My parents’ courtship was interrupted by Eve’s long trips to South America, and before long both of them began to hate the weeks of separation. They’d found their match; Eve called Ted her Prince Charming, and was utterly in love. However, each time they went to stay at Bradfield, his parents reminded Ted of his dire financial position and told him they had no intention of helping him set up a family home. They bewailed the fact that he wasn’t interested in marrying the wealthy heiress Wanda Whittington, who clearly had a soft spot for their blue-eyed but impoverished son.
As ever, Wendy came to Eve’s rescue and boosted her flagging confidence. ‘Oh Evie,’ she would say. ‘Don’t worry – those old fuddy-duddies may want Ted to marry a solid Suffolk Punch, but you’ll win out in the end. He’s found his Palomino filly.’
Ted convinced Eve to give up her job as an air hostess. Planes were dropping out of the sky; it seemed suicidal to continue. With no income and a certain amount of trepidation about his future career, he proposed to Eve. Blind with love and full of youthful optimism, they were married on 14 October 1949.
Ted knew that his final law exam results would be issued while he and Eve were away on honeymoon in Majorca. Hoping to add an extra sprinkle of magic to their fairy-tale romance, he asked his father to ring him with his results. ‘Are you sure you really want me to disturb your honeymoon?’ his father asked anxiously.
‘Yes please, Dad,’ Ted confidently replied. His father did as he had been asked and called his son on opening the envelope. The young couple returned to London to face an uncertain future, for Ted had failed.
Eve recalled her happy summer in Shamley Green during the war and they managed to find and buy a workman’s cottage in the village, overlooking the cricket pitch. It was in an atrocious state of disrepair, with ceilings so low that Ted couldn’t stand up in any of the rooms, and the floors were so rotten that he had to tiptoe around with his head bent low, like Fagin out to pick a pocket or two. Nowadays it would be condemned but happily, health and safety laws didn’t exist back then. Ted enjoyed the fact that he could lie in the bath while changing the electrical fuses.
Before the mid-1960s, conception was an ever-present danger. Eve discovered she was pregnant only a few weeks after returning from Majorca – a doctor had issued her with a Dutch cap and given her sticky instructions on how to use it, but something had failed. With no qualifications and Ted still unable to earn, it dawned on them that until his career was up and running Eve would have to be the family provider. Across the village green, an elderly man called Sir Philip Gibbs lent her a garage, where she began to give after-school ballet lessons, an ill-fated attempt to bring in a steady income.
The young couple plucked up the courage to tell Sir George and Lady Branson about the baby’s imminent arrival. Aware that this news might not go down well, Ted suggested that they drive up to Suffolk to deliver it in person. It crossed my mind that Mum might have been exaggerating when she wrote of her in-laws’ reaction – she described how she overheard them saying to Ted, ‘We told you not to marry that flibbertigibbet,’ and how she walked around the garden sobbing her heart out and being consoled by her desperate husband. However, her misery was confirmed to me when cousin Michael, who was a young boy at the time, recalled hearing his parents Joe and Wendy, who were also at Bradfield Hall that weekend, threatening to leave if George and Mona carried on being so beastly to Eve. Mum said that their reaction to her pregnancy made her only more determined to succeed.
Apart from the misery of his exam retakes, Ted and Eve spent a busy few months preparing for their first child. They couldn’t afford a car and so drove around on a motorbike with Eve, her belly becoming more swollen by the week, bobbing along in the sidecar. A gang of friends came to help them lower the floors of the cottage and replace the ancient wiring, rendering their home habitable for their new arrival.
Rationing wasn’t to end for another four years, so they had to supplement their paltry meat allowance by breeding rabbits in hutches in the back garden, and they would also swap the meat for eggs. Eve loved to grow vegetables – nothing exotic, but plenty of perpetual spinach and potatoes. Their dream almost came to a sudden end one day. Always preparing for a rainy day, they’d been hoarding petrol in old cider bottles in a drawer in the kitchen – why in the kitchen, goodness only knows! Early one summer morning, heavily pregnant and sleepy after a restless night, Eve padded downstairs to boil the kettle for a cup of tea. She lit a match and whoosh, the petrol vapour in the drawer ignited. Eve screamed for Ted, who rushed in and opened the drawer, managing to slam it closed again just as a bottle exploded. A microsecond later and both of them would have been covered in burning petrol and shards of glass.
