For an articulate man, this didn’t give his wife much of a clue as to his true feelings, but the vision Dock had of her future life was instantly shattered. She’d imagined evenings spent dancing to brass bands at the Ritz and the Criterion and had dreamed of building a network of glamorous, successful London types. Now, all of a sudden, Rupert insisted that he wanted to live in what Dock, with gritted teeth and a fixed smile, would forever refer to as ‘Deepest Darkest Devon.’
Nowadays we would recognise that Rupert was having a comprehensive nervous breakdown, but Dock was confused and angry and I don’t believe she ever forgave him. Neither Dock nor Rupert had the language to connect with each other’s points of view. At that time only those with fine, upstanding characters were respected, and this meant exposing no weakness or doubt. Those who returned from the front were supposed to consider themselves fortunate; the Great War hadn’t been won by sensitive flowers.
Rupert had calculated that he could buy the family a decent house with some land. If he sensibly invested their savings, supplemented their income by growing their own vegetables and selling their eggs, bacon, honey and apples, he could just about support the family, though they would have to stop at two children.
Dorothy dragged her feet as they moved into what, to many people, would be considered the idyllic smallholding of Higher Leigh near Kingsbridge in South Devon (it is now a luxury bed and breakfast). The house was remote and down a winding, high-banked lane, equidistant from Kingsbridge, Loddiswell and Churchstow. On its seven acres, Rupert planted a great variety of English apple trees: Beauty of Bath, Lord Lambourne, Lady Sudeley, Bramley, Cox’s Orange Pippin, Cox’s Pomona, Ellison’s Orange, Laxton’s Superb and Devonshire Quarrenden. He also bred rare breeds of chickens and grew soft fruits and flowers. Over half a century later, I occasionally bite into a rosy, home-grown apple and am transported by the taste straight back to that blissful shaded orchard of my childhood summers.
Life in Devon was indeed ‘clean’. Rupert tended to his bees and trees, played golf twice a week and spent a great deal of time sculpting rather good figurines of naked women draped in flowing fabrics, lying back on plinths. Mum later kept a few of them, and they ended up in our old barn where we kept the billiard table. I would play with them as a child, accidentally lopping off the odd hand or head. None have survived.
The Huntley Flindts managed to maintain the middle-class lifestyle expected at the time and had both a maid and a car. Rupert, always careful with money, had set up trusts to educate the two children privately. They were members of the country and golf club and their sense of civic duty impelled them to volunteer in community initiatives. Dock managed to keep her frustrations below the surface as she volunteered for the local Red Cross and entered numerous golf and tennis tournaments.
Dock tried to be a loving mother and succeeded in many ways, though she was not always conventional. She was a dreadful cook and rarely baked, but she was decades ahead of her time in extolling the virtues of raw food. ‘A salad can’t really call itself a salad unless it contains at least ten different ingredients,’ she said. Her motto was ‘pale foods are for pale people,’ and she rightly claimed that you should eat unprocessed foods whenever possible. Brown rice, brown sugar and brown flour and wholemeal bread – ‘not just brown bread,’ she insisted, ‘you need to eat the wheatgerm.’ She thought that too much salt caused heart attacks and recommended that everyone eat very little meat. The children were told to chew each mouthful of their breakfast, a homemade muesli, twenty times. ‘Much of the digestive process takes place in your mouth,’ she told them, before giving them a tablespoon of cod liver oil and sending them off to school.
Dock was keen to keep the children’s feet on the ground. She didn’t agree with the ‘deception’ of telling them about Father Christmas or the tooth fairy, and could never understand the role of magic or make-believe. Nor did the family ever have a pet of any kind. ‘I’ve never understood why people like dogs,’ she once told me. ‘You can see their bottoms!’
Years later, my husband Robert and I went to visit Granny Dock in her immaculate flat in New Milton in Hampshire, excited to tell her the news that we were expecting our first baby. We were sitting down by her electric fire, sipping tea from delicate bone china cups. She was obviously thrilled – both for us and that she could boast to her bridge club friends that grandchild number eleven was on the way.
