by Rose Tremain
The piece I was to play at the recital was Rimsky-Korsakov’s ‘Song of India’, a nice slow, melodic number, well chosen by Joyce as being right for both my technical limitations and my emotional strengths. My slot would be in the first half of the event. The stars of our group, Caroline Gee and Elisabeth von Petersdorff, would be saved until last. Joyce herself would wind up the recital with a Chopin prelude.
We were driven to London on a coach, all of us sick with excitement and fear. The day was hot. I can remember the dress I wore, with a patterning of coral-coloured tulips on a white background. My ‘useless’ hair was now cut very short, the better to be tamed and organised.
Our first sight of the Festival Hall, that great modernist concrete edifice built to celebrate the Festival of Britain in 1951, and the knowledge that we were actually going to be inside it, performing in the recital room, cast us into a stunned silence. Backstage with Joyce, who paced around on her court shoes, encouraging us with her bright voice, we tried to calm our nerves by peering through a tiny space in the curtains, to see the parents arriving.
When I saw Keith – looking just the same as when I’d last seen him – I had difficulty believing that I wasn’t hallucinating. He’d become so ghostly in my mind that the physical fact of his presence felt unreal. But Jane McKenzie, who had known him since the days of Miss Vista’s dancing class, clutched my arm excitedly and said, ‘It’s him, Rosie. It’s definitely him!’
It was him.
He stayed to hear my performance, which Joyce reassured me had gone well, but when we looked through the curtains again after the interval, the seat my father had occupied was empty.
The second half of the concert began. I kept looking and looking, staring at the empty chair, but Keith never reappeared. No doubt he felt bored by the idea of sitting through the efforts of another ten or twelve anxious girls. No doubt he’d forgotten about the promise of tea. But the realisation that, although he’d seen me on the stage, he couldn’t be bothered to wait to say hello to me was wounding.
The next thing I remember is standing by myself near the river, outside the Festival Hall. The sun was still hot, sparkling on the then-drab wharves of the South Bank and the muddy Thames. The other girls were going off to tea with their parents and I was alone. I remember wondering if I was being punished for neglecting to invite Nan, who would have applauded ridiculously loudly when I came on in my tulip dress, whose smile I would have been able to feel as my ‘Song of India’ unfolded into life.
But why hadn’t I invited her? Had there been a ‘parents only’ edict from the school, just as there was on parents’ days? Had I been worried that Nan might take the wrong bus and get lost on her way to the great concert hall? Whatever the truth or otherwise of all this, I was now sick with misery.
Loyal Jane McKenzie came and found me and I was taken to tea with her and her parents, Pam and Malcolm. Pam McKenzie said to me, ‘I always liked your father, Rosie dear, because he amused me. He used to call me “Pam-Pam”, after a French variety of tinned tomato juice – and that made us all laugh. But today he was a shit.’
A different kind of music now started to be played at Frilsham – the music of adolescent love: Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and the Everly Brothers.
Jo had left school to study art at the Académie Julien in Paris, but Jane and Ivo allowed Mawkie and me to link up with Berkshire friends, and a round of teenage parties, known as ‘hops’, began. We would be driven to these hops in Ivo’s Rover (the Bentley had gone by this time – an early sign, perhaps, that his money was not going to last for ever), and he and Jane would spend the evening drinking and playing Scrabble in a nearby pub before collecting us at around eleven o’clock.
This, it now strikes me, was quite generous of them. The only time Ivo would not drive was if there was any suggestion of mist or fog, and Mawkie and I missed quite a few parties because of this. Sometimes we would be only two or three miles from the party and Ivo – to our great disappointment and teenage fury – would turn back. Richard has recently suggested to me that Ivo’s extreme fear of these weather conditions probably dated from his wartime experience in the Royal Air Force and his understanding of how so many flying accidents occur because of poor visibility, and I think he may be right.
