Rosie

by Rose Tremain

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Rose Tremain

  List of Illustrations

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Paradise

  Cast Away

  Mother

  Angel

  The English Room

  Teen Music

  Milton’s Oppositions

  ‘Tits to the Valley’

  Afterword

  Picture Section

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Rose Tremain grew up in post-war London, a city of grey austerity, still partly in ruins, where both food and affection were fiercely rationed. The girl known then as ‘Rosie’ and her sister Jo spent their days longing for their grandparents’ farm, buried deep in the Hampshire countryside, a green paradise of feasts and freedom, where they could at last roam and dream.

  But when Rosie is ten years old, everything changes. She and Jo lose their father, their London house, their school, their friends, and – most agonisingly of all – their beloved Nanny, Vera, the only adult to have shown them real love and affection.

  Briskly dispatched to a freezing boarding-school in Hertfordshire, they once again feel like imprisoned castaways. But slowly the teenage Rosie escapes from the cold world of the Fifties, into a place of inspiration and mischief, of loving friendships and dedicated teachers, where a young writer is suddenly ready to be born.

  About the Author

  Rose Tremain’s novels and short stories have been published in thirty countries and have won several awards, including the Orange Prize (The Road Home), the Dylan Thomas Award (The Colonel’s Daughter and Other Stories), the Whitbread Novel of the Year (Music & Silence) and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (Sacred Country). Her most recent novel, The Gustav Sonata, was a Sunday Times Top Ten Bestseller. It won the National Jewish Book Award in the US, the South Bank Sky Arts Award in the UK and was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award. Rose Tremain was made a CBE in 2007. She lives in Norfolk and London with the biographer, Richard Holmes.

  www.rosetremain.co.uk

  ALSO BY ROSE TREMAIN

  Novels

  Sadler’s Birthday

  Letter to Sister Benedicta

  The Cupboard

  The Swimming Pool Season

  Restoration

  Sacred Country

  The Way I Found Her

  Music and Silence

  The Colour

  The Road Home

  Trespass

  Merivel

  The Gustav Sonata

  Short Story Collections

  The Colonel’s Daughter

  The Garden of the Villa Mollini

  Evangelista’s Fan

  The Darkness of Wallis Simpson

  The American Lover

  For Children

  Journey to the Volcano

  List of Illustrations

  NOTE : All photos are property of the author

  Jane Thomson, Rose’s mother, age 20, 1933

  Keith Thomson, Rose’s father, age 35, 1947

  Linkenholt Manor, home of Roland and Mabel Dudley, Rose’s grandparents, c. 1950

  Rose’s first birthday picnic, 2 August 1944

  David’s Cottage, where Rose saw the birds on the wire

  Michael Dudley, Rose’s uncle, ready for war, 1940

  Nan and Jane outside 22 Sloane Avenue, 1950

  Rose and Jo in Wengen with Nan, 1950

  Rose near the Meadows canal with Piggy, Mary and Polly, 1954

  Timmy Trusted with family Pekinese in Cornwall, c. 1950

  Jane with Jo and the cousins, Jonathan and Robert, Swanage, 1951

  School photo, Crofton Grange, 1953

  Painting scenery for The Mysteries of Udolpho: with Jane McKenzie, Elsa Buckley and Rose

  Rose’s last school report, defaced by V.M.T.

  Signed photo of Poet Laureate John Masefield in his Oxford study, 1959

  Frilsham Manor in the 1960s

  The ‘ginnery’ at Frilsham

  Rose being ‘finished’ at Les Diablerets, Switzerland, 1960

  On the balcony at Chardon: with Ginny Lathbury, Rose and Carol Reunert

  Fondue at the Cafe de la Poste, Les Diablerets; with Rose, Jenny Lowe, Pierrette Monod and Carol Reunert

  Ski instructor Monsieur Borloz – ‘tits to the valley’

  Happy at last?: Ivo and Jane Thomson fishing in Ireland, c. 1980

  Loving Eleanor: Jane with Rose and baby Eleanor, 1972

  Trying to love Mother: Rose with Jane, 1992

  Smokers’ corner: Richard Holmes with Jane at High House, Norfolk, 1993

  Rose with Mawkie at the Lychgate, Linkenholt, 2002

  To the memory of Vera Sturt (‘Nan’) and to my beloved grandchildren, Archie and Martha Rose

  Paradise

  I can remember this: lying in my pram and looking up at a white sky. Across the sky, some lines are drawn, like musical staves. Fluttering shapes arrive and land on the staves: birds on telegraph wires.

