by Rose Tremain
I walked back to the school with the answer to my question. It could be captured. I would write a story about the hayfield. It wouldn’t be a mundane account of what had happened to me; it would be transfigured by becoming fiction. It wouldn’t be re-experienced as sentimental nostalgia, but experienced afresh. In this way it could become new again – that was the revelation. As the author of the story, I wouldn’t tamely and passively submit to it; I would assert my divinity over it.
I can’t remember whether I told any of my friends about this. Writers tend to keep precious revelations and sudden, blinding ideas to themselves, aware, as D. H. Lawrence pointed out in his 1922 Essays, that the telling of them can diminish them and make them unusable as ideas for stories. Lawrence went so far as to say that he couldn’t tell anybody he loved them, because the saying of the words ‘I love you’ immediately negated them. I wouldn’t agree with him here; expressing what one thinks one feels can sometimes bring it, blinking, into the bright realm of certainty. However, I have always recognised that knowledge is a powerful thing, and knowing when to keep it secret is an art which every serious writer needs to perfect.
Teen Music
Now I have to go back to Sir Ivo Thomson and the house he bought for us after his marriage to my mother: the very beautiful Frilsham Manor, near Newbury in Berkshire.
Ivo had made enough money out of the sales of his shares in the Yorkshire Evening Press to stop work in his fifties and settle into the life of a country squire. A tributary of the Pang river ran through the garden at Frilsham Manor, which he and Jane stocked with trout so that they could go fishing whenever the mood took them. It took them quite often, because they had nothing much else to do. And dry-fly fishing, I now understand, was a kind of life’s bond for them, the thing they both loved and at which – after taking lessons – they became quite skilled. All their favourite holidays were spent on the great trout rivers of the British Isles, the Kennet, the Test, the Avon, the Wye, the Tweed and the Usk.
The garden at Frilsham was large and well set out, with soft lawns, beautiful river borders, an orchard and a walled potager, which provided vegetables and herbs for the kitchen all year round. Jane sometimes worked there, doing what she called ‘little bits’, and Ivo memorably walked up and down the orchard, pushing a noisy rotor mower, turning a bright shade of pink all over his body, which amused us children and worried Jane. But the garden was mainly looked after by a man called Jim Butler, a quiet, patient person who always moved with a slow step, as if anxious not to disturb any bird, plant or flower, and who understood deep in his bones how to care for the soil.
Ivo, our father’s first cousin, was now the anchor of a newly constructed family. Jo and I acquired Mark (Mawkie) and Carol Thomson as our step-siblings. Jane acquired them as her stepchildren and was never entirely at ease with either of them. Mawkie was two years older than me – twelve when the Frilsham family came together – and Carol was seventeen or eighteen and on the verge of leaving home to start her adult life.
Jo and I were both struck dumb by Carol. She was exceptionally beautiful, in a blonde, Grace Kelly-ish way. Her skin was peachy. Her hair – unlike ours – seemed always obedient to her will. It was difficult to think of this person as our sister. Perhaps some memory of her mother, Tweets, emerging from her dress on the nursery floor always clung to Carol, making us slightly afraid of her. Her beauty certainly ensured that she had a legion of devoted lovers in her twenties – thus increasing the awe we felt for her. I remember that one or two of these were brought down to Frilsham and crept into Carol’s room after the parents had gone to bed and put in their ear plugs. She eventually married Commander Mike Parker, an equerry to Prince Philip. Carol and Mike had one daughter, Kate. The marriage was good, I think, for as long as it lasted, but Carol’s life was destined to be unbearably short. She died of cancer in her early forties. I was never able to have with her any of those ‘looking back’ conversations that I’ve often had (and still have) with Mawkie. What she thought of me and Jo I never really found out. The only thing I remember her saying to me, when I was dressed for a party in a pretty black-and-white dress Jane had bought for me in London, and wearing a tiny touch of my first lipstick (Roman Pink, by Max Factor), was that I looked like a doll.
