Dennis could not have had more moral support than he did from my mother, Rosemary Clare Walker LRCP, MRCS (physician and surgeon), who had studied medicine at the Royal Free Hospital after her schooldays at Benenden, where she was unhappy, and Penrhos, where she worked hard enough to follow her father and earlier generations of Walkers into medicine. She was a locum during the war in the Gorbals in Glasgow while my father was involved in firing back at marauding German aircraft. She spoke with immense admiration afterwards of the courage and uncomplaining graft of the Glaswegians, doing their best to bring up their families in tough conditions and keeping their slum houses, she said, spotlessly clean.
If that conjures up a picture of a tough, pragmatic woman in a white coat it is a false one. My mother was tender as a petal, a gentle dreamer, warm and sympathetic. She thought and cared deeply about many things but kept her own counsel and, quite unlike her husband, usually managed to hide her emotions. Her profound intelligence was hidden beneath a very large bushel and it took alcohol (which, unlike her Scotch-loving husband she never drank to excess) to loosen her tongue. Oddly for a doctor, she hated anything raw or rough – including, like Doc Martin, the sight of blood.
She suffered her own occasional physical afflictions with silent stoicism, unlike the male members of her family, but she avoided hard work if she could, especially once her family had flown the nest. She was probably more affected than she ever said by the experience of giving birth to a still-born daughter, Diana, between my elder brother, David, and me. To her dying day at the age of eighty-nine she breathed not a word about that trauma to any of her children and to my children she was a strangely hands-off grandmother, albeit a very affectionate one. Scottish blood she may have carried but she was, I suppose, a perfect example of English reserve. She cared deeply about many things, not least her family, or right and wrong; but hers were still waters.
Sadly, vascular dementia restricted my mother to an undignified last few years at a nursing home near Guildford. At least she was always able to recognise her family and to appreciate the visits that my brothers and I made on a rota basis until she died, in 2000, nine years after Dennis.
Rosemary had three sisters, May, Beryl and Anne, and a brother, Bob, who became a film cameraman, never happier than when he worked with Harry Belafonte and Joan Collins in Barbados on Island in the Sun. Bob, who had two wives and three children, was a laid-back, gentle, vague character with a wonderful twinkle in his eyes. His charm exceeded his ambition by about ninety-nine to one. He died young of a brain tumour.
Anne, the youngest daughter, lost two fiancés at the beginning and end of the war, the second indeed after official hostilities had ceased. Mercifully she married at last after the conflict. She shared her sisters’ softness and romanticism but the various experiences of them all demanded a certain toughness too. My mother had shown it by driving herself to success in her medical exams at a time when women doctors were a rarity.
May, the eldest, was a merry soul who never stopped talking and seldom stopped laughing. She was the ideal extrovert wife for her gentle, deep, shy husband, John Neale, who had been profoundly affected by his experience as a prisoner of the Japanese during the war.
The longest lived of the family was Beryl, known to them all as Bix. In the end she had by far the toughest life but never gave in and she touched everyone by her warmth and vigour. She and my mother were closest in age and temperament. They were introduced to a love of the countryside and all that went with it by their surroundings in what was then a rural Northamptonshire. There were trips to Lincolnshire and coastal Norfolk, and family holidays amongst Perthshire hills and Lake District mountains. They all wanted to climb every peak they could see, and often did. Bix would remember the birds and the flowers she had seen and record them in her diary, which she kept daily for perhaps eighty-five years. One of my grandfather’s patients was the novelist L.P. Hartley and there was something of the dreamy life of The Go-Between, or The Shrimp and the Anemone about the upbringing of the Walker sisters.
Reality had to intrude, however. In tune with the times, they were all sent away to boarding schools, in Bix’s case to Queen Anne’s, Caversham. Later she trained as a nursery teacher at the Froebel Institute and applied her techniques at Westwood House High School until, shortly before the war, she married a dashing young officer, Captain Burls Lynn Allen. Their very big and happy wedding in Peterborough, in July 1939, gave way to the dreadful consequences of Hitler’s egomanic ambition and to Germany’s hypnotised compliance. Burls was murdered within a year in heroic circumstances in a small village called Wormhoudt, on the road from Cassel to Dunkirk.