Understanding that I had joined some inner sanctum of sisterhood, she went quiet for a minute or two and then said, ‘Did I ever tell you about the time I had the abortion?’ Robert and I sat rigid, our faces stuck in awkward smiles, wondering how much she was going to tell us. As I took a sip of tea, Granny continued, slowly at first. ‘There I was, stuck in that godforsaken backwater. Your grandfather was perfectly happy keeping himself busy with his garden and parish council work. At first, when I told him I thought I was pregnant, he was angry, blaming me for being careless. I realise now he was desperate – his well-ordered vision of an early retirement and of pottering about in the country was going up in smoke. There was no way we could afford another child. In truth, I too realised that having a third child would anchor me to Devon forever.’
Years of sadness and pent-up frustration began to show in her voice. ‘I agreed that I had to have an abortion,’ she whispered. ‘I remember it as if it were yesterday. I remember taking the train up to Blackheath and wandering up and down the lanes, trying to find the address I’d been given. I remember eventually finding the house and standing outside for ages, trying to pluck up the courage to knock.’
Rob and I avoiding catching each other’s eye. She didn’t need us to speak – she had to finish her story. ‘The woman answered the door. She didn’t really say anything other than ask if I had the cash ready. She then took me to a room behind the kitchen, and without further ado asked me to take my pants off and lie on the table. I lay there with my eyes closed, wishing I was anywhere but there. Then she got out a knitting needle and started jabbing. She jabbed and twisted, and then just kept jabbing and jabbing . . .’
‘Oh, my darling Granny. How ghastly. I’m so sorry for you,’ was my inadequate response. Shame at my lack of courage to say more made my hair on my neck prickle. Robert said nothing, his teacup frozen halfway to his mouth.
Thankfully Dock didn’t suffer from septicaemia, the life-threatening result that was common following such a brutal termination. The operation was never mentioned, and life in Devon continued as before.
Dock and Rupert worshipped Eve. She was growing up to have her mother’s impish humour, an interest in sport and a love of dancing. She would walk the two miles to church hand-in-hand with her father, trying to keep up with his massive strides. These walks were often their only one-on-one time, and while she hummed tunes and pointed out things of interest, he would use the time to impart as many Christian values to her as he could. He also taught her the importance of careful financial management.
‘Little Chimp,’ he would say, ‘what are you going to do with your sixpence pocket money this week?’
‘Two pennies for the poor, two pennies in my piggy bank and two pennies for me,’ they would chant together.
Sensitive, artistic Rupert also used these walks to impart his love of the imagination to his daughter, teaching her a poem he’d written as a counterpoint to her mother’s matter-of-fact approach to parenting.
‘To All Very Young People’
Live on in our land of make believe,
A land so enchantingly true:
For the years go fast and childhood’s past
Ere you capture what is your due.
Fairy and fantasy, let’s pretend –
Such adventures and thrills in store.
Come get your coat, pull gumboots on,
Slip out by the garden door.
Hand in hand – no, you go first,
But be careful where you tread:
Down the path to the woods beyond.
What’s that by th
e old woodshed?
Dragons or Indians; let them come,
We’ll fight them soon as seen.
Or in gentler moments, but properly dressed,
We’d welcome the Fairy Queen.
The smells in our woods are especially nice,
At times when we’re free to roam.
Oh! Which way back? Come! Let’s be quick
To mother and tea and home.
Play on in your land of make believe,
For the happiest years will fly,
And your pirates and fairy friends of today
Will return to the sea and sky.
Eve couldn’t have been more different from her brother Michael, who had inherited their father’s sensitive disposition and was a gentle giant with a tendency towards depression. Playing the violin and reading were his passions, whereas Eve was always the centre of a gaggle of giggling girls, encouraging them to take part in the shows she wrote and performed – incidentally, shows that she would then charge her family sixpence each to watch.
Unlike her brother, Eve seemed not to have a care in the world. Their physiques were very different, too – she never grew beyond a petite five foot four inches. Their only mutual interest was tennis. They played endless early morning games at the club, Eve making up for her lack of stature with a devious net game that won her many doubles matches, until she gave up playing aged eighty-eight.
