The role of little helper was one I played throughout my early childhood. Lindy spotted that I was eager to please and turned me into her robot. ‘Robot, come here,’ she’d command.
‘Beep, beep,’ I would reply as I walked, stiffly, towards her. She would turn me around, press a few imaginary buttons on my back and then say, ‘Robot, go and make me a cup of tea.’
‘Beep, beep,’ I would happily say, and off I’d go to do her bidding.
I beeped around for months, doing her odd jobs – making her bed, fetching her homework and turning the oven off if she was cooking. Then, one day, reality dawned and I told her my batteries had run out. It was the end of an era – my innocence was slipping away. But I still had plenty of lessons to learn.
When I was nearly five years old, in the spring of 1964, our family moved across the green up Wood Lane, to Tanyard Farm. My father was reluctant, but Mum persuaded him that we should move, enticing him with the promise of outbuildings for his workshops and reassuring him that she would take on all responsibility for managing the house. He’d have been happy to remain at Easteds, but we children were growing – besides, Mum had vision. Dad’s beloved Uncle Bill had died, leaving him his fishing rods and a legacy of £4,000, and they managed to get a mortgage for the other £10,000 they needed. The timber-framed house stood on a small hill, fifty yards back from the lane. Like many English farmhouses, each generation had had a hand in building the odd extension, or raising ceilings and adding windows. Tanyard Farm was a hotchpotch with an Elizabethan heart and Edwardian wings, surrounded by a muddle of timbers, brick, stone and tile.
As soon as we moved in, Mum set Dad to work knocking down the wall between the dark dining room and the study; light soon began to pour in. And once he’d got started with his sledgehammer, Dad couldn’t stop.
‘Let’s take off all the modern rendering around the fireplace,’ he enthused. ‘The old stones behind it are so beautiful.’
Once he started, he couldn’t stop. He happily spent the whole weekend bashing away. Late on Sunday night and in a cloud of dust, he yelled with excitement as he exposed an ancient bread oven beside the inglenook fireplace.
‘Evie,’ he called, as his hands felt around inside the oven. ‘I’ve found treasure – some old manuscripts!’
‘What is it, Teddy?’ she whooped.
We all drew in our breath, as Dad carefully worked one of the books free and brushed off a thick layer of brick dust. ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ he laughed. ‘I’ve broken through to the bookshelf in the study next door. It’s one of my old Halsbury’s Laws of England!’
Tanyard Farm was to be our home for twenty-five years. After an initial flurry of decorating, during which Dad developed tennis elbow from painting the walls, and the building of a conservatory, no more changes were ever made. Yards of velvet purchased from Mum’s business suppliers were enthusiastically pushed under the needle of her aged sewing machine and across the dining room table to make curtains. I watched in wonder as the headings were stitched on and the strings pulled tight, ruffling the fabric. She’d then ask me to help her thread the curtain hooks onto the heading and we’d hook the curtains on the metal hooks sliding along the rails. Mum then pinned up the hems, weighing them down with pennies. Once hung, the curtains were never hemmed and the pins slowly rusted into the fabric, while I’m sorry to say that the tempting pennies were removed by little hands and spent in the village shop.
The heavy oak front door, with sturdy bolts that my father would slide home with a reassuring thud each night, opened directly into the low-beamed dining room. One Edwardian extension was converted into a separate ‘flat’ and was soon occupied by tenants, in return for a number of hours of housekeeping per week. There were four other bedrooms, a family bathroom and my parents’ en suite, which was never used due to its dodgy plumbing.
My parents’ bedroom, which seemed like a world of its own, was dominated by a bed large enough for the entire family. Family snuggling-in-bed days were reserved for Christmas or the rare occasion when Dad had a blinding hangover and we’d all pile in asking him very loudly how he was. It was a sacred space, a private island of security. I rarely saw my parents in bed together; by the time Dad woke me with a ‘Wakey wakey – it’s another beautiful day,’ and I’d padded my way along the corridor to climb into bed beside Mum, Dad would be getting dressed. I’d watch him standing beside his mahogany dressing table, first lighting his pipe and then putting it to one side as he attached a stiff collar to his white shirt with collar studs. After buttoning up his shirt, he’d relight his pipe, tuck his shirt tails between his legs and somehow slip on his pinstripe trousers and hook his braces over his shoulders, without the tails coming out from under him.