Mawkie was a lovable, handsome boy with a thatch of red hair, an infectious laugh and a mild penchant for rebellion against Ivo and Jane and authority in general. He and I loved rowing up and down the river in a tiny wooden boat, but we were never allowed to go on the lowest stretch of it, in case we toppled over the little weir that ran beside an old mill house at the end of the garden and broke the boat – and our necks – on the concrete channel that carried the water away in a fast current. But I can remember how the weir called to us. As you got nearer to it, you could feel the flow of the water speed up and the boat begin its fatal glide towards the precipice. Then you would have to row as hard as you could, one oar each, to save yourself from catastrophe. It was the kind of game, the kind of risk that teenagers adore, something that has real danger in it and which is certain to bring about parental mayhem. Jo – wisely perhaps – stayed out of these boating escapades, but Mawkie and I repeated them as often as we dared. Sometimes, Ivo would come rushing along the riverbank, signalling wildly to us, like a stationmaster trying to slow down a runaway train with a red flag. But as far as I can recall, we just waved to him and rowed calmly on, giggling no doubt, pulling slowly towards the weir and then suddenly away from it.
Ivo could get angry with us, but in the main, we were lucky to have this sane and affectionate man as our substitute father. This branch of the Thomson family were Yorkshiremen (descended from our great-grandfather, William Thomson, Archbishop of York from 1862 until his death in 1890), and there was always something of the Yorkshire character in Ivo – amused, stubborn, outspoken and kind.
After the breaking apart of the three couples (the two Thomson families and the Whitmee family) in London and the distress of all the children, Ivo understood that it was he who had to try to repair some of the damage. He made leaving our home in London bearable by buying a spacious and pretty house in one of those chalky Berkshire valleys that still tug at my heart. He provided for Jane the kind of lifestyle she aspired to and which my father had never been able to afford.
Was my mother happy?
What I think happened when she married Ivo was that she felt a profound gratitude to him for rescuing her from heartbreak – for rescuing us all – and that she tried as hard as she could to be happy. I recall that she also tried to be kinder to me and Jo, but this attempt would very often falter.
One of these falterings occurred on my thirteenth birthday, 2 August 1956. As my birthday treat, Ivo drove us in the Bentley to Swanage beach. Jane had prepared a picnic lunch of cold roast chicken, mayonnaise and hard-boiled eggs. A birthday cake waited in a tin.
The day began well, with the sun shining on the water and Jane and Ivo drinking gin and tonic out of a thermos. After the picnic, we all went swimming. Our Cornish holidays had made Jo and me reasonably brave about cold seas, and Mawkie, now at Eton, had to be brave about everything. But Jane, who never swam in Cornwall, got cold very quickly. Perhaps the sun went in? In my memory, everything turned grey and worrying at this point. Jane ran out of the water and dashed to her towel. We all obediently followed. The bathing costume she was wearing, lime green and very tight, was fastened with a zip. As she frantically struggled to get out of this garment, the zip stuck. Shivering and cross, she sent Ivo back to the Bentley to fetch pliers from the car tool kit. Jo, Mawkie and I tried to warm her up with our towels, but she told us not to be silly, our towels were ‘soaking’.
Ivo arrived with the pliers. He attacked the zip and eventually got it to move, and my mother tugged on her clothes. But the lime-green bathing costume was torn by the pliers and Jane couldn’t prevent herself from becoming angry and tearful. All she wanted now was to go home. She seemed to forget completely that this was meant to be my birthday tr
eat, that a cake waited in its tin. Did we eat the cake? I can’t remember. I knew that not just the lime-green costume was ruined, but the birthday also.
There is something pathetically and hilariously funny about this scene, but it was also wounding.fn1 Such is its power that, all my life since then, I’ve never been able to surrender completely to the idea of enjoying my birthday. The second of August keeps coming round. Sometimes it seems to dawn brightly, but it always makes me agitated. This is very tough on Richard and on my family, who always do their best to make the day good. Often, it is good, especially when my little grandchildren can be part of it. But in my heart, I’m looking out for darkening skies, for the sound of the cold sea, for the thing that will sabotage the day – the thing that nobody else has seen.