In 1933, Dock realised she was pregnant yet again. The idea of taking the train back to Blackheath was too traumatic, and Clare was born nearly a decade after Eve and Michael. Their unhappy mother was now condemned to life in the country.
6
MOTHER COURAGE
In 1936, Michael was sent to Bryanston, the progressive boarding school. He arranged to come home as seldom as possible, and when he did, he reacted to the domestic tensions by locking himself in his bedroom with a book. Eve developed an acute sensitivity to negativity of any sort and reacted by becoming the joker of the family. As none of the Devon schools offered an outlet for her drama and dance interests, Dock, determined to fulfil her daughter’s ambition of a life on the stage, sent her fourteen-year-old daughter to Heatherton House, a boarding school in London that took promising young dancers. Eve was never to live at home again.
As Ted was knitting his way towards life in the army, Rupert was recalled to Woolwich as garrison adjutant. On Sundays he’d take Eve to a tea dance at the Grosvenor House Hotel on Park Lane and tried to temper her ambitions by pouring practical sense onto her dreams of becoming an actress. He also hoped that by restricting her allowance, he would tempt her back to Devon once she had finished her studies.
Eve left school when she was seventeen, her last two terms having been spent in Shamley Green, the sleepy village in Surrey that Heatherton House had moved to because of safety concerns. She was too young to join up for military service, but eager to start working. Wartime London was an exciting place for an adventure-hungry young girl – everything was so vital, and everyone was friendly and supportive. Eve moved into a ‘ladies club’ at Lancaster Gate with around forty other girls, who all shared an enormous dormitory with only dividing curtains affording some privacy. Each girl had to take a two-hour duty shift, standing on the roof as a fire watcher. Those hours spent in the cold London air, watching the powerful searchlights crisscross the black sky, the silence punctuated by the odd cry of a fox or the singing of a drunk stumbling home, were manna from heaven for Eve’s fertile imagination. With her senses heightened by the need for vigilance and the ever-present fear of an imminent ‘doodlebug’ explosion, she would spend her watch inventing grisly dramas taking place beneath the roofs around her.
The only qualification Eve gained on leaving school was her Royal Academy of Dance Diploma. The reason for her lack of academic success wasn’t simply the dismal formal schooling she received at the dance academy. Passing exams simply wasn’t in her DNA, for like Ted, she too was dyslexic. She had an agile, inquisitive mind but was unable to process information from the classroom blackboard and put it on paper. In many ways, this gene has been the making of our family – being unable to gain academic qualifications has meant that none of us has been conventionally employable, and explains our entrepreneurial drive.
Eve’s school had an agency that placed its young alumni in various stage shows. With her impish energy and ability at mime and dance, Eve was cast in most of the roles she auditioned for. Being involved in big West End productions, with all the camaraderie, glamour and drama that it involved, was Eve’s dream come true. She was in her element. But all was not so happy at Higher Leigh, where Eve’s younger sister Clare was leading a solitary life, with the family maid her only companion. When I talked to Clare about her childhood, she could only recall one happy memory – lying on her back under the cider barrel with her mouth wide open, catching the drips as they seeped through the old wooden tap. With no brother and sister at home – Michael was training to be a doctor at St Thomas’s Hospital Medical School – she craved love and warmth from her mother but Dock, now virtually a single parent with Rupert posted to London for weeks on end, had taken a job as a secretary at a local boys’ prep school.
Clare’s parents, thinking that she would be happier living with other children, sent her, aged just six, to boarding school, but the little girl was miserable there. On more than one occasion, Dock received a call from the headmistress telling her that Clare had run away. Dock would then search the Devon lanes until she spotted a diminutive figure plodding determinedly homeward. She’d scoop up her daughter and drive her back up the long gravel drive before depositing her, kicking and screaming, in the strong arms of matron and fleeing for home.
Last year, while clearing out Aunt Clare’s desk after her death, I found a bundle of letters written in childish script, tucked away at the back of her filing cabinet.
Darling Daddy
PLEASE PLEASE come down and take me out this Sunday, the 17th. PLEASE PLEASE, if you cannot come could you tell Eve to come and take me out instead?
