by John Wright
Sutherland Lodge with its impressive double-gabled, ivy-clad frontage stood on rising ground and had magnificent views to the south. It overlooked dense green forests, rolling countryside and the green fields round Cropton way. The eaves of the house had intricately carved bargeboards with a series of alternating diamond and bow shapes cut into them along their whole length. Delicately carved wooden finials crowned the apexes of the gable ends with, below them, a matching inverted finial. High up on the gable at the western end there was the gauntleted forearm of a knight grasping a short dagger on a stone shield, with the word PERSE engraved below it. It was probably the crest and motto of a noble family, with the word meaning ‘perseverance’. We would need a good deal of that in the times to come.
Three stone steps led up to a pair of studded oak doors which were flanked by stone buttresses. Above them an elegantly carved Gothic arch framed a stained-glass window with a leafy stemmed rose (the flower of secrets) in the centre of it. A pair of finely carved, winged gargoyles – which always frightened me – jutted out on either side of it. At one side was an old-fashioned, brass bell pull and directly above the doorway there was a stone-mullioned, three-sided oriel window.
A wide gravelled drive ran along the front of the house and we were told that the upper west wing was for the exclusive use of the resident Stancliffe family. From the drive, a wide flight of steps flanked by low stone walls led down to a rustic fence that surrounded an open paddock; a couple of horses were contentedly grazing on the meadow grass that was still lush and green.
Part of the house had been requisitioned on behalf of Middlesbrough Borough Council to be used as a nursery school for evacuee children below school age. It was about a mile and a half north-east of Cropton as the crow flies, but it was three miles or so by road and forestry track. It stood in a small clearing at the southern edge of the vast Cropton Forest where English kings had once hunted deer and wild boar.
Much of the land had been in the care of the Forestry Commission since 1930 and they had provided sorely needed work for the locals and those who came here from farther afield. A huge area of land had been planted with conifers, although many of the indigenous trees remained and rhododendron shrubs grew in profusion along the edges of the forest tracks. Our new home (built in 1870) had originally been a shooting lodge belonging to a Lieutenant-Colonel Daniel Thompson, a retired veteran of the Crimean War.
The fine three-storey stone building, with its eleven bedrooms, had later been the property of the Ringer family who were much involved with fox hunting and grouse shooting. They had made good use of the long range of stables and kennels that stood to the east of the house but most were now unused. A couple of the stables housed the horses of the present owners, Captain and Mrs J. Stancliffe, who had bought the house between the wars. They were deeply involved in local church and village affairs, although Captain Stancliffe, like so many others, was away serving with the army.
Mrs Stancliffe, a refined and attractive middle-aged lady with dark curly hair, was always kind, gentle and ladylike in her dealings with the nursery. We thought her very posh as her daughters Susan, aged seventeen, and Rosemary, aged fifteen, were away at a private boarding school. Her mother was a leading light in the local Red Cross and Women’s Institute and they owned several farms and a good deal of the land in the area.
Mrs Stancliffe employed a young German Jew as her housekeeper and her living quarters were in the topmost room of the ivy-covered tower. To me it seemed like a scene from a fairytale. Apparently she had recently been reported for letting a light show after dark as the blackout regulations were being strictly enforced and a light had been spotted at her window. Malicious rumours concerning the Jews were circulating in some quarters and there were real fears of infiltration by secret agents. Stories concerning the unseen presence of German sympathisers were ‘doing the rounds’ and the press called these fifth columnists ‘the enemy within’. The suspicion became even greater if they were German nationals. This atmosphere of mistrust may have had a bearing on the governess being reported and she was fined and sternly reprimanded at Pickering Magistrates’ Court.
Within a few months all German nationals were to be classed as aliens and interned. Most were kept behind barbed wire, patrolled by armed soldiers, in requisitioned hotels and guesthouses on the Isle of Man while their credentials were examined, but most turned out to be genuine refugees escaping Nazi persecution.
