City Girl, Country Girl

by Liz Harfull

  Jeanetta and Charlie lived in the gatehouse, or lodge, that Peterson built at the entrance to his property. Jeanetta was the cook and housekeeper at the big house. When the owners were away in London, she and Charlie moved in to keep an eye on things. Meanwhile, they started a family. Their eldest daughter, Lillian, was born in 1902, followed by Doris (Wendy’s mother) in 1903, and then several years later, a son, Jack, who only survived until the age of five, after contracting polio and then pneumonia. Another son, Alec, known as Sonny, came along in 1912.

  When Doris was a child, Arnewood Towers was home to a young family, with two children similar in age to Doris and her sister. They had a nursemaid who would often take all four children out to play on the nearby common where some of the forest’s famous ponies often grazed. One day when Doris was about four, the older girls decided it would be fun to run under the stomach of one of the horses. Doris followed, but ran between the pony’s back legs instead, and the startled animal kicked her in the head. The injured little girl was taken to a nearby hospital, where they operated on her crushed skull and inserted a steel plate. It was still there, causing considerable medical interest, more than eighty years later when Doris was x-rayed in the Bunbury hospital south of Perth.

  Family life was turned on its head with the coming of World War I. Although he was by then in his early forties, and married with a family, Charlie was called up as the casualty lists mounted to the millions and the military authorities became desperate for reinforcements. He became a dispatch rider in the British Army, serving on the Western Front where he carried messages between command posts and the troops on the front line.

  Doris remembered with stark clarity the day when word arrived that her father was missing in action, believed dead. They were told that he was riding alongside another man when a shell exploded, tossing Charlie high into the air. The other man escaped with his life and reported what had happened. The news devastated Jeanetta, who wondered how on earth she was going to manage without him. She was no longer working at Arnewood Towers and she had two young daughters to raise.

  But Charlie survived. He was pulled from the shell hole by his horse, which was standing above him with its reins dangling within reach when he regained consciousness. A group of soldiers found him and took him to a French hospital. He was not badly injured, but he had lost his memory. It took him about two weeks to work out who he was and then he returned to his unit. A most relieved Jeanetta received a second letter to say her husband had been found and was alive.

  Recalling fondly the man she knew well as a child, Wendy says: ‘He used to make me laugh with his stories. “You know, those French girls in the hospital never wore underwear, and here they were bending over scrubbing the floor. What a view!” he told me.’

  As soon as she turned fourteen, Doris went into service at the manor house, like her mother before her. She was given responsibility round the clock for looking after a three-year-old girl and a brand new baby. Every morning she would bathe the infant, dress him and take him downstairs for a brief visit with his mother before returning to the nursery. Wendy saw for herself the level of care her mother would have given the child when she watched Doris bathe her own children.

  ‘Mum always had a big white apron, always starched. She would put this on for bath time for the baby, and on the table would go the bath, and the water just right, and the cotton wool and the towel laid out. And we would sit there and watch while she washed the baby. She washed the head and rinsed it, and then she’d get the cotton wool and wipe the eyes, and then a little bit of cotton wool and do the ears and the nose, put some powder on its bottom, check it all over and then put its nappy on, and she always had them in long gowns until they were about four months old. Then the baby went into its cradle and was put into the bedroom.’

  Wendy’s father, Edward ‘Ted’ Turner, also came from the New Forest. Ted was born into a reasonably well-off family with market gardens at Bashley, not far from the banks of the Solent. Ted’s father died from cancer when he was only eleven, and his mother soon married again. Her second husband apparently took control of his wife’s inheritance and quickly spent it. ‘It was the law in those days—the husband owned everything when you got married so you had no say in it. He took all the money and kicked all the boys out of the house before they even turned fourteen,’ Wendy explains, the bitterness in her voice no doubt a reflection of something she heard in her father’s tone when he recounted this period of his life. ‘My dad said it was lovely being wealthy but dreadful being poor.’

