One Hundred Summers

by Vanessa Branson

  I was crying for my present, too, and for having no one to share my grief with. I returned to the house, and scoured the Yellow Pages for the phone number of the knacker’s yard, mistakenly looking under ‘N’. My eyes swimming, I eventually rang Directory Enquiries, gasping between words as I tried to tell the operator what I was looking for.

  After I’d eventually found the number, a rough old traveller turned up and asked me to slip a rubber collar around Snowy’s rear legs. Then I watched as my shaggy old friend was winched into the back of the horsebox, his head bobbing up and down as it was dragged up the slatted wooden ramp.

  What was in Mum’s mind when she so callously told me about Snowy’s death? Even now, I can’t quite get my head around her lack of compassion, though I realise she was in a rush to get to work, and I guess I might otherwise have sauntered up to the field and found the dead pony myself. The truth is that death doesn’t fit into a mind that’s as focused on the positive as my mother’s – she just wasn’t able to deal with the conversation.

  Whatever her motives, I think her harshness ultimately did me a favour; I’ve faced a number of challenges since then when I’ve had to pull myself together and call the metaphorical knacker’s yard; every time, my mind returns to that winter morning and the knowledge that I can cope, because there is no other option.

  In the summer of 1972, after audaciously courting the stunningly beautiful designer Kristen Tomassi, Richard convinced her to marry him. To my thirteen-year-old self, she seemed like a willowy, ethereal princess. Considering their youth and progressive beliefs in changing the status quo, the couple had a remarkably traditional wedding, in the church attached to The Manor – Simon Draper recently told me that Richard put on a good show in order to impress his bank manager from Coutts, who was guest of honour.

  Lindy and I were bridesmaids, along with Kristen’s sisters, and we all gathered by the church porch, feeling a little self-conscious in our long, peach chiffon dresses, as we waited for the bride to arrive. Then Mum, who had reserved a seat for Granny Dock, came out of the church, wondering where on earth her mother was. Richard and Dad then came out, too. Everyone’s concern was palpable – Granny was driving up from the south coast to Oxfordshire and would surely have left in good time. She must have had an accident.

  We all turned to see Kristen and her father appear in a garlanded Rolls-Royce at exactly the same time as a giant articulated lorry. Rolls and lorry pulled up outside the church gates simultaneously. Granny climbed down from the lorry’s cab with as much dignity as possible, as the lorry gave a giant air-brake fart. The driver blew her a kiss and gave her a cheery wave. Her wide-brimmed hat slightly askew, she was hustled into the church just as the organ fired up. It turned out that she had crashed into the lorry thirty miles away and the kind driver had driven her to the church at breakneck speed, leaving her mangled car by the roadside.

  In my teens, the pleasure of visiting The Manor was tempered by my shyness. I would wander around rooms filled with Chesterfield sofas, log fires, faded rugs and sleeping Irish wolfhounds, quietly observing but never quite fitting in. There would always be musicians, technicians, girlfriends and boyfriends mooching around. When entering a room, I’d wonder: should I say hello or try and be as cool as them? On one visit, I joined in a five-a-side football match with the band Queen, who were recording there; on another, I was there for Van Morrison’s birthday dinner, a grumpy affair as he didn’t approve of the flavour of the cake that had been made for him by the cook’s ten-year-old daughter. An early insight into the complicated workings of the creative mind.

  Happily back at Box Hill, I volunteered to direct the Eisteddfod (a talent show, for want of a better word) on behalf of my house. Box Hill was divided into four houses, and competition between us was intense, with points scored for all aspects of school life, from sport and academic work to social service and music. I was a Corinthian, and we were neck-and-neck with the Spartans – the house prize rested on the outcome of the show, and I was desperate to win.

  During rehearsals I realised that I loved directing, and hit upon a cunning device to tie all the skits together. We placed a couch in the corner of the stage and had a psychiatrist talk to the empty couch, which raised the suggestion that he was also insane, as he plucked scenes from the contorted mind of his imaginary patient. By contrast, the Spartans’ production was good but didn’t entirely hang together. The judge gave us a glowing critique, and as I went to collect the cup at the end of the evening, with the whoops and cheers of the school ringing in my ears, I felt truly fulfilled for the first time in my life.