Mam had had a good deal of experience as a domestic servant, having worked for middle-class families in a number of large residences over the past ten years. This stood her in good stead as she assisted Mrs Winnie Ruonne, an excellent cook who always managed to feed us well even in those increasingly austere times. She was a short, plumpish lady with small features and a pale, freckled complexion, and we always called her ‘Dinner Lady’. She was actually a middle-aged woman but her round baby-face made her seem much younger. She always wore a white wrap-over pinafore and an elasticated mobcap that hid most of her ginger-coloured hair, which she plaited into a thick pigtail that hung down her back.
Winnie’s husband was a railwayman, and she saved up her off-duty days so that she could go and stay with him from time to time. Mam and Dinner Lady worked happily together in the cosy warmth of the kitchen where there was a large open fireplace and a Yorkist range of cream-coloured, enamel-coated ovens. They rose early and were getting breakfast ready long before we got up. As the porridge bubbled away in a huge pan the great black kettle steamed on the hob, and the distinctive mouth-watering aroma of home-made bread and cakes often permeated the whole house.
Across the corridor from the kitchen was a large well-stocked storage cupboard with its shelves full of tins of ham, soup, baked beans and the like. There were even 71b tins of bully beef in it. At the other end of the kitchen there was a walk-in scullery and a large copper for washing the masses of dirty laundry that we produced every day. A local woman used to come in on a Monday to tackle it and on the following day she did the ironing. Whole days were set aside for particular domestic tasks in those times.
A doorway led out into the side yard and diagonally across it was a coal store and the garage where Mrs Stancliffe kept her big shiny-black Humber car. Next to it was a tack room with a converted bothy on the floor above, and beyond that lay the stables and kennels. It was not until many years later that I learned that the sensuously curving pantiles on the roofs had been brought to this country from Holland as ballast in the old sailing ships.
On my first night I was put into one of eight small beds set up in the large ground-floor dormitory that had a polished wooden floor and no carpets. There was a small rug by each bed and a wooden frame, covered in a layer of thick black material, was placed over the windows at dusk. It took me a long time to get to sleep and, in the dead of night, I woke with a start not knowing where I was; I felt lost and frightened in the unfamiliar blackness and had the urge to go to the lav (as we always called the toilet). Trying desperately to hold on, I searched under the bed for the po (chamber pot) only to find there wasn’t one. I had not been there long enough to know the whereabouts of the bathroom and, in any case, there had always been a smelly po (often called a jerry) under our bed at home; a necessary evil as the lav was outside. When we went to the toilet during the day we always said, ‘I’m just going down the yard.’ Unable to hold it any longer I wet the bed and, fearful of the consequences, I cowered under the covers on the damp warmth of the saturated sheets. I lay there full of shame and guilt and I thought the reek of ammonia must surely be noticed and I would be found out, but nothing happened. I lay there choking on the fumes that rose from the stinking palliasse wishing it would go away but, like me, it had nowhere else to go. Trembling with cold, I tried to smother my sobs in the now wet pillow. I lay there – a lonely, home-sick, ashamed four-year-old who badly needed his mother – shivering in the darkness for what seemed like hours until, exhausted, I dozed off, wrapped uneasily in a ragged veil of sleep.
; The following morning, when my ‘crime’ was discovered, nothing was said and I was bathed and dressed by Miss Waters who was a caring, sympathetic and likeable young woman. The thin mattresses on our small metal-framed beds were filled with straw and chaff and were, fortunately, easily emptied, washed, dried and refilled, and when Mam came to work that morning and learned of my accident she gave me a big cuddle, a hug and a kiss.
‘I couldn’t help it Mam, it just came.’ I mumbled tearfully.
‘Never mind darling, just forget about it. Things will soon get better,’ she said in her soothing manner. It was not an unusual occurrence, but I was to live with the guilt and shame of it for some time to come.
A few days later the gaunt-featured and prim Miss Thorne took George and I to have our hair cut in Pickering. Her auburn hair, parted on the right, was tied back giving her a severe appearance but she was nice to us, although firm when necessary. Spaven brought out and yoked up the trap. In retrospect, his surname seemed a little inappropriate for a man in charge of horses, as the word ‘spavin’ is defined as ‘disease or distension on the inside of the hock of a horse’. Miss Thorne sat with us in the trap, which was always readily available for our use, and which she referred to as a Governess cart.
