We slipped out by the back entrance through the playing fields and walked hand-in-hand across the green and back down the lane to Tanyards. It was winter and getting dark. We must have realised that we were doing something naughty because as soon as we got home, Beatle curled up on an old armchair in the barn and I covered her up with a blanket and went to join Coley in the studio, before becoming so engrossed in making a picture out of material off-cuts that I forgot all about her. An hour or two later, her deeply stressed father came storming in, shouting and threatening to take off his belt and thrash me within an inch of my life, a fate that he said awaited poor Beatle.
Coley and I were speechless. She clutched my hand and we walked to the barn, where we found Beatle still curled up under the blanket, sound asleep. I will never forget her backwards glance at me as her father yanked her arm and frog-marched her to their car. Coley never said a word to my parents; we both understood that we had seen something that should never happen to a child. Beatle’s mother was to die soon afterwards.
Beatle was very clever and destined to go to St Catherine’s, the academic girls’ school in Bramley. I took the eleven-plus in a forlorn attempt to beat the system, but my desperately poor reading skills meant there wasn’t a hope in hell that I would pass.
My other friend was Mags. Her parents seemed very old to us – her mother was a teacher at Longacre and her father was dying of some dreadful lung disease. She was adopted, a concept I found hard to grasp, and though she loved her adoptive parents, we often fantasised about who her biological parents might be. When I went back to her house, we would skip through the sitting room past her dad, who was inevitably slumped in a wing-backed armchair watching television, his face covered by an oxygen mask. ‘Hi Dad,’ Mags would sing, hoping he wouldn’t stop us. He would take in a difficult breath before managing to wheeze out a word in response. Her mum would be in the kitchen, making us tea and toast before sending us out to play. It was dawning on me that some families had no music, no teasing and no laughter.
We would flee the house and go off to play in the local sewage works, where we would happily ride around on the bars of the massive water purifying plant as it sprinkled pure piss through drums of stone and sand.
One day, Mum was invited to be guest speaker at one of the Longacre School sports days. I realise now that Chum had recognised something inspirational in her, and I was inordinately proud as she walked up to the podium and talked with contagious enthusiasm to a hundred captivated children about the importance of building solid foundations under everything you do.
Apart from schoolwork, my Longacre days were blighted by another horror – two girls in my class called Lottie and Laura. After Mum’s talk, they attempted to make my life a misery by undermining my confidence at every opportunity. They both lived just off the village green, close to Tanyards, and acted as gatekeepers to my freedom in the village. I understand now that their home lives were wretched – one had an alcoholic mother and the other an anorexic one – so someone had to pay.
It’s easy to bully someone and go undetected, with the odd hiss here and the odd sneer there. Continually asking ‘What’s so funny about that?’ and rendering your cheerful banter leaden. You can move your victim’s coat onto another person’s hook, put a pool of water on her chair or hint to the others in the class that she smells, all things that while seemingly insignificant on their own are cumulatively enough to make a young girl turn inside out with misery. Once started, these girls were relentless.
I will never forget the bravery of one of the shyest girls in the class, Louise Elms, who once blurted out, in a fit of anguish, ‘Will you two just stop picking on Vanessa!’ There was a sudden silence as all the girls in the cloakroom stood still, in awe of her courage. I will be always be grateful to her.
It was early autumn, and Lindy challenged me to swim. I’d been trying to learn all summer but hadn’t dared to swim out of my depth. In the previous months, I’d had one unsuccessful lesson with a creepy man called Mr Pilkington. He’d been booked to give us a few sessions, but when I told Mum that he didn’t wear pants under his baggy shorts and that he seemed to relish the moments when he exposed his hairy thingy to us while looming above us at the edge of the pool, Mr Pilkington never returned to complete the job.
Lindy bet me a pancake that I wouldn’t be able to swim a length of the freezing pool, and with that prize in mind, I managed one length and then, like Forrest Gump, just kept on swimming. I swam and swam, with Lindy counting: one length, two lengths, and so on, until I reached one hundred. She made a fresh batch of pancakes as a reward. What joy to have mastered swimming and to be wrapped in a warm towel, while munching through a pile of pancakes cooked by an admiring big sister. I’ve loved long-distance swimming ever since.