  ***

  I’ve been rooting through my letters, diligently kept in box files over the years. There they are, my teenage years all laid out on the ping pong table. Letters from Mags, my ever-loyal friend who kept in touch from Bramley, along with short, morale-boosting notes from Mum with snippets of home news. There’s not one letter from Dad but there are three from Lindy, including one that rather ominously apologises for teasing me so badly during the drive to school that ‘she and Daddy cried all the way home’.

  There are letters from friends, full of references to the LPs they were listening to – David Bowie, Marc Bolan, Bob Dylan and Cat Stevens – as well what they were getting up to during the holidays, including the odd foreign trip but otherwise a lot of listening to music and smoking in bedrooms. With the Vietnam War coming to its ghastly climax and the Irish Troubles rumbling, you’d have thought that the odd letter might have given them a passing mention but no, we focused on the close-at-hand.

  A while ago, Fiona photocopied and bound our five years of school correspondence. It’s a thick volume that captures the language of co-educational boarding school life in the seventies and our excited observations of status systems, rules and friends, as well as the first bras, periods, boys and young flirtations that obsessed our twelve-year-old minds. By fourteen, our enthusiasm was tinged with cynicism, first cigarettes and quarter-bottles of vodka. Finally there are long, hysterical letters from Fiona filled with drunken Saturday nights, fallings-out with best friends, topless frolicking under the stars, incompetent teachers making passes and the drama of being caught meeting her boyfriend at 2 a.m., which led to her being expelled.

  Here’s a taster – one of my last letters to Fiona, in which I was experimenting with a new-found intellectual pretention and highlighting the agony and ecstasy of those teenage years, as I switched from near-suicidal misery to romantic bliss on the spin of a bottle of Smirnoff…

  Dear Fi

  I was so happy to hear from you this morning. I thought you’d forgotten about me. It really has been getting depressing lately, both mentally and work-wise. There are just no working rooms here and no working atmosphere.

  Last weekend was Nabs’ birthday and I got really drunk, and I mean really drunk, on about three quarters of a bottle of vodka, and for my head that was quite a bit. All I did all evening was cry and cry and make a real fool of myself. It’s funny, but I have a big hang-up. I’ve sort of grown a skin around myself against the whole system. All the people around me seem so involved in themselves – I just don’t know who to mix with.

  Nabs is in the same situation as me, so we really depend on each other which is bad really.

  All my morals and ideas of life have changed. I want to go to university now, to study philosophy. I thought about it last Saturday. I need some aim in life and me and Nabs talked for hours on the subject and came to that conclusion.

  You know, Nabs is the most amazing person. I just don’t know how to explain it, but he has this real love for the countryside and beauty. Every afternoon we go for a walk and sit on this bench on the top of the hill looking across this valley and at the end there is the most exhilarating sunset. It’s all I really enjoy now. But deep down inside I have some content feeling, which makes me feel inwardly happy – silly, really.

  Send me more news, Fi Fi.

  Have you read The Fall by a man called Camus? It’s grea
t, by the way.

  Love ya

  Nessa xx

  Among the hoard of correspondence, I came upon a file entitled ‘Very Old Love Letters’ – now this was going to be interesting. I lit the fire, put the kettle on and settled down to savour the moment. There were a number of letters from boys I could hardly remember, one or two from boys I’d met in Menorca who went to different schools, and a couple from a neighbour of Fiona’s that we’d watch television with when I visited her in London.

  At the bottom of the file, slightly damaged from a flood we suffered in the cellar, I came across four long letters from Nabeel. Three were written during the school summer holidays, which he’d spent in Tunisia, and the last was written after he’d left Box Hill. Reading his letters reminds me of the glory of coming of age: when you realise that the world doesn’t actually revolve around you; when hormones flood your body and empathy and yearning overwhelm you; when you see yourself reflected in the eyes of your lover and like what you see; when you first experience the wonder of looking at a sunset and its beauty moves you to tears.

