I did well enough in my studies, but not well enough to win any prizes except a class prize (I thought of it as the booby prize): a leatherbound book of Shakespeare’s comedies, which I never read.
CHAPTER 18
Leyland House: Part One
In 1945, I saw my own father again for the first time since before the war. He met me in London, where we stayed in a hotel and went to the Chelsea Flower Show. During school holidays, I visited him in Yorkshire where he still lived in the same Georgian house in the village of Garforth on the Leeds-Selby road. In the ’30s, it was only modestly traveled; today it is a major north-west artery. In 1945, he shared the house with his wife, Barbara, his daughter, Anne, and a small day school for preschool children. This was run by Miss Mary, a tiny whitehaired woman with eyes like blue marbles. She giggled when she told me she used to pinch her brother in the bath to watch his mouth turn into an upside down “u.”
At the time of my mother and father’s divorce, the expectation must have been that my brother and I would travel back and forth during school holidays between England and Spain. But I don’t remember Kem ever visiting us during the 1930s. I visited my father some summers, before the war made it impossible.
Although I visited infrequently and only for short periods, it was home to me. I was always given the same room in the front of the house, overlooking the garden. The windows were huge, with old wavy glass and no screens. There was no central heating and, only later, gas fires in the bedroom grates where there had originally been coal fires laid by servants. Downstairs was cozier, with comfortable furniture and long, red velvet drapes and fireplaces that burned the hard coal of the area.
I have always had special feelings about this house, its gardens, and the fields around. The people spoke my language and seemed familiar and normal in a way that the place and inhabitants of our life in Portugal did not.
Leyland House
My father hung a swing for me from a sturdy old apple tree next to the flower beds. Beyond them, he kept his beehives. The adjoining field was leased to a farmer who used it to pasture his dray horses. They kicked up their huge hoofs and frolicked with each other as if they were lambs. There was a summer house my father had transported from his childhood home in Surrey, which swiveled to allow you to avoid or catch the sun at any time of the day. Bill was a gardener and one of my earliest memories is the hot pungent smell of tomatoes in a greenhouse.
Before bed, Daddy read to me from Alice in Wonderland. The Cheshire cat appeared in several colored plates and disappeared a piece at a time until in the last picture the cat was invisible. This frightened me so much that my father cut out all the plates that showed the cat in the process of vanishing. As a book lover, this must have been difficult for him. But I had had my fill of things vanishing. I knew only too well that not only cats in books disappeared—it could happen to anyone.
I loved the large old music box that played a variety of old songs. The enameled insects struck the bells as the drum (it looked like a miniature piano roll) turned. I thought all these things were mine, or partly mine. I certainly felt a proprietary right. Later, after my father remarried and had a child, I learned what it felt like to have what I thought mine become someone else’s.
There are some photos of these summer visits. Several are at the beach. In one, Kem is digging in the sand, rather like a dog, and I am watching. Above us, our father looks protectively into the middle distance. We are frozen in time: the two children and the father. There is only the beach and the sun and the little girl who is there on loan. We love each other but meet rarely because of distance, then the war. Gradually, we become strangers in whom there are echoes both disturbing and moving of this unrealized love.
Kem, Bill, and Sally c.1934–36
CHAPTER 19
Leyland House: Part Two
After the war, coal was still being mined throughout Yorkshire, especially near Leeds. The miners who waited by the road after a day’s work had faces black from soot. It was a dirty place. Later I understood why my mother hated the black slag heaps and cold countryside. I saw it only in summer, when leaves hid some of the dirt and the sun warmed the dark ground.
“Go and talk to your father,” my stepmother said, rousting me out of the corner where I was, as usual, deep in a book. I found him in the greenhouse. He smiled, always pleased to see me, although we never knew what to say to each other. So I sat and watched him, basking in the warm pungent smell of the tomatoes and his comfortable presence.
Periodically, he would put on his protective clothing, fire up the smoke machine, and remove the honeycombs from his hives. At those times, we were advised to stay indoors as the bees became agitated and apt to sting. I watched him dressed in baggy protective gear, squeezing an accordion-like machine that emitted clouds of smoke. Bees were everywhere and frantic. He calmly removed the trays of filled honeycombs and replaced them with empty ones. Then he closed the hive and carried the combs toward the kitchen door, bees and smoke trailing behind. He never seemed to get stung, but once I saw Barbara remove the stinger attached to a little ball of venom from my sister’s arm. This was possible, she explained if you did not rub the sting first.
Besides the Victorian music boxes, my father collected glass paperweights (many of them old and valuable) and books. He loved the Kate Greenaway children’s books and owned first editions of Oliver Goldsmith and other 19th-century novelists as well as a complete set of works by the illustrator Aubrey Beardsley and an early copy of Salome by Oscar Wilde, also illustrated by Beardsley. He had a cellar full of wine from before the war, but he enjoyed collecting more than drinking, and some bottles were still there when I last saw him in 1964.
