact some of the most marvellous holidays in my life, and could not have afforded to take more money with me if I’d been allowed it, so there was no hardship there.