Childhood diseases felt like a real treat; mumps, measles, whooping cough and scarlet fever meant that we were allowed to spend entire days in that bed. Being ill meant being singled out for Mum’s special attention, and she would bring me peeled and segmented oranges and bottles of warm Lucozade. It was the only time I remember her reading to me – and always the chapter on the Spartans from the children’s Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Once, when I was being driven to distraction with measles and feeling particularly sorry for myself, Mum comforted me by saying, ‘I’m going to let you in on a magic trick, Nessie. If ever you’re feeling ill or scared, imagine you’re in a boat, sailing towards the sunset.’ My parents’ bed became my galleon, a make-believe refuge.
Their musty walk-in wardrobe also provided hours of entertainment, and I loved rolling from Mum’s side to Dad’s. The chore of doing the laundry with our strange, primitive washing machine resulted in a practical approach to cleanliness: clothes were rarely washed, so smelt deliciously musty: a parent-y combination of tobacco, hairspray and wool.
Above the rails of clothes was a deep shelf sagging with dried foods, candles, tins of beans and jars of slowly solidifying Nescafe. The recent Cuban Missile Crisis had reminded my parents of the war, and this time they were certain they weren’t going to be caught short.
At the back of the cupboard, behind the coats, was a cast-iron dark-green safe. When we were older, Mum used to give us ‘a little something from the safe’ for Christmas: a pair of family cufflinks, say, or some Maundy money collected by Granny Mona. She would then insist on taking the precious gifts back for safe-keeping, and much to our amusement, we would often be given the same present again the following year. Hidden in a box behind the shoe rack was Dad’s collection of Health and Efficiency magazines, a strange little publication apparently aimed at naturists. As an inquisitive six-year-old I puzzled over the wholesome photographs of men and women playing badminton, and of women standing next to a caravan, one foot on the plastic doorstep, smiling directly at the camera. All, without exception, covered in nothing but goose pimples.
Jobs were the only activity I remember the whole family participating in. Tanyards boasted four acres of land and an abundance of ancient farm buildings. There was a vegetable garden and a herbaceous border to maintain, an orchard to mow and endless fences to restore. In what would have been the old barn’s courtyard there was an enormous swimming pool that had been dug by soldiers returning from the First World War to the humiliation of unemployment during the recession of the 1920s.
My parents would have been overwhelmed by the maintenance of such a sprawling property if it hadn’t been for Mum’s knack of getting people to work. She could turn the most mundane chore into an adventure. From the minute we woke up, she’d be marshalling her work party, which included everyone staying in the house that day. Over breakfast (always something eggy on workdays), she would explain the challenge ahead, drawing us in by asking for suggestions of how we should go about the project. After tying up our hair in tea towels, like ‘land girls’ during the Second World War, we’d gather assorted brooms, scythes, wheelbarrows and trowels, and off we’d troop.
One of our jobs was scrubbing the pool each spring, a task that entailed lying on our tummie
s, our sleeves rolled up and brushes in hand, scrubbing for our lives as the water drained away. If you scrubbed before the algae dried, it would save hours of work. Once the pool had been emptied, scrubbed and dried, drums of powdered Snowcem cement paint appeared and we would be supplied with brooms. We would mix the Snowcem with water before tipping it out at the pool’s shallow end and running along with our brooms, spreading the paint like players polishing the ice in a game of curling.
Other jobs included cutting down trees, chopping up logs and stacking them to dry for the following season. We’d also sweep the barns of cobwebs and restack the hay bales, and we’d squeal as mice – or, as once happened, a family of rats – ran around our feet. Mum worked harder than anyone, leading the charge with tales of finding treasure behind the ancient beams and with stories from her childhood.