He gave me one of his paperweights and later Barbara gave me two of his books. When my father died, my brother, Kem, removed the Aubrey Beardsley collection and sold it. He and Barbara had never liked each other, and this must have ended their relationship. I once asked Kem why he disliked Barbara, and he replied that he had come to resent her when our father was courting her and she took so long to accept him, always putting him off until finally (Kem thought) no one better appeared, and she reluctantly accepted.
Barbara was furious when she discovered the Beardsley collection gone, even though neither she nor Anne was interested in them and, as far as I know, neither read any of the books. But they were, of course, valuable. Perhaps they drank the wine, but I doubt it. The music boxes, books, and paperweights were all sold after my father died. I was told they fetched a good price. But in 1945, when I met Barbara for the first time, I liked her. She treated me more like an adult than my mother did and made it clear she preferred me to my brother. I had reasons of my own to resent Kem, and found it easy to ally myself with Barbara against him. He was everything I was not. He was glamorous (a war hero), good-looking, and articulate (a writer). He was in many ways like my mother. They were both impractical, generous, and impulsive.
It was during my first visit to my father after the war, when I was 14, that Barbara introduced me to the occult. She told me that she had had supernatural experiences when she was young; apparitions came to her at night, accompanied at times by terrifying noises, and she could sense “presences” in houses. Her sister, who had slept in the same room, was never troubled. Barbara assured me that Leyland House was free of any troubling spirits. I believed her, but I was frightened by her stories. She was not a woman who dramatized her life; she was very private and even shy, probably anti-intellectual in the middle-class English way that considers any kind of “showing off” as bad form.
She was the very opposite of my mother, and it was probably for this as much as her affection for me that made me like her. I fantasized living with her and my father, but this would never have crossed my father’s mind, and it was never proposed. Even if it had been, I could not have gone. I was tied to my mother in ways I did not then recognize.
Years later, when I was an adult, Barbara asked me if the stories had frightened me. I admitted the
y had, but by then I knew more and asked her if these “apparitions” ceased after she was married. She said yes. I thought to myself: Ah yes, sex. But I also knew the English were much more accepting of supernatural events than Americans. There are many supernatural legends, often located in famous bloodstained places such as the Tower of London. Some of the country houses now open to the public with entrance fees and tea rooms have resident ghosts that make irregular but recorded appearances. This is generally accepted without much fuss unless there is a noisy or destructive poltergeist or some other threat to civil order.
Years later, Kem took me to see the house where I was born. I was surprised that it was still there. I had not returned to Harrogate since I left at age two. When I visited my father, we made regular trips to York, a historic and interesting city, and to Leeds. Why had we never been to Harrogate? Why had I never asked to go? I can only think it was part of his life with my mother, which became a forbidden topic. Not that anyone ever forbade it; it was simply never mentioned. Children learn to talk about what they hear. I heard nothing about my birthplace, an hour’s drive away. Even more curious, I never thought about it until Kem took me there. Then I could think of nothing to ask. What worlds might have opened for my brother and me if we had been able to plunge into that forgotten abyss and discover our earliest selves? As it was, we paused at the end of the street facing the park— I can see it in my mind’s eye—then drove away.
Since I never lived with my father or Kem, and only saw them a few times, I do not know much about their lives. All I know I learned during those brief periods of contact, most of them when I was a child. My half-sister, Anne, has lived her life near where she grew up and has been in touch with my father’s family all her life. The history of the Bennett family comes from her although, sadly, there are few personal details.
CHAPTER 20
Bennett
William Deverell was born in 1887, making him four years older than my mother. He was probably brought up outside London in Sydenham (where the Pynegar family lived for a time). After leaving the army, Bill moved to Leeds, where some of the family had previously lived, to take over as a director, with his brother, of the Forgrove Machinery Works. He was educated in a public (private) school in Hurstpierpoint and then Dulwich Engineering College. After this, he joined the Queen’s Royal West Surrey Regiment along with his father, brother, and two brothers-in-law. A photograph of these men show the four young officers standing behind the father who would tower above them if he were standing. Much taller and heavier than his sons, James William Bennett looks like a throwback to ancestors he refers to as “hefty chaps.” (A letter to my father from my grandfather, James William Bennett, is reproduced in Appendix 1.)
Bill began courting Barbara Batley while Kem was at school. At holiday time, he was dragged along, “cap in hand” (his words), to visit and propose marriage once again. For years, Barbara refused, preferring to go along “as they were” for a number of years before she finally accepted.
Later, Kem referred to his father’s “amiable heedlessness,” which helped turn him into what he called a lone wolf. Kem inherited our mother’s temperament: romantic and high-spirited, rather than practical and acquiescent.
Queen’s Royal West Surrey Regiment. Left to right: Stanley Stedman, WIlliam Pryce, George Bennett, James WIlliam Bennett, William Deverell Bennett
My mother liked men and often had to live without her husband when he was in India and later when she took her young son to Europe for school vacations. There were rumors in the family that either Kem or myself was fathered by another man. But, as I came to resemble my father, the story of the second honeymoon went undisputed. Kem, on the other hand, looked much like one of my mother’s brothers, but had little resemblance to my father’s family.