  My mother used to say, ‘You couldn’t possibly remember that. Babies can’t capture anything, because they have no words. Your mind would have been as empty as the sky you think you saw.’

  I would remind her that the sky wasn’t empty. It was filled with the descending notes of birds. They settled on the wires. And she would say, ‘Don’t be silly. You invented that stuff. The first real memory you could possibly have – when you were, say, three or four – would have been of Linkenholt.’

  All right, then. Linkenholt. It’s clear and present in my mind. The big house stood on a hill in Hampshire, where the wind was always strong. It was never a beauty. The colour of its brick was too screechy a coral red. Its white-painted gables were too massive. It reminded people of a lumpy three-masted ship, riding its waves of green and beautiful land. But all through my childhood, I longed for it – for the moment of walking through its heavy front door and breathing its familiar perfume. What was that perfume? A composite of beeswax furniture polish, Brasso, French cigarettes and dogs. It was the smell of home.

  It wasn’t my home.

  Linkenholt Manor belonged to my grandparents, Roland and Mabel Dudley. My older sister Jo and I only went there three times a year – Christmas holidays, Easter and summer. But our love for it was uncontainable. Our day-to-day lives in a dark, post-war London were smog-bound, constrained and confined by the walks to school and back, to the Italian corner shop, to the sooty parks, the skating rink, the swimming baths. But at Linkenholt, we were free. Around the house on the hill were spread two thousand acres of chalky farmland, owned by our grandfather, across which, on our Raleigh bicycles, in corduroy dungarees or sometimes improbably dressed as Indian chiefs, we were allowed to roam. These fields and woods, in the 1950s, were some of the loveliest in England. It is not an exaggeration to say that we often felt our London existence to be a kind of exile, from which we longed to escape, a dark dream from which only at Linkenholt would we awake.

  And here we came at last: pulling up Linkenholt Hill in a low gear of our mother’s Morris Traveller, cruising slowly through Linkenholt village, past the dairy, past the tiny cricket pavilion, past the church where I was christened, then into the gravelled drive, on the border of which three vast elm trees stood like restless giants.

  And now, the arrival. Jill, the overfed Springer spaniel, barking. The door opening. The slow emergence of Granny and Grandpop into the porch. Brief contact with the tobacco-tainted scent of their clothes, with the skin of their faces – taut and shiny over Grandpop’s skull; soft and powdery, falling in pastry folds, on Granny’s cheek – and then the rush past them to where we longed to be: inside the house, feeling it take us in, then hear
ing the lovely percussion of our feet clicking against the brass rods of the wide stairs.

  The room Jo and I shared was at the back, overlooking a rose garden and a wild spinney beyond, where the wind sighed in the night. To drift to sleep to the sound of this wind, knowing that we were ‘home’, that the morning would lay before us the paradise we kept dreaming of, was to feel drugged with happiness.

  Linkenholt loved us. That’s how it seemed to me, when I was ‘Rosie’, a very young, ignorant girl. The place gave us its soul and its grandeur, but Granny and Grandpop were heartbroken people who had almost nothing left to give us. They had lost their elder son, also called Roland, aged sixteen, from a burst appendix. He was away at Harrow School when this happened, so they didn’t even see him die. Of their remaining two children – our mother, Jane, and our uncle Michael – they loved only Michael. But in the last month of the war, November 1945, Michael Dudley was killed at Fürstenau in Germany. He was twenty-eight. Roland and Mabel went on living, but they never recovered.

  They were left with the one child, the middle child, the girl child, Jane, who seemed to give them no joy at all. Their precious boys were dead. Such scratchings of affection as they had left, they gave to Michael’s two sons, Jonathan and Robert, our cousins. Perhaps, when they let Jo and me cycle off down the drive in our Indian feathers, they secretly hoped a few cowboys had strayed out of Wyoming, USA, to Hampshire, England, and would put an end to us – an end to trying to love children who meant almost nothing to them.