I fell in love with a boy called Dermot Halloran. I was fifteen. He was seventeen and about to become a cadet at Pangbourne Nautical College. One of my friends from school, Venetia Quarry, was in love with Dermot’s brother, Mike. Hilarious letters were exchanged between me and Venetia on the subject of the Halloran brothers. I kept them for years in a blue plastic folder and would love to be able to quote accurately remembered lines like ‘Has D X’d you properly yet?’
Dermot Halloran was tall and dark, with beautiful skin and a pouty expression that reminded everybody of Elvis. Even Jane admitted he was ‘a bit of a dish’. It was at this time that she bought me my first pair of high-heeled shoes, and she was amused, I think, by the teenage crushes Mawkie and I were now unable to hide. Perhaps she suddenly understood, to her profound relief, that we were children no longer; that the end of our parental dependency was just within sight.
The best of the teenage hops was one we gave at Frilsham. Jane laid this on very well, with a fairly innocent wine cup for us to drink and a carefully planned cold buffet set out in the dining room. I wore my new high heels and a dress of blue-green taffeta. After supper, we put on our music and danced on the polished parquet of the hall.
This event had about it a kind of magic. All my closest friends were there, about twelve or fourteen of them, including the Halloran brothers and my cousin Johnny. We turned off all the lights, and in the soft darkness of the hall we paired off and clung to each other, danced, jived, kissed, touched and dreamed. Now and then Ivo would come barging in (from where he and Jane sat playing Scrabble in the ginnery) and turn the lights back on, but as soon as he’d gone, we turned them off again. All teenagers endure difficult times, but this night was beautiful; it was entirely ours.
It’s interesting to remember what became of all this collective first love.
In my case, I went back to school and Dermot Halloran went to Pangbourne Nautical College. We saw each other at parties in the holidays for about a year, exchanging chaste kisses. Then he left the country to join the Canadian navy.
Venetia and Mike Halloran also split up and Venetia, pushed by her mother, Lady Mancroft, soon embarked on a fierce and successful pursuit of a rich husband, which she eventually found in Fred Barker, a young man so rich he was able to buy a large house in Hampshire, pull it down and build an even larger one in its place. Clearly the Halloran family had not been nearly rich enough.
The only serious (because sexually consummated) love was between a clever boy called Robin Peat, who was just coming to the end of a starry career at Eton, and my very beautiful friend Nancy Phillpotts, cousin of my class-mate, Julie. Nancy, aged sixteen, told us all at school that she was going to marry Robin. She described her stays in Norfolk with his family as ‘honeymoons’.
Then Robin was snatched away from her. When he unexpectedly failed his Oxford entrance exam, his disappointed parents packed him off to Europe, to recover from this setback. In Italy, he met a young Greek student called Cathy. Having so passionately deflowered Nancy, he was of course going to deflower Cathy, too. No young girl resisted Robin Peat, and he knew it. He quickly made Cathy pregnant and was obliged to forget Nancy – his ‘Nou’ as he called her – and marry Cathy in a Greek Orthodox ceremony we hated to hear about.
Poor Nou. Poor Robin.
Miraculously, Nancy and Robin met again decades later in Paris. Nancy’s Austrian husband, Hanni, had died. Robin divorced his second wife and married his long-lost Nou. But he was a disappointed man by then, all his early promise seemingly gone. Together Nancy and Robin embarked on buying and running a wine business at Château l’Eperon near Bordeaux – Robin’s last fling at living the life he wanted with the girl he’d always loved.
But the business was too arduous for them. Robin died of alcoholism in 2004.
Milton’s Oppositions
Hence, loathed Melancholy,
Of Cerberus and blackest midnight born
In Stygian cave forlorn,
’Mongst horrid shape, and shrieks and sights unholy,
Find out some uncouth cell,
Where brooding darkness spreads his jealous wings,
And the night-Raven sings;
There, under Ebon shades and low-brow’d rocks
As ragged as thy locks,
In dark Cimmerian desert ever dwell …
These lines, from John Milton’s L’Allegro, became engraved into my mind in my O-level exam year at Crofton Grange. We were studying the lyric poems L’Allegro and Il Penseroso as part of our syllabus, enduring, no doubt, some struggle with Milton’s classical allusions, which are strewn about like boulders in the river of the poems, but helped here by Robbie’s perpetual cry: ‘Look it up! Look it up!’