Ivo, I think, must have been dismayed by what happened on that Swanage day. When he married Jane, whom he seemed to love very much, he was surely hoping that her anger and selfishness could gradually be lessened by his own acts of kindness.
He tried many things. One of these was to buy a family dog, a black-and-tan miniature dachshund called Boody. Jo, Mawkie and I were willing to love this soft and touching creature, but Boody was a smart dog: he didn’t love us back. He knew who his master was, and that was Ivo. The affection between dog and man was such that when Boody eventually died, I was advised by Jane never to mention the death to Ivo. Proud Yorkshireman that he was, he couldn’t stand to be seen weeping.
Though it was smaller than Linkenholt, Frilsham Manor needed several hands to maintain it, and Ivo’s money was able to provide these. A Spanish couple, Juan and Maria,fn2 lived in the house with us. The cooking was shared between our mother and Maria, but what we ate was very English food: oxtail stew, Sunday roasts, steak-and kidney pudding, baked apples. Juan mended things that got broken and sometimes waited at table, wearing a short white coat. Jane was proud of having employed this Spanish pair (a resolution to what she called ‘the increasing post-war servant problem’, even if she didn’t want Maria to make Spanish food), and appeared to treat them with patience and courtesy. But down the road of time, something terrible was to happen that called into question her whole relationship with them.
Again with Ivo’s money, and with her innate good taste in decoration and furnishings, Jane had made Frilsham Manor very beautiful, and she wanted everything kept in a condition she could be proud of when the visitors’ book began filling up. Jim Butler’s wife came in three days a week to help Maria with the housework.
It troubled me that Mrs Butler spent such a lot of time on her hands and knees, polishing the hall floor. When we came down for breakfast, there she would be, her thin arms making wider and wider arcs with the polishing rags. At Linkenholt, perhaps because we were only there for short stretches of time, I never remember seeing the servants actually performing arduous tasks of this kind; the brass stair rods, for instance, just seemed to stay polished of their own accord. But I can’t think of Mrs Butler without remembering her in her attitude of surrender to the parquet floor. In fact, I can’t really remember what she looked like standing up. However, what she achieved with her rags and her beeswax polish I can remember very well: the perfumed air of the Frilsham hall gave up a scent so sweet I still dream about it.
For the first few years after we moved to Frilsham, Nan was always invited to stay for part of the holidays. Her presence in the house confirmed the feeling that the worst family sorrows were over. Ivo, I recall, was impeccably kind to her, and she developed an affectionate respect for him. ‘Mummy darling,’ I once heard her say, ‘you know, dear Sir Ivo is much easier to get along with than Daddy was.’ And I couldn’t help remembering her saying, ‘Stay a bit longer, Daddy,’ when we finished the last picture story in the nursery in London and how, with a contrite backward glance, Daddy would always refuse.
Nan at age sixty was a country girl now. She adored going on walks to look for birds’ nests, to hear thrushes sing, to pick primroses or bluebells or blackberries, to hunt for mushrooms, to have picnic teas in the woods. I remember that on these outings, as we walked up the steep hill towards the Frilsham Woods, I would hold her hand, as if I was still a very young child. On the picnic rug, I’d nudge up close to her. And I think Jo did this, too. We understood that our lives were separating out and that Nan would never be ours again in quite the same way. We had to hold onto her while she was still there.
Tea, in summertime, when it wasn’t a picnic, was laid out in a sunny garden room that had been christened ‘the ginnery’ by Jane, who thought it was a promising space for pre-lunch gin and tonics. It was a pretty place, but plagued by flies from the cattle that were lodged in farm buildings not far from it. Ivo couldn’t stand these flies. In consequence, the air of the ginnery (where I don’t remember much gin ever being drunk) was always toxic with fly spray called ‘Flit’.fn3
I spent long hours in the ginnery. At Crofton Grange, I’d begun piano lessons, and even my mother understood that I’d never play well if I didn’t practise in the holidays, so either she or Ivo had bought me an upright piano, which was the most spectacular gift I’d ever had.