  In desperation, as soon as he turned fourteen in 1916, Ted signed up for a five-year stint in the famous Coldstream Guards, whose duties include keeping an eye on royal residences in the United Kingdom. Even though the regiment accepted such young recruits, they were not permitted to take part in active combat until they were eighteen so Ted was spared the horrors of the Western Front. By the time he was old enough for combat, the war was over. Instead, he got to stand on guard duty at the gates of Buckingham Palace, resplendent in scarlet jacket and a towering bearskin hat.

  Ted found this a dubious honour. ‘They weren’t allowed to move. To go to the toilet, they had an oilskin bag strapped to their legs and they had to wee into it,’ explains Wendy. There was one incident in particular that Ted never forgot. He was on duty, standing in the rain and cold, when two little Cockney boys came up. They looked up under his helmet and one of them said, ‘You poor sod.’ That was exactly how Ted felt. ‘He hated the army—he couldn’t get out quick enough,’ Wendy says.

  As soon as his five years were up, Ted returned to the New Forest. His stepfather wouldn’t take him in so he found somewhere to board and made his own way, growing vegetables on a small area of land belonging to an uncle.

  Ted met his future wife a few years later when he was recovering from appendicitis. She was friends with his sister Amy, who took Doris along to visit him in hospital. They had attended the same village school, but even though there was only a year’s difference between them, neither recalled knowing the other. Wendy isn’t certain, but she thinks they married within six months, as soon as her mother turned twenty-one. Doris’s parents believed Ted wasn’t good enough for their daughter and refused to attend the ceremony, but his family were there, with Amy acting as bridesmaid.

  Even though the young married couple set up home only metres from the Ansteys, Doris was pleased to be away from Jeanetta who she found very controlling. After Doris married, she would walk the long way round to avoid her parents’ house when she went to visit her girlfriend, knowing that her mother would be sitting in the upstairs window keeping an eye out. But times were very hard, with Ted and Doris taking in Amy as well as Ted’s brothers because they had nowhere to live and no money. Wendy says it was typical of her parents, who were generous to a fault, especially when it came to family.

  ‘Mum used to feed everyone, all the neighbours’ kids . . . and Dad always put his children first. He was a market gardener and his brothers were market gardeners, and they used to come to dinner on a Sunday and Mum always cooked a roast. We would all be shelling peas to help Mum get ready. Uncle Arthur sat down for lunch one day and he says to my dad, “Here!” he says. “Ted,” he says. “What’s with feeding these kids all these peas? You could get one and six a pound for them at the market. Why waste them on your kids?” And my dad said, “My kids come first. I give them the best of anything I’ve got!” And that’s why he never had anything.’

  Things changed for the better in 1938 when the Turners moved into a brand new farmhouse on Wootton Farm Estate, on the edge of the tiny hamlet of Wootton, just up the road from the market town of New Milton. Their dramatic change in circumstances came about because of the generosity of a wealthy relative. One of Ted’s aunties had promised his father when he was dying that she would make sure his children were looked after if she ever came into money. She made good the pledge when her husband died, leaving her a fortune from his earnings on the London Stock Exchange. She ga
ve Ted and each of his four brothers the choice of buying either a farm or a hotel. All of them chose to buy land and earn their living as market gardeners.

  Ted selected a four-hectare block on a new estate off Bashley Common Road, created by the recent subdivision of an old farm. With the money left over he built a fine house and fitted it out with ‘all the mod cons’. The single-storey bungalow had red-brick walls, a tiled roof and large bay windows to let in plenty of light. There were four bedrooms, a large lounge, sitting room and kitchen with hot water, gas and electricity. The aunt even provided new furniture for the house and a bicycle for each of the children. By then there were six. Lorna, the eldest, was about twelve years old, followed by Iris, Doreen, Janet, Peter and then the baby, Elizabeth Edith Wendy Turner, always known as Wendy, who was eight months old. About three years after the move came John, then Faith and Richard, followed by Mavis, the last child born in England.