All I know of my father was that, besides being an engineer, a gardener, a beekeeper, and a lover of books, he was also an admirer of Popeye the Sailor Man and, perhaps more strangely, gorillas. He had in his possession when he died some large glossy prints of a statue of a gorilla by the English sculptor David Wynne, which stands in Kensington Gardens in London. Bill was visiting the gorilla statue when a photographer popped out from behind and offered to sell him some photographs, which he bought. David Wynne became the second husband of Kem’s wife, Gillian Grant, who divorced my brother to marry him. When Kem lived in Joan Grant’s house, David Wynn was a friend of the family, and Kem undoubtedly took our father to see the gorilla.
Standing: unknown; seated: James Bennett and Anne Lister Bennett, 1931
When I try to put together these few flags of my father’s taste— his love of gardens and the natural world, glass paperweights, the erotic drawings of Beardsley, Kate Greenaway’s Victorian children with their ribbons and hoops and skipping ropes, and then the macho symbolism of Popeye and the gorilla—it sounds like a well-rounded personality. But he was too subdued and repressed to have exhibited these characteristics, at least to his children. I wish I had known my father when I was growing up. But I take comfort in knowing these traits exist in some form in our gene pool.
I always believed my father loved me but was too remote both in distance and concern to show it. Even though we corresponded periodically, he never inquired about my education or anything else. I once asked him to pay for a secretarial course, which he did. He might have paid for college had I had the self-confidence to ask. In response to my desperate request, he paid my mother’s passage to England when I got married, with the money that was to have been his wedding present to me. Kem’s charge of “amiable heedlessness” seems about right.
After public school, Kem went to an engineering college—perhaps the same one my father attended. He hated school. When the war started, he signed up with the British Special Forces, the Commandoes, and was dropped behind enemy lines in Denmark to work with the Resistance. For this he was awarded a medal, the Danish Knight. He was wounded—almost fatally—in France. He told stories—always funny—of these experiences. He never told us what his medals were for and, as far as I know, never sent for them.
Like my mother’s family, the Pynegars, he had an abundance of charm, high spirits, and humor. He told me once he thought we had always liked each other. For me this vastly understated my feelings for him, which for years were best described as adoration. He was, I thought, the most attractive man I could imagine, aside from movie stars and characters in books. This accounts for my pathological shyness on those rare occasions when we met.
His daughter Nicola told me years later of his “silver cord” experience. When near death from his wounds, he saw himself hovering above his body, attached by a silver cord. This gave him a belief in some form of life after death, and later he became interested in Eastern mysticism and reincarnation. Our mother had a similar experience when she was near death from pleurisy and saw her favorite brother, Rex, walking towards her. Rex had been killed during World War I. She thought he was coming to get her but “I was too strong,” she said.
After the war, Kem published four or five novels and numerous short stories based on his war experiences. One of his books was turned into a movie. Whenever I met him, he was unfailingly charming and funny and kind. I never saw my brother angry.
We became estranged over his unwillingness or inability to help care for our mother after she returned to England when I married. From my perspective, it made sense for her to finally return to her native land. I had run out of ideas of how to help her and wanted to begin an independent life with my new husband. I believe Kem tried to be helpful, but he had a young family and was struggling financially, and Sylvia was not about to take on the role of mother-in-law or Granny. So once again, off she went, looking for somewhere to settle, living on the money from the sale of our Virginia house.
After his divorce from Gillian, Kem was finding it increasingly hard to earn a living. His writing did not earn him enough, and he finally turned to his other talent, cooking. He became a chef and restaurateur for some years, until a chan
ged world and perhaps poor health pushed him onto the sidelines.
In 1994, when I finally set about trying to find Kem through the British Red Cross, I was given the shocking news that he had died six years earlier of a heart attack. The counselor at the Red Cross tried to comfort me by telling me she had located his two children and would ask them if they were willing to be in touch with me. The same day, his son, Johny, called me on the phone. Later, I met both Johny and his older sister, Nicola, who has become a regular and loved presence in my life.
CHAPTER 21
Goodbye, England
In 1945, my brother, Kem, was demobbed from the Commandos and came to live with us in Hassocks. It turned into one of the coldest winters on record, and England was on its knees. Everything was still rationed except fish, which was plentiful now that the waters surrounding England were safe. Kem was trying to become a writer and spent his days typing on the dining room table.
This was the only room with a coal-burning stove, and we practically lived in it. There was no central heating, and limited fuel for heating water. The living room, with its large windows overlooking the garden, had only a fireplace. The bedrooms were freezing, and the small kitchen was warmed by the oven. Once a week we bathed in an inch of hot water in the icy bathroom.
My indulgences were chocolate and the movies. There was a cinema in our village where I used to walk to see Hollywood musicals. First I bought my week’s chocolate ration and ate it in the movies. Once, my brother came to get me after the movie. He scolded me for ignoring my mother. I was angry with her for treating me like a child, not as an equal—the way she treated Kem.
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