  The strange thing is, this didn’t seem to matter to us. We were never – in my memory, anyway – craven to the grandparents, longing to please them or hoping to be hugged or petted by them. We loved Linkenholt, not them. They were rich and they had created a beautiful world around themselves, and that world was all to us.

  A small regiment of servants kept this world shined up. It was human endeavour that gave to the great hallway its perfumed magnificence, that pruned the lavender paths and the fruit trees and the laurel walks of the vast garden. In the kitchen, huge roasts and puddings were confected by Florence the cook. In the dairy, old Mr Abbot churned yellow cream and a stiff salty butter more delicious than any I’ve tasted since. In the greenhouses, Tom, the head gardener, would, with tender, earth-blackened hands, offer us choice ripe strawberries and vine tomatoes perfumed like exotic fruit.

  In London, we habitually ate a lot of bread and jam, Spam, Kraft cheese slices, Ryvita, toad-in-the-hole, tinned ravioli – parsimonious post-war food which kept us very thin. Here at Linkenholt, we consumed roast grouse, honey-baked ham, rhubarb syllabubs, treacle puddings, apple pies and cream. And we could give our whole attention to these wonders. Nobody expected us to speak much at mealtimes. I think it was assumed that girls would have nothing to say. We just had to sit up straight and wipe our mouths nicely with starched linen napkins and, when the meal was done, ask Granny if we could leave the table. ‘Can we get down, Granny?’ we would say. But she would never answer. She would just give a furious little nod of her head, which made her powdery chins wobble.

  Yet I don’t think we cared. I can remember running straight out of the dining room, through the hall, down a long passage, past a locked gun room, to the back door where our bicycles waited. A circuit or two, perhaps, round the restless elms, then away down the drive, out into the ever-unfolding green spaces, through a larch glade, up a chalky hill, pushing our bikes towards a great wood of beech and fir, oak and ash, where pheasants were fattening themselves up for the shooting season. Or sometimes, if an excited, daring mood was on us, we would cycle slowly from the manor gates to the top of Linkenholt Hill, stop for a moment, then whizz at colossal speed, as fast as we could, down the hill, the scented hedgerows a blur, the bright sky seeming to bounce at the edge of our vision.

  Skidding to a stop at the bottom of the hill, we might meet Mr Carter, the gamekeeper, with his posse of lively Springer spaniels. The dogs would come rushing towards us – five or six of them. Jo loved this rush. She would kneel and pet the dogs, while I ran away. Bred as gun dogs, they were, I’d always assumed, adept at biting things, and I imagined those things would probably include my limbs or my face. Mr Carter would gently encourage me to stroke the dogs, but I never lost my fear of them.

  Mr Carter was a man of few words, who lived alone in one of the estate cottages, a house with a strange tower growing out of its roof. He always treated us with patience and affection. And this was true of all the people who worked for the Dudleys. We must surely have been annoying to them, ridiculous even – spoilt kids from London, charging about on expensive bikes, given every material thing we asked for. But, perhaps because they had lived through the tragedies that had so wounded the Dudley family, they understood why our grandparents were unable to give us much affection, and so they compensated by showing us what kindness they could.

  The person we were closest to was Douglas Abbot, only son of Mr Abbot who looked after the dairy. Douglas had two roles, as butler and chauffeur. He was tall and very thin, with a gentle voice, never ruffled by our grandfather’s outbreaks of bad temper. In a special cupboard in the dining room, he kept orange squash and ginger beer for us. Once, when with our cousins Jonathan and Robert we’d built a tree house in the spinney beyond the rose garden, Douglas Abbot climbed the makeshift ladder to our hideaway carrying four glasses of squash on a silver salver.

  When I think about this extraordinary image, I understand that if part of your childhood is spent in a paradise like Linkenholt, a veil falls between your eyes and the truths you need to learn about the world. Later, this veil falls away.fn1

  Christmas at Linkenholt involved beguiling preparations.

  Every year, Jo and I were allowed to dig up a tiny Christmas tree from the spinney and keep it in a pot in our bedroom. (In January, it was replanted in the wood.) We decorated it with glued-together things: branches of wild oats, with the seed heads wrapped in multicoloured sweetpapers; pine cones and twigs dipped in glitter powder; garlands cut out from strips of chocolate foil.