  Wendy recounts with frequent gales of laughter what seems to have been a mostly idyllic childhood, despite tensions within the extended family, limited money and the impact of another war. Her earliest memory revolves around a very large cabbage. She was sitting in a royal blue pram being wheeled back from the market garden by Doreen and Janet. ‘They got this big Savoy cabbage for Mum and they stuck it in front of me. I’m sitting up in this pram and all I could see is the green light coming through the cabbage leaves so I started eating the cabbage so I could see what was going on, and they all thought it was hilarious.’

  Wendy and Peter, her elder brother by two years, formed an inseparable gang of three with John. They enjoyed enormous freedom, treating the New Forest as their own private backyard—an expansive adventure playground where they spent countless hours exploring the ancient woodland, heaths and bogs, building cubby houses and climbing trees, catching minnows in the rivers and streams, munching on nuts and berries harvested from the forest and hedgerows, and getting into the occasional scrape. ‘We used to get up very early, have our breakfast and then go out and feed the rabbits, feed the chickens, feed the ducks, feed the geese, do all our jobs and then we had the rest of the day to do whatever. We had a wonderful time,’ Wendy says.

  Peter was always in charge. He was well liked by other children and a natural leader who easily convinced his younger siblings to go along with most of his schemes. ‘He was a great organiser. He would say to me and John, “Now I want you to go and collect thistles for my rabbits, and I want you to collect the oats,” and you did whatever he said.’

  Wendy can really only remember one refusal—and that was when Peter suggested John give up his coat to protect three goats they were walking back to the farm. In a memoir he wrote many years later for his family, John recalled: ‘We got the goats but on the way home it started to get dark and the wind had come up along with driving rain. The wind was so strong it practically took my breath away . . . I thought, bugger the goats, so that was one time I didn’t do what Peter asked.’ Entrepreneurial from a young age, Peter was constantly coming up with ideas to make money. One of them was breeding rabbits and pigeons to sell at a local farmers’ market. Only about eight years old at the time, he would pack them into boxes and take them on the train. His customers were other children who didn’t get to enjoy the birds for too long. They were homing pigeons and flew back to Peter, who would sell them again the next week.

  Even the idea of confronting a German invasion of Britain didn’t faze him. He had plans to lure the enemy into one of the treacherous bogs in the New Forest, where they would sink without a trace. And he scouted out a hiding place under an old bridge. ‘There were two big sleepers, enough room for each of us to lay along,’ says Wendy. ‘Peter had one side and I had the other with John. And across the front was another sleeper that made a sort of shelf. We were going to store our food there.’ After water rats ate their initial supplies, Peter confiscated his mum’s biscuit tin. ‘I reckon its probably still there today,’ Wendy adds.

  Pausing to think about her brother, who died in 1989 at the age of fifty-four, she confesses: ‘If it wasn’t for Peter, my childhood would have been very dull. He was older and he knew best but he always looked after me and didn’t mind a girl tagging along. I used to climb trees, and do everything the boys did—swing on ropes, swing over ditches with leap-frog poles. And we used to make bows and arrows and spears.’ Great training for Wendy, who at the age of thirteen became the South of England champion javelin thrower in school sports.

  A favourite pastime for all the children was building dens, or cubby houses, using tools and ropes from their father’s shed. Wendy remembers a major project one summer which involved all the neighbours’ children. ‘We spent all summer making this den in the forest, with sticks all around, tied together. We spent hours on it. Peter took Dad’s good tin from the roof of his shed and put it across the top, and then we put clumps of soil on top of that. And then we heaped it up with bushes so it was camouflaged. We collected dead grass and bracken and all sorts of soft things to put on the floor. We worked and worked.’

  There was plenty of fun when they were younger, too. Even with so many children to care for, Doris would regularly make time to play with them. One of Wendy’s favourite memories is walking down to the woodland where there was a bank of earth. Doris would help them scoop out little shelves and then line them with moss to create a shop. The shelves would be stocked with beech nuts and acorns, and other bits and pieces scavenged from the forest floor, which the children would pretend were groceries such as sugar, ice-cream and even chocolate cakes. Then Doris would become the customer while the children served her, delighted with their salesmanship.