It was our first time in one and we loved sitting on the hard, wooden side seats of the highly polished carriage. The wooden-spoked wheels were twice my height and the burnished brass rail at the front gleamed in the autumn sunshine as Spaven busied himself with the harness. As we set off, the rhythmic rippling of the horse’s sleek flanks fascinated me; the muscular haunches twitched constantly and it swished its long tail about to stop the swarms of tormenting, stinging gadflies from settling. The sharp resinous tang of pine-scented air mingled with the faint leathery smell of horse.
We travelled on a different route this time and, as we headed south on the long straight forest tracks, we quietly absorbed the stillness and gazed at the luxuriant greenery. We watched red squirrels collecting nuts and cones to store up for the winter. The forest was mostly made up of sentinel-like spruce trees with greyish-brown flaky bark, but the pine trees had more deeply fissured, crusty-looking trunks. The brooding stillness was broken only by the gentle rustling of leaves and the rhythmic and leisurely clip-clop of the hooves of the sleek brown mare. A slight autumnal haze hung over the leafy vale and we could hear the soft murmuring of a beck.
The bay mare crossed a shallow ford, or water-splash as we called them, beside which was a stone footbridge with white handrails. It nestled in the depths of a small valley and a little way past it a path led up to Kelton Banks Farm. ‘Mr Ward owns that farm,’ Spaven told Miss Thorne. ‘They keep several Shire ’osses stabled there. They do various jobs on t’farm as well as pullin’ t’snowplough, which is kept ready in case it’s needed locally durin’ t’winter.’ The narrow, twisting road climbed a steep bank between tall, overgrown hedgerows before we turned right onto the Cawthorn–Cropton road. We travelled beside wild briar bushes that were heavily laden with blushing hips. ‘In t’winter months this road often gets blocked by deep snowdrifts,’ said Spaven. As we got closer to Cropton the tightly packed conifers gave way to mixed woodland interspersed with ploughed fields and grassy meadows. We turned into the top end of Cropton village and on our right a narrow earthen track led up a grassy slope to the church gate. Behind it lay an old graveyard with its grassy hummocks and leaning headstones, clustered around the pretty parish church in which Mrs Stancliffe was a Sunday school teacher – as Mam had been at home.
We thoroughly enjoyed that lovely carriage drive of about eight miles through the sights and scents of the countryside. The leaves whispered in the gentle breeze with the odd one spiralling silently down; Miss Thorne called them ‘harbingers of autumn’. The trees seemed, to me, sad at their loss. Apples were ripening in the orchards and blackberries hung in red clusters in the hedgerows. Once in the small market town of Pickering we walked up the hill to the old stone building called The Vaults where Fred Pickering’s barbershop was situated. We had our hair cut in the bobbed style of those days. The barber put an enamelled tin bowl on my head and cut up to it, and I vaguely recall the masculine scents of bay rum hair oil and shaving soap. I remember the click and snip-snip of the scissors as my fair locks tumbled to the floor, and as we came out the old, octagonal-shaped clock on the square, church tower struck four. We giggled when we were told that the top part of Potter Hill, facing east, was once called High Backside. We were taken to the Central Café above a tobacconist’s shop and were treated to a lovely iced fairy cake with half a glazed cherry on it, and a glass of orange fizz. The long, fine sunny spell came to an end and October was very wet with heavy and persistent rain that rushed down the forest runnels to swell the waters of Sutherland Beck. The streams became engorged to overflowing as the seemingly endless rains drained down from the saturated uplands. As the appalling weather continued unabated, the once shallow beck became a deep, raging torrent that raced down the narrow valley to join the roiling waters of the River Seven, now in full spate on Glaisdale Moor. Lower down it became a man-deep torrent that angrily thundered, foamed and surged southwards threatening to sweep away the picturesque old footbridge at Nutholme. Further downstream the full, muddy river caused extensive flooding when it burst its banks in the low-lying areas.