As the baby’s due date loomed, Ted was feeling under pressure. The stress of trying to pass his wretched Bar exams while simultaneously restoring the cottage caused an enormous boil to erupt on his cheek. Oh dear – the folly of a little knowledge. He decided to draw the poison from it by pouring boiling water into a cider bottle and holding the mouth of the bottle against the offending boil, understanding that as the water cooled it would reduce in volume, creating a vacuum that gently lanced the boil. His cheek was duly sucked further and further into the bottle, until it was stuck and dangling from his face. He then had to lie with his head on the kitchen table and cover himself with a towel, while Eve gleefully tried to shatter the bottle with a hammer. When the bottle was eventually smashed and the vacuum was released, Ted’s boil had turned into a bulbous angry purple egg protruding inches from his face. Eve went into labour there and then.
In truth, Mona Branson was sensitive to the couple’s plight. She was at pains not to indulge her son, but she couldn’t stand by and see the little family struggle so. When she paid them a visit to see her new grandson Richard, she quietly slipped Ted some cash so he could build a garden shed for his wife’s new venture – Eve was going into the fancy goods business.
The following years were exhausting, but idyllic. We can follow the family’s progress by looking at the photographs. At first there are plenty of black and white snaps of baby Richard, forever beaming his toothy smile. Four years later, the now-colour images include his sister Lindy – always pretty, but even back then her smile was more tentative than her boisterous brother’s. Eve, petite and with no signs of weight gain from her pregnancies, stands with a dancer’s posture in 1950s frocks, staring straight into the lens with her chin down, ever the starlet. There aren’t so many photos of Dad, who was always behind the camera, indulging his hobby. If Eve ever took a photo of Ted, he inevitably looked relaxed, a pipe hanging from the side of his mouth and his eyes twinkling. There are photos of their ‘Bumpety-bump’ car, an ageing Austin Traveller complete with running boards and an oak finish that would just about manage the trip to Devon and back for their summer holiday with Granny and Granddaddy.
While scavenging for scraps of the past that would give me an insight into their real lives, not the smiling-in-photographs lives of Rupert and Dock, I found a piece of typescript. Rupert had been an in-patient at St Thomas’s when it was commemorating its four hundredth anniversary, having had the then-shattering operation of having his prostate removed. He was asked to write about one small facet of hospital life. Apart from his childhood poem, these are the only words I have from my gentle grandfather’s pen:
Vespers
It is evening, two minutes to eight o’clock, and visitors to the ward, having seen their relatives and friends and left their gifts of flowers and fruit, are leaving silently and quickly.
A red screen is placed by a probationer nurse in its warning position covering the glass swing doors, a signal to all passing outside that the ward is now attending to its own affairs. One after the other the lights over the beds are put out by the patients themselves, and an unusual hush seems to spread along both sides of the long room. Apart from two lamps, heavily shaded with green baize, above sister’s desk and the medicine cupboard, one bright light only remains above the t
able in the centre.
Outside, at the far end, beyond the long vista of darkened beds, can be seen through the windows and over the stone balcony, the swiftly running river, dark and forbidding, and beyond the faint tracery outline of the building of the Mother of Parliaments, with rows of bright lights reflected in the hurrying waters below, suggesting that another late sitting is in progress.
In the ward, the nurses, still looking as dainty and fresh as when they came on duty many hours before, hurriedly complete whatever they are engaged in, and then silently gather around the screen and the end beds of the ward.
Across the river, the Nation’s clock commences to sound its warning of the approaching hour, and on the first echoing clang of eight, a slim figure, dressed in the darkest of blue under her snow-white apron, with lace cap and bow – sister, beloved by all – slips quietly through the doors and passed like a wraith through the semi-darkness to the centre table.