He and what remained of his troop, the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, had been herded with a remnant of the Cheshire Regiment into a hot and stinking cowshed after fighting overwhelming numbers of German forces for five hours. The orders to Burls two days before, 26 May 1940, had been as clear as a bell on the breeze: ‘Tell your men, with our backs to the wall, the division stands and fights.’ That they and others did so enabled thousands of British troops to be evacuated from Dunkirk in the shadow of the encircling German troops.
Captured at last by the SS Liebstandarte Adolf Hitler regiment, the Führer’s personal bodyguards, Burls must have known his fate when, according to the surviving soldier that he was shortly to save, he banged on the door of a shed packed with about 100 soldiers, all weary and many wounded, and shouted: ‘For the love of God, there is no room in here.’ A voice from outside responded chillingly: ‘Where you are going there will be a lot of room.’
Bert Evans, then just nineteen and the sole survivor of the massacre that followed, told a Sunday Telegraph journalist when the barn was restored in 2010 how, after a final cigarette had been negotiated by their Captain, grenades were thrown into the barn and everyone inside was raked by machine guns. The door was then hauled open and any survivors were individually shot in the back of the head. Evans had his right arm almost blown off by the blast but Burls, who was miraculously unscathed and could have run for his life alone, grabbed the wounded private soldier and dragged him away at the double. Chased by an SS officer they plunged into a pond. Burls was shot at close range through the forehead and Evans in the neck. They sank below the surface, apparently dead, but the private lived to recall: ‘That’s how my captain died; saving my life.’
Burls and Beryl had been due to take a posting in India, a country where her mother’s forebears had served for generations. In time Bix met and fell for a charming Czech soldier, billeted with his Free Army, and they were married in far less grand circumstances in January 1944. When Karel Matyasek stepped on a mine sixteen months later she found herself widowed for a second time at the age of thirty-one but she wrote to her parents ‘although I have been unlucky like so many others I have twice for a time been wonderfully happy’.
The consolation for her second shattering blow was the birth of Karel’s son, Jiri, in March 1945. He became the racing journalist James Lambie, author of The Story of Your Life, an outstanding recent history of the newspaper that employed him for most of his career, Sporting Life.
Beryl’s compassion must have had something to do with her genes. My maternal grandfather, Alec Russell Walker, MB, BC, BA, FRCS, was, like his own father and uncle and several of his brothers, a doctor, in his case a surgeon with a great reputation amongst his patients. According to the family tree he was descended from both Robert the Bruce and John Knox and came from Leslie in Fife. In the Victorian era the Walkers practically were medicine in Peterborough, it seems. A photograph taken on my great-grandfather’s eightieth birthday, celebrated during the First World War, shows a sturdy middle-class professional family, each doing his or her bit for the national effort. Of the eight men in the group young enough to serve directly, four are in the army, two in the navy. Charles, whose son became an Admiral, is described as a civil engineer from Sheffield; my grandfather was surgeon to the Peterborough Recruiting Station.
Alec’s family adored him. Sadly, I only remember him swallowing a fish bone that got stuck in his throat when we were having dinner at the Old Manse in Tyndrum, his retirement home in Perthshire. I remember my grandmother Ettie better, if only from visits to her bedside at Achdalieu. She was a Goadby, another large middle-class family. Of her several sisters the one I knew best was Aunt Edith, who supplied me with most of my early religious counsel. She had been a missionary in Egypt and lived to 105, latterly at a nursing home in Tunbridge Wells. I still have the pocket version of St. John’s Gospel that she sent me one Christmas and I remember also the howler I committed when writing my bread and butter thank-you letter for another present. ‘As I write this letter’, I penned in an attempt to spin it out until it at least got over the first page, ‘I am listening on the gramophone to a new record by the singer Michael Holliday, which was also amongst my favourite presents.’ No doubt my missive had my usual spelling mistakes because she replied by return, abjuring me never to try to do two things at once.