At some point in the year, Robbie came to me and asked if I would consider attempting a large mural, illustrating scenes from L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, for the upper panel of the English room wall. She said she disliked the drabness of the room, in which she had to spend so many hours, had wanted something ‘permanent’ done about it for a long time, and now it had come to her that she had found the perfect subject for the painting.
Robbie warned me that ‘like Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel’ I would be working high up, but scaffolding towers would be brought in and strong boards laid between them, so that I would be quite safe while I painted. To prepare for this big enterprise, I would submit drawings to her, done on graph paper so that they could be scaled up correctly onto the wall. The choice of imagery would be mine, but the overall design would have to have a classical unity about it and be approved by Robbie before I began.
She wanted this done in one term. As I acquired the graph paper and began preliminary sketches, I remember worrying about fitting in my O-level revision around the hours I would be spending on the scaffolding. I wanted to rise to the challenge of Robbie’s mural, but I didn’t want to fail my exams. I discussed my dilemma with my closest friends, Jane, Elsa, Alison Fairfax-Lucy and Heather Gray, and they solved it for me by suggesting that we would all get up at five in the morning through the rest of the term and put in two hours’ revision before breakfast.
This we did. To our own surprise, we stuck at it. And I remember that those early May mornings, with the sunrise casting soft shadows onto the park, with the extreme quiet that pervaded the building, had something beautiful about them. Part of the beauty lay, I think, in the secret feeling that, by doing this unseen work, we were putting ourselves ahead of everybody else. There was now no chance that our little group would fail our O-levels. Our brains were being crammed at dawn. Even Jane McKenzie, who couldn’t draw very well, was helped to perfect biologically correct sketches of sprouting broad beans and brown water beetles. Part of every revision session was given over to talking to each other in hilariously hopeless French, as prep for the French oral exam. We passed around mapping pens, atlases, compasses, dictionaries and oranges. The taste for academic work, pure and undiluted, was born in me on those early mornings.
My sketches for the Milton mural proliferated and improved. Robbie’s mention of Michelangelo led me, with excruciating vanity, to see myself in his heroic light. For hours and hours I studied his drawings and paintings of the human body. Though Milton’s poems are crowded with images of the natural world, and I knew that ‘dappled dawn’, ‘sweet briar’, ‘russet lawns’, ‘elms and hillocks green’ as well as ‘antick pillars’ and ‘cloysters pale’ had to form the background to the work, I also needed to paint shepherds, milkmaids, pensive nuns, muses, bards, kings and gods. Enthralled by Michelangelo’s capture of the massive human form in fluid movement, I slowly assembled my group of figures around the personification of Melancholy itself, a brooding male figure in Puritan dress, resting his chin on a languid, Michelangelesque hand.
How many hours did it take me to execute this mural? I remember that I worked through other classes’ lessons, trying to keep as quiet as I could, and that I was ‘excused knitting’ for that term and so could go there for an hour after lunch, when everyone else was struggling with their charity garments. Just the squaring up of the wide panel took me a long time. I would have been helped by good maths, but this subject had dripped off my school agenda at age fourteen.
I worked in oil paints, which I’d never used before, but for which I became grateful. With watercolours, and to a certain extent with the poster paints we used in our art classes, the execution has to be right at the first attempt, but with oils you can indulge in what the Old Masters called ‘pentimento’, obliterating one image by putting another on top of it. I think there must have been a lot of pentimento in that huge mural. As I recall it, the central figure, which owed so much to my study of the Sistine Chapel paintings, had a powerful presence. Most of the larks, roosters and nightingales flew or strutted around in a touching and companionable way, but I remember that some of the shepherdesses, and even some of the gods themselves, looked a bit dead on the wall.