  I never had any confidence in my ability to write, though Nabeel’s letters are littered with pleas that I write back to him. I think we understood, when he left Box Hill to go to a sixth-form college in Southampton, that it was unlikely that we’d be able to sustain a relationship. As the summer term drew to a close, we clung onto each other, barely talking to anyone else. On the last day of term, the entire school climbed onto buses for a day-trip to Littlehampton. While the other kids spent their time at the fun fair, we walked up and down the windy beach. I nestled under his arm while we listened to Bob Dylan sing ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ over and over again on a tinny portable cassette player and when the batteries ran first slow, then out, and we just lay on the pebbles in silence.

  Nabeel wrote to me the following term.

  Dear Vanessa,

  God, I don’t know how to start this. Basically I’m wrecking myself, I don’t know what the fuck is up, ‘but something is not right, it’s wrong’. You know today at college I lit a cigarette and with it I almost screamed, I turned around, I wanted you there, do you understand? You weren’t of course. But I suppose I’ll fade from you soon, but you know for the second time since I’ve known you, I’ve missed you like hell. The first time was in Tunisia and now. These are things I think about and never say, yeah I suppose I’ve said ‘I love you’ etc. And I did, I haven’t lied. But you are on my mind nearly all the time, do you know what I mean? I can’t love you in a letter because it’s impossible, but I miss you…

  Please write back soon and say what you think, look here, don’t feel sorry, don’t be polite, be brutal if it’s like that. I just have to know. I want you. It is as simple as that. I just want to know. I could get a girl around here when I felt like it, but I don’t want them. I want you to sit next to me when I smoke a cigarette, to hold my hand and to kiss me and to talk to me…

  One thing I want of you: be truthful for God’s sake, it doesn’t matter, you don’t have to be nice, when you don’t want something, say ‘no’. I mean this, I’m hoping for the best but that is immaterial as far as you’re concerned. I’d hate it if you felt sorry for me on this issue, say it like it is with no dilutions. I’ve loved you and I have to have your person as well as your body, one on its own won’t do, not without the other.

  ANSWER VERY SOON, RIGHT? PLEASE WITHIN A FEW DAYS. You have the time and don’t fuck about.

  I miss you with every cigarette.

  Nabeel

  Love is in this letter as far as it can go.

  I never replied. Now, over forty years later, I wonder how I justified my youthful carelessness. I have no excuse other than the fickleness of youth – my childish emotional intelligence was ill-equipped to deal with such force of feeling. I fear that I simply thought there was a whole new world out there, waiting to be explored.

  Nabeel sent me one more postcard, a reproduction of a Georges Braque from the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, a year or two later:

  I just felt like saying hello to you. I hope you’re ok.

  Love Nabeel.

  I’m alright here in Southampton. I’m being made into a doctor.

  I didn’t hear from him again until I tracked him down while writing this book, but that’s another story altogether.

  ***

  Sussex, April 2017

  An afternoon spent reading love letters, forty-four years after receiving them, had an extraordinary effect on my mood and I felt awash with love again. The birds sang, my lips tingled and my eyes smiled, as I walked across the fields to meet Mum for supper in the Ship at Itchenor. As I reached the pub, I noticed a man sitting outside, speaking softly in French on his mobile. I joined Mum at a corner table beyond the bar, bought her a whisky and myself a glass of dry white wine and started to tell her about my afternoon. She shuffled closer as I quoted from the letters. I’m not sure how much she takes in, but love still touches her soul.