  A special treat was spending a day in the forest with their father, instead of going to school. He would put some apples or swedes into a hessian sack so the children had a snack while they walked. ‘Can you imagine telling a kid today that they would be eating a raw swede? Dad grew a lot of them, and they are quite sweet and they would last us all morning,’ says Wendy. Carrying the youngest child on his shoulders, Ted would lead them to the river so they could catch minnows in jam jars and then let them go. They had butterfly nets and would try to trap different species for a collection pinned on boards at home. Like many children of the day, they collected birds’ eggs, too, carefully putting a small hole in one end and blowing out the centres before storing them in a box padded with cotton wool. In the summer, Ted would show them where berries grew—the small blue-black fruit of the whortleberry, blackberries and sweet wild strawberries which grew in large patches along a nearby railway line. In winter, he taught them how to track deer and rabbits in the snow.

  ‘Dad taught us everything about the forest. We knew all the animals, we knew all the birds, the butterflies and the fruits, and what we could and couldn’t eat. We knew that we could eat the sorrel, and we would pick big purple clovers, pull the stems out and suck the ends because they were full of honey. And in our forest was a very old tumbledown woodman’s cottage, and in the garden was a cherry tree. We used to climb up into the tree and eat cherries, then we used to fill up our shirts with them and walk home.’

  Wendy was only three when war broke out. With the conflict stretching over six long years, as she grew older she became very aware of the changes it brought to her family and the place where she lived. Strategically well located on the south coast, at the height of the war the New Forest and immediate surrounding area had no fewer than twelve airfields and landing grounds, several key coastal defences, an experimental bombing range, and numerous sites favoured for military training exercises. In the lead-up to D-Day in June 1944, it was crowded with equipment and thousands of troops waiting to embark on the invasion of German-occupied France that would help determine the outcome of the war. Small village roads were widened to accommodate large military transports and areas were cleared for more camps, extra runways and even tank parking bays, which are still visible today.

  The Turners lived not far from Holmsley aerodrome, an important base for British and
American bombers. At night, the children would lie in their beds listening to the roar of the huge planes as they took off and flew low over the house with their deadly cargos bound for enemy territory. Then in the morning they would see the surviving aircraft straggle home, often visibly damaged. Sometimes the Germans returned the favour and sent bombers to destroy nearby military targets. No bombs landed close to the Turners’ home, but John recalled seeing searchlights reaching out into the black night sky and hearing the anti-aircraft guns boom into action when enemy aircraft were captured in their beams. And Wendy clearly recalls seeing the sky light up as bombs fell on the port of Southampton about thirty kilometres away. ‘We thought it was Guy Fawkes night,’ she says.

  In the evenings, the family gathered around the radio to hear the latest news and the stirring speeches of Prime Minister Winston Churchill. ‘Even the baby didn’t cry. Everything was silent for the news. We were all holding our breath, listening, because at one stage it looked like Germany was going to invade England completely,’ says Wendy. After the news came the emotive propaganda of Lord Haw Haw, the pseudonym of a notorious English traitor who broadcast from Hamburg in an attempt to demoralise the British public. While most people laughed it off, Wendy was terrified by his promise that the Third Reich was about the cross the English Channel and invade Britain while she was asleep in her bed.

  As the conflict dragged on, several members of the family became directly involved in the war effort. Lorna became a nurse with the Red Cross and Iris joined the Women’s Land Army, set up to help overcome labour shortages on farms producing vital food supplies. Even though he worked in the market garden every day, most nights Ted cycled about ten kilometres to Lymington where he was a spotter at Wellworthy’s engineering works, keeping a watchful eye out for German bombers. The factory was working at full capacity, churning out piston rings and other components for the British Air Ministry, so it was a likely target.