Robbie would come and visit me frequently, stare up at the work slowly taking shape and be honest about its perceived weaknesses, which I would then struggle to correct. But she and I also talked about other things. She would sit under my ladders and we would discuss the way in which Milton, writing these poems at a young age, already understood so well the way the human mind is poised between its longing for what he calls ‘vain deluding joyes’ and its deep attraction to melancholy, so fatally bright in the mind’s eye that it has to mask itself with ‘black staid Wisdom’s hue’.
I remember telling Robbie that she’d found the right artist to interpret this idea, that my own mind, though capable of rejoicing, was almost insatiably drawn to tragic contemplation. I admitted to her that when we’d embarked on Romeo and Juliet in my first year (and in the wake of finding myself cast away from so much that I’d known and loved), what I responded to in it was the ‘absolute total sadness of it’.fn1
These musings brought the familiar, toothy smile onto Robbie’s creased face. Our discussion of the work in hand and the emotions behind it led on, at some stage, to ideas about my future.
Robbie had assumed, and so had I, that I would stay on at Crofton Grange for the A-level years and that my ultimate target would be a place at Oxford. Robbie evoked her own time there, before the war, and how privileged she’d felt to be among the very few women taking undergraduate degrees. I longed to follow her there. She convinced me that I would ‘fit in’ at Oxford and be happy in its intense environment. She was prepared to use any contacts she had to help me get there. She warned me only to work harder at Latin, the one subject where my grades were poor. ‘There is plenty of time,’ she said, ‘but we have to start planning now.’
Excited by this, I dropped the magic word ‘Oxford’ into letters sent home at this time, but then noticed that this never elicited any comment. I assumed that my mother and Ivo felt it was too soon – prior to O-levels – to be discussing university. Yet this ignoring of the subject was disconcerting. In Robbie’s presence, it was so easy to conceive a clichéd picture of myself already there, cycling along the Broad with copies of Paradise Lost and Hamlet in a wicker basket, with clever new friends by my side. I imagined entertaining Robbie, toasting her favourite marshmallows in front of the gas fire in my rooms, going with her to visit John Masefield. But it was not long before I understood that my mother had other ideas for me. She wanted me further away than Oxford. She was planning a different path.
Meanwhile, something terrible had happened to her.
I have no record of the exact date when this thing was revealed to me, only that it coincided with my time spent working on the Milton mural. Rapt by my early-morning studies, by my hours spent pretending to be Michelangelo, I’d achieved a happiness and an equilibrium at Crofton Gra
nge I’d never thought possible. But meanwhile, my poor mother was being taken apart by an absolutely unlooked-for event.
I first heard about it in a letter from Ivo. In his fluent, unshaky writing, he alluded to an ‘attack’ on Jane by Juan and Maria. He said that the Spanish couple had immediately been sacked and that Jane was recovering in hospital.
Ivo gave no details. He reassured me that everything was going to be all right – that she had been ‘saved’ by Jim Butler, who was working in the garden when the attack happened and heard her screams and came rushing to her aid.
I found it difficult to imagine this scene. Juan and Maria had been with us for several years and had seemed happy at Frilsham. That they could have attacked Jane didn’t seem likely at all. Jo was away in Paris and perhaps wasn’t informed about this at the time, in case her studies at the Académie Julien were disturbed. And when Mawkie and I came home for half term, we were told by Ivo not to mention a word about it, in case we upset Jane, who was now out of hospital but needed everybody’s loving care.
Mawkie and I puzzled over the drama. A temporary cook had replaced Maria, but Jane still spent part of each morning in the kitchen, part of the summer days doing her ‘little bits’ in the garden, with which we now tried to help her. Things seemed pretty much normal. There were no visible physical wounds on Jane’s body. There were one or two unexplained overheard conversations. I remember Mawkie saying to me, ‘Fuck, Baitie! I heard the words “going to court”! Is there going to be a trial, or something?’
There were a thousand questions we wanted to ask, as no doubt Ivo understood, but we weren’t allowed to ask them. Secrecy and silence were the watchwords Ivo and Jane had chosen. But eventually we found out from Jane herself what had happened.