  We festooned our room with home-made paper chains and tissue-paper bells, bought from Woolworths in the King’s Road in London. We gathered our toys around the tree: my pig and his two rag-doll friends made by me, complete with extensive wardrobe, and named Mary and Polly; Jo’s dog Diggles and his companion Little Bear. We sat them up and let them marvel at our decorations. Mary and Polly put on their cocktail gowns.

  Downstairs, in the library, the other tree, the real Christmas tree, waited. It was very tall and reached out its wide scented arms far into the room. Here, the decorations we loved most were strange pastel-coloured Victorian angels with anguished faces and long flowing gowns made of horsehair.

  On Christmas morning, after the deep pitch darkness had sighed us to a long sleep, we woke to find filled stockings, heavy and rustling, on the end of our beds. We always opened these alone, instructed to let the grown-ups lie in (presumably after their Christmas Eve tippling).

  The stockings themselves were the heavy wool socks Roland Dudley wore for shooting. The small presents were wrapped in tissue paper: chocolate cigarettes, tiny furniture for our doll’s house, crayons, Matchbox cars, gobstopper sweets, packets of transfers, a tangerine in the toe … Then our mother would come in, probably smoking her first du Maurier cigarette of the day in a long black holder, to make sure we were washed and tidy for Christmas breakfast.

  She was very particular about our hair. Jo’s hair was insanely curly – ‘beyond hope’, our mother said. She could never figure out where this curly hair had come from. (We once annoyed her by suggesting that Jo was African.) My hair was just straight and slippery and had to be tied in bunches or clenched into obedience by a tortoiseshell slide, which kept falling out. She’d look us up and down. In some way that I can’t quite fathom, we disappointed her. Had she longed for boys, inherited a ‘boy only’ love from her parents? Had she even lost a boy child in the miscarriage she’d endured during the four years between Jo’s birth and mine?
I will never know now. All I can remember was that this disappointment was of long duration.

  Christmas breakfast was a fine Linkenholt moment. I can recall the sun coming through the mullions of the south-facing dining room, falling onto the mahogany sideboard, where Douglas would carve a ham on the bone and set slices before us on fine china plates. In my household in Norfolk, when my daughter Eleanor and her family come for Christmas, we still eat ham on Christmas morning. Indeed, small remembered delights have been lifted from Linkenholt and brought into our lives and kept vibrant there. We now wrap the grandchildren’s stocking gifts in tissue paper.

  After the ham breakfast, we’d put on our best coats – the ones from Hayford’s of Sloane Street, with little velvet collars – and walk to Linkenholt church, the place where I was christened and where Jo, given a candle to hold during the christening ceremony, floated off into one of her dreamy moments and set fire to her disobedient curls. Our grandfather would usually read one of the lessons. Granny never moved from her pew. She’d sit there, wearing a strange floppy velvet beret, staring at the arrangements of holly and ivy, her face unmoving. No doubt she was thinking of her dead sons. In the bleak midwinter. O little town.

  St Peter’s Church, Linkenholt, is a tiny flint building halfway down the single village street, set back against ancient yews, with a Germanic ‘witch’s hat’ tower and a graveyard almost empty of people. When our grandmother died, Roland Dudley had constructed a lychgate in her memory. When Roland himself died, a second marble plaque was put into the gate, commemorating his life. When my mother died, I and my stepbrother, Sir Mark Thomson (always known in the family as ‘Mawkie’), obtained the agreement of the vicar and the church wardens to add two more plaques, naming Jane and her second husband, Mawkie’s father, Sir Ivo Thomson. And Jane’s ashes, as she instructed, are scattered on Linkenholt Hill. A libation of Gordon’s gin was poured on them.

  Mawkie and I – together with my daughter Eleanor and my beloved partner of twenty-five years, Richard Holmes – still make a pilgrimage to Linkenholt from time to time, usually choosing the spring, when the hedgerows offer up primroses, violets and the small white flowers we used to call ‘star of Bethlehem’. We walk up to the house to find it gated and locked, the gravel driveway now a tarmac road. The elms are gone, of course, but the spinney is still there and the wind still makes it sigh. I like these visits. I like seeing the ghost of Rosie in her feathered headdress, riding round the lawns on her Raleigh bike. But Jo has never been back there. She’s a person who is able to put portions of her past into oblivion. It isn’t that she can’t remember them; she just doesn’t want to revisit them.