On those cold, dark and dreary days the paraffin lamps were on all day, and the doors and windows were kept tightly shut as incessant rain lashed against and streamed down the windowpanes. The wind howled, rattling the tall sash window frames as it boomed and echoed in the wide, stone chimneys. The torrential rain saturated the land and clattered onto the portico roof making the glass sing before rushing down to flow along the old cast-iron guttering. It drip-dripped interminably from the trees and bounced high in the puddles, and the packed soil of the pathways became sodden and slowly turned to ooze.
3
Little Man You’ve had a Busy Day
Around that time two new twenty-year-olds, Catherine Todd and her friend Mary, joined the nursery staff. Ten years earlier, when Catherine was only ten, her mother had died in the family home at Berwick and she was sent with her younger sister to a children’s home in Scarborough. After leaving school she worked as a housemaid in Leeds, then in the early 1930s she got a job as a housemaid at Queen Margaret’s Girls’ School for well-bred young ladies on Filey Road, Scarborough. It was a private school; a kind of finishing school for the well-off, where she became a close friend of another maid who came from Middlesbrough. Mary, a tall, slim, dark-haired girl, went home on holiday taking Catherine with her. The family was living on Cannon Street when war was declared and the pair went to a ‘keep fit’ session at The Settlement Club where they heard that staff were urgently required. They applied and in early October were delighted to learn that they had obtained posts at Sutherland Lodge. Catherine was 5 feet 4 inches – quite tall for a young woman in those days – slim, fit and attractive with soft mousy hair (with a ‘kink’ in it) that rested on her shoulders.
The two young women really loved children and, from the outset, Catherine used to sing us to sleep at night after tucking us in and giving us a hug and a kiss. These little gestures of affection were much appreciated by the children who, like me, were so far from home. She used to sing a song that began, ‘Little man you’re crying, I know why you’re blue’, and went on to say, ‘Time to go to sleep now, little man you’ve had a busy day.’ I learned later that the lyrics were from a song recorded by Kitty Masters – a popular and well-known singer of the time – who was a vocalist with Henry Hall’s BBC Dance Orchestra. During the ’30s the band, with its signature tune of Here’s to the Next Time, was often heard on the wireless and we called Catherine ‘Kitty’ from that time on.
We took to her and came to love her, and she returned our love a hundredfold. She was a sensible, capable and level-headed young woman who believed that children are precious and should be protected and loved if they are to become stable adults. When we had
to stay indoors Kitty kept us entertained and happily occupied by playing music, singing and dancing for us, and her youthful exuberance ensured that we did not mope or brood about home too much. She kept us busy drawing and playing with toys and she devised guessing games that lifted our spirits and encouraged us to think for ourselves. When we were with her we scarcely noticed the rain that fell pitilessly day after dull, dismal day.
The cosy day-room was in the bothy on the floor above the tack room and in it we sat on tiny wooden chairs that were arranged in a circle around her. In times long past, the bothy was the place in which the unmarried farmhands used to sleep and eat, and to get to it we had to go up a narrow wooden staircase. A log fire burned in the grate of the open stone fireplace behind a wire-mesh fireguard, and on the green-painted wood panelling of the dividing wall there were brightly coloured pictures of children at play. A row of five elegant, mullioned windows faced north, and beyond the garage, the stables and the soggy meadow, the deep dark forest crowded round us in all directions.
Mary and Kitty read to us and we learned to chant ‘Incy Wincy Spider’ and many other popular nursery rhymes. We sang children’s songs like Twinkle Twinkle Little Star; I Had a Little Nut Tree andHickory, Dickory Dock, and I particularly enjoyed singing ‘You push the damper in and you pull the damper out and the smoke goes up the chimlee [as we called a chimney] just the same’ at the top of our voices. We made ‘atishoo’ sounds and flopped down giggling when the music stopped. We played ‘Ring-a-Ring-a-Roses’, never realising that we were reenacting the sneezing that was a symptom of the bubonic plague that 300 years back had caused thousands of tragic and painful deaths.