At lunchtime, noticing that her army was flagging, Mum would melt away, returning via the vegetable garden to pull up a few lettuces, with a bag of sliced brown Sunblest bread, butter and a jar of Marmite. I see now that she realised we would lose our momentum if we went back to the house to eat, so she’d find a makeshift table and get to work wherever we happened to be, spreading lumps of butter onto the bread, followed by a dollop of Marmite and after casually flicking the slugs off the gritty leaves she would fold everything together and hey presto, heaven on earth. Dad would admire the morning’s work while sucking on his pipe. ‘Jolly good,’ he’d purr. ‘Jolly good.’
By this time, having failed his Common Entrance exam first time around, Richard had finally been accepted by Stowe School, and returned for the holidays full of frustration. No boarding school could cater for his challenging ideas and extraordinary energy, and he found traditional teaching methods agonising. He couldn’t bear to waste time watching team sports, attending chapel or queuing for everything from food to showers. At fourteen, he was already trying to disrupt the system. My parents encouraged him to play by the rules, but Richard would have none of it. He had survived prep school because of his love of sport, but early on at Stowe he had damaged a cartilage in his knee and was left climbing the walls in frustration.
Mum encouraged him to write. He entered and won an essay competition judged by Gavin Maxwell, the writer best known for Ring of Bright Water, a memoir about befriending an otter on the west coast of Scotland while coming to terms with his homosexuality. Richard was euphoric when he received a letter from Maxwell inviting him to stay for a weekend, but Mum made her blond, blue-eyed young son decline the kind invitation.
***
Whether it was a result of his genes, the era he was born into, witnessing our parents’ struggle to make ends meet or a love of beating us all at his favourite board game, Monopoly, Richard was determined to make his fortune, and my earliest memories of him revolve around his focus on business success.
One summer holiday, Dad was thrilled to see that Richard wanted to follow in his footsteps and open a museum of curiosities. The two of them spent hours in Swallow Barn dusting off Dad’s childhood collection, setting up trestle tables and arranging the display. Unlike Dad’s museum, Richard had painted a big poster in red paint, which read, ‘Entry fee 2/6p.’ By the end of the holiday, the tobacco tin by the poster contained just three half-crowns: one from my father, one my mother and one from Auntie Joyce, who had come to stay one weekend. A lesson had been learned: no business sells itself, and promotion is essential.
When Richard came home for Christmas, he decided that his next venture was going to be breeding budgerigars. The sheets of hardboard used to make the tissue-box covers came in handy, as he and Dad spent days building stacks of interconnecting hutches, each with its own little nesting box. I watched in wonder as a budgie battery farm evolved in front of my eyes, and was excited when the first fluffy arrivals were introduced to their new homes. Richard had done his sums: each budgie cost two shillings and was expected to produce six chicks per year. Seed for each bird would cost two shillings, giving Richard a profit of ten shillings per budgie. My labour would be free, an economy he would soon live to regret.
Richard went back to school, expecting to witness his growing fortune at exeat three weeks later. I had loved the little birds and felt very grown-up when Richard told me that feeding and watering them was my responsibility. Though I was determined not to let my big brother down, my curious friends and I were drawn to the prohibited nesting boxes, playing mummies and daddies with them and counting their tiny eggs. It was sadly inevitable that one day, in our excitement, we would forget to close the cage door, and when we did, not one budgie failed to make a bid for freedom.
Richard’s third childhood attempt at business was sadly no more successful. We’d grown up with tales of a distant relative who had planted trees in Burma and watched his fortune grow. This story appealed to Richard, who bought two hundred Christmas tree saplings, all under six inches tall but with a potential to grow by a foot per year, with each foot representing a pound in profit. Our Easter holiday was spent digging holes and tucking these nuggets of potential gold into the soil. It was a whole-family task, and my role was to run up and down the rows with a small tin watering can. Again, Richard returned to Stowe at the start of the Easter term and returned to financial ruin: rabbits had entered the enclosure and nibbled the top of every single tree.