PLEASE come its very urgent, send a postcard please saying when you will arrive and when you will go. I shall die if you don’t come. Tons of love. Clare
The image of a miserable little girl making a bid for freedom still breaks my heart. Talking to my much-loved but tough and eccentric eighty-five-year-old aunt, I tried to sympathise, saying that I understood how it felt to be brought up in a family as an ‘afterthought’.
‘Ha!’ she spluttered. ‘It’s OK for you. I wasn’t just the afterthought – I was the mistake.’
I paused for a while, unsure of what to say in the face of this awful truth. ‘Did you think Granny was unkind or cruel in any way?’ I ventured.
‘No, she was never cruel,’ Clare replied. ‘She just wasn’t at all maternal.’
During the school holidays, Clare and her mother spent their days at Thurlestone Golf Club. Clare would skip around the players as they sat having their tea in the sun, while waiting for her mother to return from her round. Thurlestone was to become the venue of a life-changing encounter for Clare, for it was here, at the age of fourteen, that she was to meet Douglas Bader, the real-life hero of Reach for the Sky and the love of her life. He was in his late thirties when they met, but it was the beginning of an extraordinary relationship that lasted until his death in 1982. To this day we speculate about its nature, but the sparkle in her eyes whenever his name was mentioned certainly hinted at intimacy.
Born in 1910, Bader was a keen sportsman who went on to be a famous flying ace during the Second World War. It has been suggested that his swaggering confidence and daredevil personality were amplified by his wartime experiences and that his fame encouraged an innate sense of superiority and a tendency to bully those less capable than himself. However, his eccentricity gave Clare a new confidence and freedom.
I learned a wonderful story about Douglas that may have related to Clare’s invitation to him to give a talk at her secondary boarding school, Cranborne Chase. Bader
was not one to temper his language, and when he was invited to give a talk at a smart girls’ school, he began, ‘So there were two of the fuckers behind me, three fuckers to my right, another fucker on the left . . .’
At this point the headmistress blanched and interjected: ‘Ladies, the Fokker was a German aircraft.’
‘That may be, madam,’ Bader replied, ‘but these fuckers were in Messerschmitts.’
Meanwhile in London, Eve was falling in love with a young fighter pilot called John Roper, whom she had met through a friend at the theatre. When he was on leave, they would go dancing at the Milroy Nightclub or the 400 Club. The intensity of wartime relationships was summed up in the way they spent their evenings: full of gaiety and laughter on meeting and then, as the evenings drew to a close and they grew aware of the danger their partners would imminently face, the dances would become slower and slower until they were dancing what they called the ‘goodnight shuffle’, doing nothing more than clinging to each other and taking the odd step. Mum describes kissing John goodnight one evening, then never hearing from him again.
Barely a family was left untouched by the war, and with each ghastly blow came the resolve of rising to the spirit of the age. It was the ‘stiff upper lip’, the ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ sort of spirit – layer upon layer of emotional pain buried under platitudes to encourage you to get back in the saddle.
Eve worked with Morecambe and Wise, who were in 1942 just beginning to form their unique double act. She remembers going to the pub with them after every show and listening as they cut their teeth, performing for their stage mates. Her final foray on the West End stage was in Sir Alan Herbert’s production, Bless the Bride.
While London was under threat, dressing up for the stage night after night began to feel unfulfilling to Eve. Being surrounded by so much excitement satisfied her passion for drama, but her life needed purpose. Being too young to sign up to one of the services, she looked for other sources of adventure. It was at this time that someone told her that the Air Training Corps were looking for people to train cadets to fly gliders. I can’t begin to understand how she thought she would be qualified for such a job – not least because the position was only open to men. But yet again, her charm shone through and she managed to convince the recruiting officer that she was capable of taking on such a role. She had turned up to the interview at the glider training centre in Heston in Middlesex wearing baggy khaki trousers, a roll-neck sweater and with her hair tucked into a cap. She may not have been disguised as a man, but she was certainly playing down her femininity. When asked if she had any experience, she explained that she had none at all but would love to learn and help out in any way she could.
One Hundred Summers Page 6