As if by a signal, all the nurses kneel down towards her – the beautiful colouring in their lovely faces, the white aprons and the irregular grouping against the background of the dimly lit scarlet screen and green shaded lights form a picture both exquisite and unforgettable.
Then in absolute silence can be heard sister’s sweet voice leading the saying of the Lord’s Prayer – a short pause and then, clear as a bell, come the words of that most comforting of evening prayers: ‘Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord, and by Thy great mercy defend us from the perils and dangers of this night, for the Love of Thy only Son, our Saviour, Jesus Christ.’
A short valedictory prayer and then: ‘Good night, everybody.’ These restful words, such a fitting ending, seem to carry with them in their simple sincerity a special message of comfort and encouragement to all those who still have a long road to travel before rejoining the busy world outside. It is over. Some of the lights reappear. Duties are resumed, but in a rather quieter tempo, for in a surgical ward the nurse’s work never ceases, day or night.
PART TWO
1959–1983
1
PEAR DROPS, ROBOTS AND BUDGERIGARS
With a certain trepidation, almost sixty years after my birth, I sit pencil in hand, poised to draw a map of my childhood village. I close my eyes and within seconds I’m there, back in Shamley Green, the village that was virtually my entire world for the first decade of my life.
Now I’m back there, skipping across the village green. An elderly man with his sleeves rolled up walks slowly behind an enormous noisy lawnmower, painting lines of alternating light and dark. The smell of freshly cut grass holds promises of a long hot summer stretching before my three-year-old self. As my map evolves, new memories appear with each stroke.
Protecting the cricket pitch is a low chain fence, the perfect height to stand and wobble on, supported by a grown-up’s hand. The pitch is surrounded by benches, the resting place for those watching fiercely fought matches with the neighbouring villages, Shalford, Wonersh or Shere. Occasionally you hear a joyous ‘Howzat?’ but otherwise the players are silent and hardly seem to move.
I remember the two pubs, the Red Lion with its thick carpet, chintz curtains, dark stained furniture and wall lights, the bulbs covered with little lampshades trimmed with pompom braiding. The Red Lion was always empty, apart from someone propping up the bar on a stool, talking in low tones to the overly made-up barmaid as she polished the glasses. Up the hill, between the church and the garage, sits the Bricklayers, all scrubbed tables, dartboard, jukebox and the smell of beer and cigarette smoke. This was where the villagers went to drink.
I was born in June 1959, by caesarean section at Mount Alvernia Nursing Home in Guildford. It was an era when the grey years of rationing were receding, but still remained ever-present in people’s minds. Money was tight. My father, his dyslexia playing on his confidence, remained uncomfortable talking in public and was struggling as a barrister. The poor man hated commuting: he first took the train from Guildford to London, then queued for the long wooden escalators to take ‘the Drain’, the short, crowded tube line that linked Waterloo Station to the City. He would then be faced with the clerk of his chambers, Crown Office in Inner Temple, who would inevitably hand him less lucrative briefs than those his confident colleagues would receive.
Mum’s plans to supplement Dad’s meagre earnings by starting a workshop to make fancy goods in the back garden were coming to fruition. Granny Mona’s money had paid for the shed and bought the basic tools needed to get the business started. Dad used his practical skills to make the basic objects while Mum, having scoured local shops and markets for cheap remnants of materials, braiding and old prints, would decorate them.
My beleaguered father would get back from his crowded commute and go straight into the workshop to run multiple sheets of eight by four-foot hardboard through his noisy circular saw, transforming them into hundreds of rectangles. He would then glue them together, one on top of the other in a Heath Robinson-like contraption, to make the outer shells that Mum would then decorate and turn into tissue-box covers. Another winner at the Fancy Goods fairs were Mum’s tea trays. Dad would make hundreds of frames that would then be glazed. Mum bought job-lots of ‘antique’ prints that would give them an air of grandeur, the felt backs a feel of luxury and the little brass handles precariously screwed onto each side a suggestion of practicality.