Down a single-track lane, next to the blacksmith’s forge and beyond the wooden bus shelter and the ancient oak tree with a hollowed-out trunk that was big enough to conceal at least three smoking teenagers, was the post office, a treasure trove of felt tip pens, glues with squidgy rubber stoppers, packets of rubber bands, boxes of drawing pins, balls of string and parcel tags of all sizes. Mum was keen to teach us the lesson of her childhood: that we should save for a rainy day. I relished being taken to the post office every Saturday morning, my pocket money held tightly in one hand and my post office savings book in the other. I’d stand on tippy-toes and slide the book towards the lady behind the grille.
‘Could you put one shilling into the book please, and give me one shilling change?’ I would squeak self-consciously. My father would then stand patiently by as I agonised over the choice of sweets. Twelve pennies to spend and so much choice! I could buy eight Black Jacks for a penny to get my money’s worth, though I wasn’t so keen on them, or a Cadbury’s Curly Wurly and a Mars Bar. A gobstopper could last weeks if I sucked it for an hour or two and saved it for the next day.
Ten years later, that rainy day did arrive – a torrentially stormy day, in fact. When I scrabbled around in my bedroom cupboard, desperate to find my long-forgotten savings book, page after page stamped with tiny deposits. With a heavy heart I took it back to the post office, now standing eye to eye with the postmistress, and made a withdrawal of £34, emptying the account.
‘I hope you’re going to treat yourself to something special, dear,’ she said, while counting out the money.
‘Sort of, thanks,’ I managed, stuffing the notes into my pocket and walking out the door.
2
PEAFUCKS AND ROEBUCKS
All little sisters are painful at times, but for my gentle big sister Lindy, being sent away to boarding school and leaving me at home must have been torture. She says now that she didn’t feel jealous of me, but Mum’s letters to her, full of tales of the fun we were having, must have rubbed salt into her sensitive, homesick soul.
Boarding school is becoming an anachronism in the twenty-first century; even in its modern, less brutal form, with cosier accommodation and modern communications, it is still an old-fashioned idea to send your offspring off into the hands of strangers for their formative years. To send your children away from home at the age of thirteen – or, heaven forbid, at seven or eight years old – is counterintuitive, to say the least. However, back in the mid-1960s it was still the norm for people of a certain background and with the resources to drive for a couple of agonising hours and then lug trunks and tuck boxes up stairs and down corridors, before delivering their weeping children to a cavernous, b
arely heated dormitory, give them a last hug and flee to the car, not daring to look back for fear that they might be rushing after you. You then weren’t allowed any contact until exeat, the school’s permission for a weekend’s absence, some three weeks later – it was thought three weeks was the time it would take your wretched child to break emotional ties with home and establish new ones with their school.
There is a theory that many boarding school veterans experience midlife crises in their early forties, when their own children reach the age when they were so cruelly separated from all they love and their long-buried trauma is dredged up. At this age, parents crave love and affirmation, so they can tear down the barriers erected thirty years before, when they lay on a bunk bed and silently wept into their pillow, swearing that they would never allow themselves to open their hearts and suffer this kind of pain again. Whatever form the trauma takes, many therapists are kept in business thanks to this brutal tradition.
Lindy was nine when she was sent off to Wispers, an old-fashioned girls’ school in West Dean House in West Sussex. The palatial mansion was leased from the estate of Edward James, the poet known for his patronage of the Surrealists, and the dark stone building still housed much of his art collection. Lindy would get quieter and quieter as we drove over the South Downs, and by the time we passed through the magnificent wrought-iron gates and crunched up the drive, she would be inconsolable. She then faced the trauma of not only saying goodbye to Mum, Dad, me and our dog Suki, but of seeing me jump back into the car. I remember her waving to us, her puffy face trying desperately to smile. She would also cry on the way home for the holidays, because she hated leaving behind her art room, vegetable patch and friends. She loathed the constant upheaval of going back and forth.
Lindy returned for the Christmas holidays with a new vocabulary, budding breasts and an interest in dressmaking: she’d become a virtual stranger, but of course, I never wanted to leave her side.
One Hundred Summers Page 9