Looking at photographs of myself as a child, I’m sure that people would now say that I ‘identified as a boy’. With my cropped hair, swimming trunks and ankle boots with elastic at the side, I never aspired to be a girl and I took pleasure in being physically strong. I chose to think of myself as being completely different to my sister, who exaggerated her feminine vulnerability and took great care of her appearance, experimenting with clothes and make-up. She would become coy in front of boys, but as far as I was concerned, I was one of them.
***
The winter term was over and the Christmas holidays lay ahead, and as the decade had got into full swing, life became more colourful. By 1966, Dad was gaining in confidence as a barrister and was being offered more lucrative cases by his chambers, while Mum was excited about her new business. The house was full of family Christmas rituals. Lindy was stirring cauldrons of fudge with a long wooden spoon – the smell of boiling condensed milk and sugar, mingling with woodsmoke, will always remind me of Christmas.
Mum dusted off the decorations from the previous year, including little cardboard snowmen with round tummies ready to be filled with handfuls of Quality Street chocolates. Richard was sent to the woods to cut down a suitable sized Christmas tree, before we girls smothered the less-than-perfect tree with so much tinsel that no one would notice its missing branches. Dad spent hours twiddling the tiny glass bulbs on the coloured lights to try and ‘get the damned things working again’, while ‘A Swingin’ Safari’ by Acker Bilk played on the record player. The pile of presents under the tree was growing satisfactorily, including one very large and heavy one to me from Lindy.
It even snowed that year, and once again, a sheet of hardboard came to good use. Placing it on the snow shiny-side down, we would sit three abreast on the board and shoot down the hill at breakneck speed. There was no way to slow down and no steering mechanism. It was breathtakingly good fun. Unfortunately Richard, going solo, shot straight into a barbed-wire fence, and had to spend the rest of the holidays with his face covered in plasters.
The Christmases of my childhood were heaven on earth. Dad had usually spent the year fermenting his frankly undrinkable but gratifyingly alcoholic homemade wine, and taking people up to the bathroom where it was concocted was his party piece. On top of a rickety chest of drawers were two twenty-gallon glass flagons, one full of a red liquid, the other a cloudy yellowy white. The flagons were stoppered with cork, into which a U-bend airlock was inserted. Dad stirred the brew by leaning against the chest of drawers and swilling the concoctions around the huge flagons. He was thrilled by the chemistry and marvelled at how cheap his wine was going to be. There was also an added bonus: knowing what was going to be on offer, most guests generously bought an extra bottle of wine as a gift.
On Christmas Eve, we’d all pile into the Vauxhall and drive to Corry Lodge for supper with Auntie Joyce. We’d be dressed in our Christmas best, which for me meant a clean pair of trousers and a jumper. Before we went up the drive, Mum would ask Dad to stop the car while she ferreted around in her handbag for a hanky that reeked of her metallic Rive Gauche perfume. She would spit on her hanky and rub it over our faces, ensuring that we were looking our best for Joyce. Joyce would ma
ke a fuss over us and prepare a feast of turkey followed by a flaming Christmas pudding studded with sixpences and served with dollops of cream and brandy butter and ladles of gooseberry fool. The food was served on beautiful hand-painted family plates, the drink from cut-glass decanters and champagne flutes. We would then race back to Shamley Green in time for Midnight Mass with a congregation of mildly tipsy villagers full of red wine and good cheer.
Waking on Christmas morning, the first thing I did was root around the bottom of my bed with my foot, hoping to feel a stocking weighed down with hard presents. There it was – Father Christmas had come! I’d run my hands up and down the knobbly stocking, in our case a shooting sock, the expectation almost unbearable as I waited for Dad to wake and get Mum her cup of tea, before we all piled into their bed to see what Santa had delivered. All families have their Christmas rituals, and Mum’s genius at delaying gratification defined ours. After church we would be allowed just one present, with a smoked salmon sandwich and a glass of champagne. Then we’d give the house a quick hoover before sitting down by the fire in the dining room and slowly working our way through the pile, one present at a time. I saved the big box from Lindy until last.
