Never one to mourn for too long, Mum contacted her friend at the zoo a couple of days later, to see if any other animals needed some extra love.
‘We do have an interesting dilemma,’ was the response.
‘Oh yes?’ said Mum, gleeful at the possibility of a new challenge.
‘We have a large white rabbit that has formed a strong attachment to an orphaned roe deer,’ he continued. ‘but the fawn is too nervous to be surrounded by excitable children. Would you please take them in, and try and accustom the deer to people?’
‘Bring them around this minute,’ replied Mum.
The two friends were housed in one of the stalls in the barn. Dad put up a makeshift barrier made of chicken-wire weighted down with logs, and we were made to swear that we wouldn’t frighten the timid doe. I spent hours squatting by their stall, my arm stretched through the wire to stroke the animals. Every night they would sleep snuggled up together, the deer curled up around the rabbit.
I’ll never forget the summer of 1967. Richard was sent off to France to improve his French, and his exchange student, Alexandre, came to stay with us for a month in return. I don’t know what he thought of our family, but like many young people who crossed our path all those decades ago, he has remained a lifelong friend. Richard showed little interest in learning French at sixteen, but our parents had told him that, unless he managed to get at least three A-levels, he wouldn’t be allowed to leave school, so he soldiered on with his studies.
Richard had already begun working on a school magazine and had ambitions to roll it out nationally. He and Alexandre were busy hatching plans, and the house began to reverberate with the sound of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Trudy, a sixteen-year-old from Holland, also came to learn English. She and Richard became inseparable, and at the end of the summer she decided not to go back to Holland to complete her studies. Instead, she pitched a tent in the Stowe grounds and spent the winter term camped there, ‘helping Richard with his magazine’.
We made a strange party on our daily procession down the lane to the village. Our peacock, Charlie, had taken a shine to one of our large white ducks. My father knew that ducks can only copulate successfully on water, so decided that it would be worth the experiment of walking the unlikely lovers down to the village pond and see what happened – he loved the idea of producing a clutch of little ‘peafucks’. Towards the end of the day, when the lane was quiet, Mum would take Bambi by the lead, with Handsome the rabbit hopping alongside. The duck would waddle ahead, followed by an eager Charlie.
Once we were near the water, the lustful peacock would pounce, nearly drowning the duck in the muddy shallows. Once he’d had his evil way with her, he would clamber off her back, his tail clogged with mud, and walk back to the house as gracefully as he could. The duck would then have a brief paddle around the pond and before following her mate home.
There was much excitement when the duck laid a clutch of eggs. She valiantly sat on them for weeks, but they never hatched. As the summer came to a close and the nights drew in, another sad story was unfolding. Handsome had started to hop out of his stall and one night, he didn’t hop back. Bambi, inconsolable with grief, refused all food and, no matter how much time Mum spent stroking and cajoling him, the delicate creature slowly faded away before her eyes.
3
FOR BETTER, FOR WORSE
Sussex, 2009
Alarm bells rang when I received a call from Dad while I was organising my parents’ sixtieth anniversary dinner. He was suffering: his spine and hips were crumbling in on themselves. He seldom gave in to self-pity, but the more he needed a caring partner by his side, the more Mum was absent. She’d long advocated that the formula for a successful marriage was spending plenty of time apart, and boy, she was embracing her own advice with enthusiasm. She hated to be reminded of her own diminishing future, hated seeing Dad in pain and was always busy. Nursing had never been Mum’s strong suit. When Dad had previously had operations and needed looking after, Mum had called in Granny Dock to help.
After hearing the tone of Dad’s voice, I jumped in the car and drove ninety miles down the A3 to have supper with him. My heart bled when I saw this once-mighty man grappling with self-doubt and depression.
‘I’m not sure what to do,’ he said, when we’d sat down for supper. ‘Our marriage is a sham.’
‘Daddy, let’s think this through,’ I said, my mind racing with ghastly visions of my parents getting divorced as they approached their nineties.