Another sister, Hilda, was also a favourite of my mother’s. So much so that when she was shopping one day in Knightsbridge she suddenly heard Hilda’s voice saying, softly, ‘Goodbye, Rosemary’. She turned to look for her, in vain. As soon as she got home she heard that her aunt had died that afternoon.
I know less about my paternal family, at least on the Martin-Jenkins side, although the games-playing gene was obviously there because my grandfather was captain of Woodcote Park Golf Club in Surrey in 1916/17. The only story that I can remember my father telling of him is when he caused a rumpus in a tube station by retaliating when a man going up an escalator accidentally jabbed him with his umbrella. There, no doubt, is the seed of my own impetuosity.
Frederick Jenkins, as he apparently was until adding a second barrel, probably to appease his parents-in-law when he got married, seems to have made up in personality anything that he lacked in ‘background’.
I remember my paternal grandmother – Auntie Pat to the rest of the family – with affection. Tall and boney, she had been very beautiful in her youth in a Keira Knightly sort of way. She was artistic – a talented sculptress – excitable, kind, opinionated and very amusing.
She was Roman Catholic and remained faithfully so to her dying day at Mount Alvernia Nursing Home in Bramshott, where the nursing nun who saw her out of the world, Sister Gemma, a lovely Irish lady, was also the one who, a few years later, was on hand to help the doctor to deliver James, our eldest child, at Mount Alvernia Hospital in Guildford. There was a wonderful sense of continuity about that.
I have no memories of my paternal granny until our move south but vague ones of my mother’s parents, ‘Grandpa and Nanny’, from visits to their home in Peterborough, Foxwall, where the garden with its long herbaceous border had an instant attraction for me, my brothers and cousins on summer holiday visits. There was a Wolseley, driven by a chauffeur called Crowson, whom I called Crocus and muddled with the gardener. Most of my first two years were spent in Scotland, first at Fairlie in Ayrshire, in accommodation rented from an upmarket landlady named Lady Boyle, then in the same area at Skelmorlie, where the prevailing smell emanated from the next door gasworks. I vaguely remember that heavy odour, especially when, once or twice since, I have encountered it again, notably in the Athlone area of Cape Town where the late Basil D’Oliveira was brought up.
While brother David went to his first school at Miss Johnson’s Academy in Skelmorlie Castle, I was being watched to make sure that, once toddling, I did not disappear through the back gate into the Clyde. The great river wound below a steep bank immediately beyond the gate, within sight and sometimes sound of the shipbuilders’ ‘measured mile’.
As a result of this Scottish start my brother has supported their various lost causes – trying to beat England at various sports for instance – ever since. I give them my loyal encouragement whenever they play any country other than England, but in the cruelly cold winter of 1947 we moved south to Birkenhead as my father’s work for Ellermans took him from Glasgow to Liverpool.
My younger brother, Tim, was well on the way by the time that we had completed our move over two snowy February days. He was wise enough to wait until towards the end of May to make his first appearance in a warmer world. Home for the now complete family was a white-stuccoed semi-detached house, 26, Elm Road North, Prenton. I have only vague images of that period, amongst them a sloping street, friendly neighbours, an evening paper salesman yelling repetitively into misty darkness half lit by yellow street lamps and a shamelessly ostentatious rendering by myself of ‘Away in a Manger’ at someone’s Christmas party. Something deep inside rather liked the feel of an admiring audience.
Certainly I recall that experience more clearly than anything about my first school, Pershore House. David’s education continued first at Prenton prep, then, as a boarder, at Kingsmead. Elder siblings play a large part in a younger child’s upbringing and I dare say that I was shaped to an extent by his enthusiasms. He loved all sport and still does, although never blessed with more than an average eye for a ball, and I liked nothing better than to play football with his friends, sometimes on the basis of that typically British method of team selection: two older boys as captains choose one player each in turn until the duffers are left to make up the numbers. It was during an impromptu game that David broke two front teeth when they collided with my head. The cut bled profusely. It turned out to be negligible but I got all the sympathy at first.
Amongst our neighbours in Liverpool were the Wales rugby international Raymond Bark-Jones, and Tranmere Rovers footballer Peter Bell, a neat, smart and dignified figure.