‘What do you think it is, Nessie?’ my family asked.
I opened the outer layer and found another box within.
‘There must have been some mistake,’ they laughed, as I ripped open the second box. Then there was a third box and then a forth and so on, until in the very heart of the box I came to my prize, a tin mug. I laughed, trying to cover my disappointment. ‘Very funny.’
We then went across the green to spend Christmas evening with the Talbot Wilcoxes – Peter, Jenny and their four children – in their elegant Georgian house to play parlour games. As the grown-ups steadily drank their fill, we would play charades, murder in the dark, sardines and Nelson, a marvellous game that you could only play once. Those of us in on the joke would gang up on some poor visiting guest, for some reason always known as ‘a waif and stray’.
The game worked like this. Someone would dress up as the admiral and be placed on a chair in the centre of a darkened room. The waif would then be blindfolded, spun around a few times and led into Nelson’s lair. The guide would speak respectfully to Nelson, asking if he would mind being introduced to the waif. Nelson remained silent.
‘This is Nelson’s knee,’ the guide would say, drawing the blindfolded victim’s hand onto the knee. ‘And this is his good arm,’ whispered the guide, as he took the hand up Nelson’s body. ‘This is his bad arm,’ he would continue, as Nelson proffered the stump of an elbow. ‘And these are his lips.’ This would start to feel distinctly weird to a blindfolded person. ‘This is his good eye,’ continued the guide, as he allowed the waif to gently feel Nelson’s closed eyelid. Then, gently prying the index finger of his victim forward, he’d say, ‘and this is Nelson’s bad eye,’ while plunging his finger into a pot of Vaseline. Oh, the shrieks of joy at the poor waif’s horror as his finger slid into the slimy goo.
‘Time to go home,’ said Mum. ‘Always leave a party when you want to stay for more.’
She’d repeat her conviction that Dad would still be at the party she’d met him at, had she not come into his life. ‘Come on, Teddy, time to go!’
Another family Christmas ritual was the bitter accusation from Mum and denial from Dad about him flirting with Jenny T. W. Dad would light his pipe while steering with his knees, and the car would fug up with the acrid smell of gas from his flip-top lighter, smouldering tobacco smoke, boozy breath and Rive Gauche.
‘I saw you sitting on the floor, stroking her knee,’ Mum would snipe.
‘Oh come on, Evie, it’s Christmas,’ Dad would reply. ‘I just had my hand on her knee for balance.’
‘Enough, the two of you,’ we would chorus laughing, as the car wove its way down the country lane and back to the house, which was lit only by the Christmas tree lights and the dying embers of the fire.
Forty years later, I met Lucy T. W. at a party, and we laughed about our family Christmases and our parents’ behaviour back then. Peter, her father, had died a year or two previously.
‘You know, Nessie, we always suspected your mother of having an affair with my father,’ she said.
‘Ha!’ I replied. ‘In our family, we always suspected your mother was having an affair with my father.’ What a laugh!
A week or two later, while flying to Necker Island with Mum and Dad for our annual family holiday, I bobbed up from the back of the plane to see them in Upper Class.
‘I must tell you something funny,’ I said. ‘I bumped into Lucy T. W. the other day, and their family myth is that you, Mum, had an affair with Peter!’
They both stared at me, startled rabbits in headlights, not knowing what to say. Oh Lord, I thought to myself, it’s true. Mum had accused Dad of flirting with Jenny to cover her own bad behaviour. Later in the holiday, she explained that the ‘affair’ had amounted to a walk on the heath one afternoon, but that she had always relished her emotional connection with Peter. To conduct a clandestine relationship in the 1960s would have had its own complications and would have been virtually impossible in a tight-knit village community. No wonder Mum organised to spent part of her life away from my father.