‘Your mother is always either away or making plans to be away,’ he lamented, his usual humour absent. ‘I don’t think I can stand it any longer. And to compound it all, Mum rang up Elizabeth to tell her, in no uncertain terms, to leave me alone and stop taking me out to the pub for lunch.’ Liz was a recently divorced friend of Richard’s, a good forty years Dad’s junior. They enjoyed each other’s company, but it was hardly a romance.
‘It was so embarrassing’ he continued. ‘What on earth does she think I’ll get up to? I can hardly walk!’
‘Oh, Daddy,’ I said. ‘I know Mum has always been hard to pin down, but she loves you so much – she just hates to see you suffer. Your marriage has been remarkable – you should look back over the past sixty years and feel a real sense of satisfaction.’ I took him by the hand and looked into his sad eyes. ‘Let’s be honest, you two have had more than your fair share of adventures together, and look what you’ve achieved. Besides,’ I continued, ‘you can still take Liz out for lunch. I won’t tell Mum, I promise.’
***
Back in 1966, with Lindy and Richard exiled to boarding school and Dad commuting to London, Mum made her first bid for freedom. She still had her ‘studio’ in the shed in the back garden, but her interest in fancy goods was waning and the business was now manned by Coley, a kindly lady who came in each day to make up the orders. Mum had read an article in The Times titled ‘Unspoiled Menorca’: in 1966, this small Balearic island was rarely visited by tourists, and there was only one flight from Barcelona to Menorca each week. She set off on her own to investigate and shocked Dad by returning with the deeds to the plan of a house in Binibeca, one of the first developments of its type. Each house was designed in the traditional Spanish style, with tiled roofs, whitewashed walls, and balconies overlooking the sandy cove.
Mum soon set up Binibella, a property company renting and selling houses in the village. I’m sure she hoped to supplement the family coffers, but her real motivation was the opportunities that this new venture would bring. Her children were all of school age and she was keen to make the most of her new freedom.
Until the age of seven, Shamley Green was my world, apart from the two weeks each year when I was sent to stay with Mum’s parents. On reflection, it seems strange that neither Richard nor Lindy joined me, but they took advantage of getting rid of the baby of the family and went boating on the Norfolk Broads and spent time with Aunt Clare and her husband Gerard. As a consequence of these separate holidays, I always had a closer bond with my grandparents, while Lindy and Richard were closer to Aunt Clare.
I relished my seaside holidays with my organised, efficient granny and my gentle, hen-pecked grandfather. They now lived in the clifftop Hampshire village of Barton on Sea, in a modern bungalow called Cleve Cottage, the name being a combination of their daughters’ names. At one end of First Marine Drive, in an even tinier bungalow, lived my stone-deaf great granny, who was by this point in her late nineties. At the other end of the road was a Christian holiday centre, a dour-looking building that echoed with the noise of chanting and singing. Rather than being uplifting, there was something ominous about it. At Cleve Cottage everything revolved around the pips on the radio that was always tuned to the clipped English tones of the Home Service.
Granny and I would visit her mother before walking along the bubbling-hot tarmac road towards the sea, past the booth that sold lilos and shrimping nets, and down the steep steps onto the pebbly beach. We would paddle together and then while
I munched on digestive biscuit and Cheddar cheese sandwiches, batting away the odd beady-eyed seagull, I would watch my fearless, athletic Granny as she dived through the waves and swam into the distance. Once we were back home, she would teach me to knit and make wool pom-poms and I’d help her make salads and stick bags of Green Shield stamps into saving books.
One summer, our routine was disturbed by the death of Uncle Jack, Granny’s brother. He had spent the vast majority of his life abroad as a music teacher, and finally as a headmaster in Trinidad. He had contacted Dock expressing concern about his health and said he was planning a trip back to England. Dock had booked him into Enton Hall, a health farm in Godalming that was the inspiration for ‘Shrublands’, the health farm visited by James Bond in Thunderball. It described itself as a ‘dietetic and osteopathic health centre and organic farm’ and she was convinced that this was what her brother needed, but it was sadly too late and he died on the way to England. There was no funeral. I remember trying to put myself in Granny’s shoes, not being able to get my head around losing a brother, but she seemed quite unruffled.