Easteds, our workers’ cottage overlooking the village green, was wedged snugly between cottages belonging to two other young families, the Gows to one side and the Davises to the other. Despite our nagging money worries, there was always laughter and company, with the mums happy to care for each other’s children when needed and the dads helping with gardens and household jobs. My earliest memory is of being popped into a wastepaper basket and thrown thrillingly from one daddy to the next, my giggles encouraging the men to throw me ever higher.
At the end of the terrace was Mrs Avenal’s sweet shop, and her mere name makes the memories flood back. I must have been three when my big sister Lindy bet me two pennies’ worth of pear drops to go into the shop on my own, promising to follow me a few minutes later to come and pay. I remember entering that dismal shop, the doorbell tinkling, the light barely passing through the neglected window and walking across the expanse of cracked linoleum floor. And the smell of Mrs Avenal, a memorable mix of dried urine and sherbet, filled my nose with fear and disgust. I could hear her shuffling along a dark passage towards me. I saw her hand pushing the plastic curtain to one side before her warty, whiskery face peered down at me.
‘What can I get you, dear?’ she croaked.
‘Two pennies’ worth of pear drops please,’ I managed.
She turned and began to climb a wobbling A-frame ladder to retrieve the right jar. It seemed to take an age. My mind was racing. How was she going to get back down holding the heavy jar? And where was Lindy? I suddenly thought I was going to pee myself. What should I do? Lindy had sworn she would come.
Eventually, after much effort, Mrs Avenal poured the sweets into a tiny paper bag set on her scales and fiddled with the weights, scooping in more sweets and then taking one out. Still no sign of Lindy. I looked at the bag of sweets rattling in the old lady’s shaky hand as she held it out to me, before panicking and running for the door. I raced home, yelling at Lindy and pleading with her to tell me why she hadn’t turned up, but she just threw her hands up in the air and roared with laughter. ‘Only joking!’, she said. I never went into Mrs Avenal’s shop again. It was my first lesson in shame – the shop closed soon afterwards. Mrs Avenal was no more.
Richard was already away at his boarding prep school, Scaitcliffe, when I was born. Life became electric when he came home. His best friend was a boy called Nik Powell, who lived in a cottage at the end of the green. They were forever going off on adventures, losing their bikes in rivers and getting stuck up trees. Nowadays, hyperactive children are diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and are considered somehow handicapped; but my parents, although
stretched by their super-charged son, revelled in his enthusiasm and tried to channel his seemingly ceaseless energy.
Each hour of the school holidays revolved around setting Richard challenges.
‘Rick, please could you bike to the post office in Guildford to catch the last post with this brief?’
‘No worries, Dad.’
‘Can you go down to the river to catch some trout for supper, Rick?’
‘Will do, Mum.’
‘The Vicar asked to see you about helping Judge Jellyneck with his garden.’ And off he’d merrily go.
No one was safe if Richard wasn’t kept busy, especially his little sisters. Lindy and I would sleepily pad upstairs to bed, shouting last goodnights to Mum and Dad. And as we fumbled our way to turn on the light, Richard’s creepy hand would be waiting for us on the switch.
‘Aaarrrggghh!’ he would shout, the terror skinning us alive. I remember him reading us tales by Alfred Hitchcock as our bedtime story, loving the effect he had on us as he described chilling scenes of fiendish murder.
Poor Lindy. Being closer to Richard in age meant she bore the brunt of his practical jokes. Although never unkind, he just couldn’t resist pulling a leg if one was there to be pulled. Rather than get used to the teasing, Lindy became more and more sensitive to it. I don’t blame her for occasionally taking it out on me – I must have been a nuisance to have around, and I’m sure I deserved to be kept in order.
The winter of 1963 was bitter. Snow lay on the ground throughout December and January, and well into February. Richard spent the Christmas holidays building an igloo, complete with a tunnel entrance, and I was his little four-year-old elf helper.
One Hundred Summers Page 8