With Lindy and Richard away at school, and Mum focusing on Binibella and training to become a lay magistrate, I was becoming increasingly isolated. My only friend within walking distance was Mishi Blower, who lived a mile up a steep track, deep in the woods above Tanyards. I loved going to stay with her in her tiny woodsman’s cottage, but it had no television. Mishi and I had an arrangement with the family in the big house down the track: on Thursday nights we would brave the dark and knock on their front door. Someone would silently let us in and we’d traipse down a long corridor to join the family and watch The Man from U.N.C.L.E. No one ever laughed out loud or said a word to us and, after the show, we would leave the TV room and make our way back to the cottage. It gave another insight into how other families lived.
I began to dread going to school. At first Mum told me to get a grip, reminding me how lucky I was. But I was bored, being bullied and utterly miserable, so didn’t feel lucky at all. Mum then told me to pull myself together and stop sulking, but by the age of ten no amount of self-pulling was going to cheer me up.
I developed a ‘breathing disorder’, a wheezing, panicky inhalation that would disappear as soon as I was snuggled up in the studio with Coley. It was also at around this time that I first became aware of a growing resentment from Mum when I looked to Dad for support. It was nothing dramatic, just a subtle sensation that I was getting in the way when Dad came home at the end of the day and she wanted to have a drink with him and discuss their day. Three of us for dinner each night just wasn’t working – it was time I too went to boarding school.
4
TRUNKS, KICKS AND SHOPLIFTING
Mum drove me to Box Hill School one spring afternoon, the air full of promise as we hurtled down densely wooded lanes. The previous week, I’d been issued with the regulation, plenty-of-room-for-growth summer uniform. I was the only new pupil that term, having left Longacre in the middle of the school year, thanks to the relentless misery inflicted on me there. I have no idea why I was sent to Box Hill, but I know that Mum had taken advice from a schools’ advisory agency called Gabbitas and Thring who, knowing of my academic shortcomings and happy demeanour, suggested a co-educational establishment, believing I would thrive in a less stuffy environment than the one Lindy was being forced to endure.
The school was a founder member of the Round Square group of international schools that included Gordonstoun in Scotland and Aiglon College in Switzerland, all of which placed an emphasis on a robust physical approach to education. Come rain or shine, we boarders, the boys shirtless, had to run a daily circuit around the main building within five minutes of waking up, before standing under a cold shower on our return. Apart from that, Box Hill was like any other second-tier boarding school, a
place people sent their offspring between the ages from eleven to eighteen, to be educated but more importantly to get them out from under their parents’ feet during their troublesome teenage years. Not all parents would have thought ‘out of sight, out of mind’ regarding their children, but I had the distinct feeling that mine did.
Mum was convinced that you should ‘shuffle your children out of the nest’ before they wanted to leave, thus ensuring that they would always want to return home. She would often repeat the mantra ‘you’ve got to be cruel to be kind’, firmly believing that, by wrenching us from the comfort and security of home, she was helping to build our characters.
Mum was full of positive chatter as we drove through the Surrey Hills towards Mickleham, a village at the foot of Box Hill. However, through her breezy indifference, I could sense her anguish at sending her youngest away. I had our miniature whippet, Sadie, on my lap, and stroked her silky ears the entire way. We drove up the drive and parked under the flagpole opposite the imposing Victorian red-brick building, then lugged my trunk up a flight of stairs into a long dormitory filled with metal-framed bunk beds topped with thin horsehair mattresses, one of which had my name stuck to it.
‘You lucky thing, Nessie,’ Mum chirped. ‘You’re by the window.’
‘Super,’ I said, wanting to sound cheerful and not let her down.
For some reason we had arrived early and the dark, empty corridors echoed with expectation. Then a slow-witted girl came up to us and said hello, giving Mum an excuse to make a hasty exit – she gave me a brief hug, a cheery tap on my nose, a wink and was gone. The girl, keen to befriend the new arrival, asked if I wanted to go for a walk around the grounds before the others arrived. I agreed, and managed to regain some composure as she explained the complex school hierarchy. We should call Mr McComish, the headmaster, ‘Mac’, day pupils were called ‘bugs’ and school food was to be avoided at all costs.
One Hundred Summers Page 12