We had two more years in the north, moving to leafier surroundings at Higher Bebington on the Wirral peninsula. It was a yellow-painted, four-bedroom house, bought from friends of my parents, Don and Kay Smith, who were killed together in the Manchester air crash several years later, leaving four young children.
In 1951 my father was promoted to a directorship in the London office and he and my mother ended a swift search near their first marital home at Ockley by buying the Dutch House at South Holmwood from Sir H.P. Hamilton for £7500. It was a big enough house to have been commandeered during the war as a billet for the Canadian Army, who had dug up what had once been a beautifully manicured tennis lawn in order to grow potatoes.
At no stage of our stewardship did the Dutch House have central heating, which, in addition to its too close proximity to the Dorking to Horsham road, no doubt explained why it failed initially to attract its asking price of £10,000 when my father put it on the market in 1964, but it was attractive for all that. White with blue windows on the outside, it was given its character by its curved front aspect, with an inverted centre in the Cape Dutch style. It was approached through a gate marked on each side by two beautiful cherry trees, followed by a short gravel drive. The front door was guarded by a porch with twin pillars and immediately inside the hall there was a Latin inscription carved into the plaster of a horizontal beam, placed there to celebrate the return from prison of one of the earlier occupiers, the famous (some thought notorious) suffragette, Mrs. Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence. As a member of the Women’s Social and Political Union she had been imprisoned for nine months in 1912. She later edited the journal Votes for Women and continued to fight the socialist cause long after that fight had been won.
I can remember virtually every inch of what, by some standards, was no more than a medium-sized family home, with four main bedrooms, two very small ones and a single bathroom. But there were also a number of smaller rooms whose nomenclature was redolent of a more leisured era. There was, for example, a pantry, a larder, a scullery, a boot-room, a sewing-room and, if you please, a ‘maid’s sitting-room’ leading down from the kitchen. The only thing it lacked was a maid.
In her place there was room for a tiny billiard table. For some reason I seldom used it and remain one of the worst players ever to have attempted to pot a black. Table tennis in the playroom was more f
un for me. It was a very large room with a leaky glass roof, linked to the main house by a cold corridor which, for the purposes of at least a couple of dances in the Christmas holidays when we three boys were teenagers, we restored to its original status as a ‘ballroom’. It had its own chimney and is now a separate house. It was an exciting day when we lit a fire there for the first time for one of these dances, before spreading French chalk on the wooden floor to aid the quick-stepping, fox-trotting debs and debs’ delights of west Surrey.
Like his father, David never lost his enthusiasm for mickey-taking of one kind or another. He became a chartered accountant, for a time the group financial director of Ellerman Lines and for many years a trustee of the huge charitable trust left by the second Sir John. Ever a supporter of the underdog, a natural British trait, he had also been involved for thirty years with the Chichester Liberal Democrats, but his real love in life has been nature generally and mountains in particular. Since the age of sixty, and in short bursts over a period of only nine years, he has climbed over half the 283 Munros, the hills over 3000 feet in Britain. He scaled the 21,200-foot peak of Mera in Nepal in his forties and then, at the age of fifty-two, the still more demanding 22,835 feet of Aconcagua in Argentina, the highest mountain in the world outside the Himalayas. Four years later he climbed another Andean peak, Pisco, in Peru, a mere 18,867 feet.
I admire but do not envy him. In 2009 I had planned to walk the 100-odd miles of the South Downs Way with David, only to have to withdraw when I got hepatitis. Determined to make amends the following September, I had to set out from Eastbourne to Winchester with a septic toe, which made the exercise painful from the outset. No doubt unbalanced in my walking as a result, I strained a hamstring muscle severely enough during the first few gorgeously scenic miles above the chalk cliffs beyond Beachy Head for my walk to have become an increasingly pathetic shuffle by the following morning, despite a comfortable bed, two pints of Harvey’s and a good pub meal at Alfriston. Two days later I abandoned the unequal struggle after fifty-nine miles, leaving my brother, also hobbling from dreadful blisters, to plough on alone. I completed my own missing section of the journey the following spring.
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