  ‘Oh, Nessie, you are a little devil,’ said Mum, her eyes sparkling. The French man, although ‘boy’ would be a more apt description, came in and sat at the table next to us. The letters were playing magic tricks and I soon brought him into our conversation. He was quietly spoken and in his mid-twenties, with tightly curled red hair, thick-rimmed glasses and a cable-knit sweater. His name was Arthur. We asked him what he was doing in Itchenor and learned that he’d just abandoned his PhD and was embarking on a fresh challenge. He’d borrowed money from his sister to buy a creaking one-hundred-year-old wooden sailing boat, and he was about to sail along the south coast to Falmouth, with plans to learn about boat restoration while living aboard.

  Arthur was a poet and a dreamer, and his ethereal presence caught me off-guard. I saw him looking at me, and after waving Mum off with her carer who had come to collect her, he and I walked along the towpath. We walked in silence, listening to the sound of the curlews as they drilled their long beaks into the mud. We could have been teenagers about to have our first kiss – the connection I felt with this young man, younger than my son, was confusing, powerful and deeply moving.

  We stopped at his boat’s mooring and at a loss about what to do, we stood looking at each other. Where was this about to go? Without saying a word, we held each other in a long embrace, his cheek on my head and mine to his chest. I pulled away and looked him in the eye. ‘Have a wonderful adventure, Arthur. Bon voyage.’ And then, without looking back, I walked on down the towpath.

  6

  AUNT CLARE’S STORY

  October 2017

  Robert Hoare, a distant cousin, sent me a text in the early hours of this morning:

  Hi Ness, Aunt Clare just died, have a drink for her. I’m waiting for a nurse, hence no call.

  I lay in bed for a while, absorbing the news. Against all the odds – ten slim panatella cigars each day and zero exercise – the stubborn Jenkins genes had kept Clare alive well past her expected departure date. Even so, her death took time to sink in. How could someone with such eccentric opinions and such a forceful character simply cease to exist?

  I thought about who to contact and texted Robert for a little more detail, knowing that news like this is easier to receive when sweetened with the knowledge that someone died without a struggle. Robert had been Clare’s nephew by marriage, and his dedication and love for her went well beyond the call of duty. He’d driven to her house most days after work, to sit and chat and share a smoke, a gin and a glass of Robinsons orange squash, and he’d also overseen the rota of carers who came and went at an alarming rate – most of them not sharing Clare’s particular brand of humour.

  He replied:

  Me and Robert were there, it was very peaceful. We think she smiled. x

  Now I had some good news to relate. Clare revelled in the company of men and adored her two Roberts, her neighbour and her nephew. To have had them both there as she floated off would have been blissful.

  The boys had entered into the spirit of the occasion: k
nowing what Clare enjoyed in life, they had dipped her toothbrush into some gin and, while she gently sucked on the sodden bristles, had waved a lit cigar around her head. She smiled as she took a final breath and was no more.

  I immediately texted Richard, Lindy and Milo, one of Lindy’s sons, who had lived with Clare and Uncle Gerard for a year while studying to be a helicopter pilot. Although he had told endless stories of the ageing couple sniping at each other and had finally chosen to sleep in the back of his van rather than go home to The Mill House and witness the eternal battle scenes, he’d retained a strong bond with his aunt.

  When amiable Uncle Gerard died four years ago, it fell to me to help with his funeral and all that disposing of a human body entails. During the drive from Sussex to Norfolk, I thought about how someone who had just lost her partner of sixty years must be feeling. I imagined us spending the next few days gently reminiscing, while searching in books for the perfect songs, readings and poems for Gerard’s funeral service.

  But not a bit of it. All sympathy was brushed aside and any words of praise for her dear departed were batted away, as if to say, ‘He’s gone now, so no use looking back.’ Before my arrival, she had asked her neighbour Mahari to call a nearby farmer. Clare wanted him to bring his JCB to their meadow, dig a deep hole and pop Gerard’s body in before covering him up.

  Mahari was somewhat agitated as she waited for me to arrive. ‘Brace yourself, Vanessa,’ she warned. ‘Clare has taken Gerard’s death quite – how should I put this? – oddly.’

  She was sitting down in the conservatory overlooking the mill pond, surrounded by well-thumbed copies of the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, her sleek whippets’ unclipped nails clicking on the tiled floor.