Nobody else played. I struggled through scales for hours on end, breathing in Flit, often attempting to work on music far beyond my mediocre skill. (I was particularly anxious to master Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C sharp minor, which, with its three deathly opening chords, thrillingly recounts the story of a man being buried alive.) Sometimes Boody would trot out of the house and stand, outraged, hackles up, at the ginnery door, howling at all my wrong notes. I think the poor little dog wanted me to be buried alive. And Mawkie remembers that I used to get in such ‘baits’ about my own less than marvellous skills at the ginnery piano that he began nicknaming me ‘Baitie’ – a name for me he still loves to use and which makes us both laugh.
Our piano teacher at Crofton Grange was Joyce Hatto, at that time a rising star on the professional recital circuit. Why she needed to spend time teaching at a girls’ boarding school I’ve never completely understood, but we were lucky to have her. Just as Robbie was a true teacher of literature, so Joyce Hatto brought to our piano lessons the musical understanding that can only come from a true talent.
The sound she herself could make on the school Bechstein was impeccably bright. The ends of her slim fingers were bent backwards by their constant caress of the keys. She could sight-read anything and everything, so that she could always show you exactly how the piece you were learning was meant to sound. I was not the only girl to think, sometimes, how I would have preferred my half-hour lesson to be spent just listening to Joyce, instead of enduring my own struggles.
My hands are long-fingered and strong. I could reach an octave with no trouble and my feeling for the music enabled me to put some emotional ballast into stern bass chords. What I could never master was fast-paced accuracy. ‘Fingering! Fingering!’ Joyce would bleat at my side, as I kept taking wrong pathways from one note to another. And yet she was always encouraging, always gentle. She saw, no doubt, that I would never have any real dexterity as a pianist, but kept me on as her pupil (when some girls were demoted to the second-string music teacher, the hilariously named Miss Elgar) because she understood the ways in which my head connected to the mood and feeling the composer had intended, and this interested her.
I realise now that Joyce Hatto was only in her twenties when she came to Crofton Grange, although at the time she seemed older. She was small and electric, with frizzy brown hair and a fondness for wide skirts, smart court shoes and scarlet lipstick. She did everything fast. The whole pace of our lives at Crofton seemed to speed up whenever she was around. We yearned to please her.
In 1959, when our class were all aged fifteen or sixteen, Joyce Hatto took the enormous risk of arranging a pupils’ concert in the recital room at the Royal Festival Hall. Twenty-four of us would perform short pieces. The concert would be open to the public, with tickets priced from seven shillings and sixpence to five shillings. At least fifty of the seven-and-sixpenny seats
would be filled with proud parents.
Excitement about this event – so unique in our sheltered, repetitious lives – was colossal. Among my close friends, Jane McKenzie and Elsa, we talked of almost nothing else. We longed for the day to come, not only because we were all going to be stars for five minutes each on 18 July, but because after the recital we were going to be allowed to go out to tea with our families. Visions of salmon-paste sandwiches and chocolate cake found their way only too easily into our minds. This promised to be the best, the most memorable day of our lives.
The first disappointment for me was when Ivo and Jane said they couldn’t come to the concert. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised. Neither of them had ever had any real relationship to classical music, so they probably worried that this would be an ordeal for them. Either this, or they had planned one of their fishing holidays. I can’t remember. Everybody else received rapturous letters from their parents telling them how proud they were that we were going to perform in this prestigious London venue. But Jane had never done ‘proud’. The things I achieved down the years never quite got the response I’d hoped for.fn4
Disappointed here, my friends encouraged me to write to Keith, whom I hadn’t seen for years, and ask him if he would come. I remember thinking that this was a waste of time; he would certainly say no. He and Virginia had made it clear that he would take no interest in his first family. By now, he had four more children and a life that had no room in it for us. What I did remember, however, was him playing the piano in the library at Linkenholt.
To my then unpractised ear, I’d guessed that he played well. He’d always seemed relaxed and calm when seated at the Linkenholt Blüthner. And this suggested that music-making might possibly be something that still interested him. So I decided to send the letter. And when the reply came, saying that he would definitely be there, I think I may have wept with a kind of joyful shock.