‘Granny,’ I asked, ‘are you sad that your big brother has died?’
‘Oh well, Nessie,’ she said, ‘I’m afraid he was a heavy smoker.’
We went up to Great Granny’s bungalow to tell her about the death of her son. She had the TV on and was watching a game of football. Everything had to be written down for her on her notepad. ‘BROTHER JACK HAS DIED OF A HEART ATTACK,’ wrote Granny, after which Great Granny read the news and dismissed us with the back of her hand. I saw her holding back a tear as we left the room, but later that afternoon she scuttled around to Cleve Cottage. ‘Who was it who died at the football match this afternoon?’ she sweetly enquired.
The only time I wasn’t happy at Barton on Sea was when my grandparents were playing their interminable games of golf and I had to tag along. One day when I was four, after a few holes, they left me in a shelter saying they would be back ‘shortly’. Shortly feels like an age when you’re four, and I began to worry. The next players came along and, thinking I’d been abandoned, took me back to the clubhouse. It wasn’t long before my flustered grandparents found me there being entertained by the barman. I was never left to wait again, but it gave me some insight into the childhood my poor Aunt Clare endured.
My grandfather was a kind, quiet but distant figure. My last memory of him is of playing a game of catch on the pavement outside Cleve Cottage, with the sound of hymns pulsating towards us on the breeze.
‘Can we do this for ever and ever please, Granddaddy?’ I asked.
‘Well maybe not for ever,’ he smiled, ‘but we can do it again when you come to stay next summer.’
‘Do you promise, Granddaddy? Cross your heart and hope to die?’
‘Yes, Nessie. I promise,’ he replied.
‘Cross your heart and hope to die,’ I insisted.
‘Cross my heart and hope to die,’ he replied with a chuckle.
Sadly, die he did. Years of reconciling the horrors of war, followed by the effort of living in a difficult marriage, finally overwhelmed him and he had a massive heart attack, aged just sixty-six.
Predictably, Granny took his death in her stride. At the time she tried to comfort my inconsolable Aunt Clare, saying, ‘It really was time he went; his teeth were beginning to need attention.’ When she later told me that Rupert’s funeral was one of the best days of her life, I don’t think she meant that she celebrated Grandaddy’s death, but rather that it opened the door to a completely new life. She dusted herself down and drove from the church to Enton Hall health farm. Life was short and she was determined to live every minute of it to the full.
***
There were two schools in Shamley Green, a state primary and a fee-paying pre-prep school, thus cleaving the village neatly down the middle. All three of us were sent to the posh school, Longacre, which took boys up to the age of seven and girls up to eleven. At four years old, we were dropped off in a standard outsized uniform of greys and blues, with felt bowler hats for girls and caps for the boys.
A quirk of memory is such that, while I’m sure Mum drove me to and from school on most days, I can now only remember the days when I had to walk. I’d trudge down Woodhill Lane, across the village green and up the hill to school, a long walk for a small child. I remember thinking at the time that it wasn’t fair to expect me to do this. I would cut across the playing fields and enter the main building through the back door, where we would all be welcomed by Longacre’s indomitable headmistress, known to everyone as Chum.
Chum was squat and square but not squishy at all, her curvaceous torso restrained in some sort of corset. With her puffy features and tufts of facial hair, she could never be described as a beauty, but she had a kind face and we were all rather devoted to her. She loved ‘her’ children in return, which is more than could be said of Robert, the school’s silent and put-upon groundsman. Chum was openly hostile to him, barking orders and muttering ‘stupid man’ under her breath. Mum told me that Robert was, in fact, Chum’s husband – she’d married him when he was on leave during the war, and had regretted it ever since.
If Mum was in when I got home, you never knew what would happen. ‘Quick, Ness,’ she said once, ‘I hear the flood water is rising and that the River Wey has burst its banks. Debenhams is under water – let’s go and see what’s happening.’ And off we’d drive. Mum didn’t want to shower pity at others’ misfortunes – she just wanted to share in the drama. Any excitement, whether a fallen tree or a burned-out garden shed, and she was there.
I’d often hear her berating my poor father as he entered the house after a long day in London.
‘How’s your day been today, Teddy?’ she would ask.
‘Hello darlings,’ he would say, as he headed to pour his first G & T. ‘Oh, fine, just the usual – nothing out of the ordinary.’
‘Don’t be so boring, Teddy,’ Mum would reply. ‘Something must have happened. Tell us a story!’
Dad would scan through his day and come up with some small morsel to satisfy his wife’s insatiable needs. ‘I was the prosecuting counsel for a sexual assault today,’ he began, before pausing for effect, knowing that he had our attention. ‘Some chap sitting on the upper deck of a London bus had picked up his neighbour’s hand and placed it firmly upon his lap. His defence was that she must have mistaken the sausages he was taking home for his tea for his member!’
Dad took a sip of gin and tonic, before continuing. ‘My witness was a sterling girl,’ he went on, taking his time. ‘She clinched the man’s fate when she looked the judge in the eye and said, “Your honour, I’ve been a butcher’s daughter all my life and never have I come across a sausage with a throb in it!”’
Every evening brought some little snippet to make us laugh. ‘My gum-chewing witness was given a stern telling-off by the judge today. He was told to stop masticating. I’ve never seen someone whip their hands out of their pockets so quickly.’
‘Oh Teddy, I do love you,’ Mum would chirp, wrapping her arms around him and snuggling under his shoulder.
One day, Richard had wanted to see Dad in action in court. They had driven to London together. They were driving home across the Surrey Hills in a howling gale at dusk, when Dad saw a branch from an enormous oak tree coming hurtling down towards them. He braked hard and yelled ‘Duck!’ and Richard instinctively did as he was told, as the branch crashed down on the bonnet and windscreen of the car. Both Dad and Richard had to be freed by the fire brigade but they were largely unscathed, apart from some cuts from the shattered windscreen. The fire brigade cranked the roof up enough for them to drive the car slowly back home, without the windscreen. They drove up the drive tooting the horn triumphantly, happy in the knowledge that they had a good story for Mum.
Weekends at Tanyards were never dull. Richard would come home often, to discuss Student, a magazine he was planning to launch. He’d been editor of his school magazine at Stowe and decided that t
here was a need for a national magazine dealing with issues that would interest young people. He enlisted Granny Dock to help with the typing and sold advertising from the school telephone box. The first issue, published in the spring of 1968, dived right into some controversial topics. In his first editorial, Richard wrote, ‘The views of any student, politician or journalist must be tolerated, not only because some of them may, for all we know, be on the right track, but because it is only through the conflict of opinion that such words as knowledge or wisdom can have any meaning.’
From the crypt of St John’s Hyde Park, he and his business partner, our old Easteds neighbour Nik Powell, along with his editorial team of Jonathan Gems, Robert Morley and Paul Forbes-Winslow, interviewed the leading thinkers of their generation. Many of them came to sit animatedly around the kitchen table at Tanyards, eating Mum’s wholesome grub and drinking Dad’s distinctive homemade wine.
I don’t remember any creative classes at Longacre School – no plays, dance or poetry, and no singing other than hymns in assembly. I do remember trying to learn French verbs without knowing what a verb was, and being singled out for extra reading classes.
My true education took place in the Tanyards kitchen, listening to this group debating the pressing matters of the time: abortion, contraception, the legalisation of cannabis, pornography, homosexuality, Vietnam, Franco’s Spain, the women’s liberation movement, South Africa, Biafra, race, art and culture. We discussed Richard’s interviews with people such as James Baldwin, Vanessa Redgrave, Don McCullin, David Hockney and Henry Moore, plus archbishops, vice-chancellors, rear admirals, comedians and activists.
I only made two friends at Longacre: Belinda, whom I nicknamed Beatle, and a girl named Mags. At the end of school one day, Beatle said she didn’t want to go back to her house because her mother was very ill and home had become a place of misery. ‘Come back with me,’ I offered. ‘We can ask my mummy to call your mummy when we get home.’
One Hundred Summers Page 11