This Time Next Year We'll Be Laughing

by Jacqueline Winspear

  When my mother arrived home, I rushed to tell her all about what had happened to my doll. She wasn’t angry, but told me that Daddy would mend the doll when he came home. I remember asking why Grandad was so upset, and she told me it was because of his war wounds. Years later, watching a documentary that included a reenactment of soldiers in the Great War undergoing bayonet practice, I recognized my grandfather’s guttural cry. My childish screaming had unleashed dreadful memories for that dear man. My parents understood this and knew that, much as Grandad adored his grandchildren, a home where an elderly man who had endured physical and emotional war wounds was no place for a small girl with an overabundance of energy.

  It was something that happened at my mother’s workplace that tipped the balance, making the plan to move even more urgent. This was the late 1950s, a time when the nuclear threat loomed, and following the 1946 speech in which Winston Churchill had declared that a “Cold War” existed between the then USSR and the rest of the Western world, arrangements had been made at the highest levels for nuclear attack. A crucial element of any preparation for war is communication, and soon after taking up her former work, my mother was involved in what were then secret drills. I was about twelve when she described the underground bunker that had been built below her place of work—it was a whole series of rooms strong enough to withstand nuclear attack. As she told it, there were dormitories, a cafeteria and cinema, but of more crucial importance, there were stations identical to those the operators were using on a day-to-day basis. During the drills operators left their regular positions and moved at speed down into the bunker to take up exactly the same place and thereby be at the ready to maintain international government communications during a time of war. The massive steel doors would slam shut behind them and they would be on lockdown. It must have been following the first of those drills that my mother asked her supervisor what she was supposed to do, after all, she had a small child at home—she wanted to know if she could return to her family. Would there be an “all clear” like there had been after a Luftwaffe bombing raid during the war?

  “Oh no, you have to stay here, at your station. It doesn’t matter who you’ve got at home—this is your job,” said the supervisor. “There’s no going home. You take up your position, and you stay there to do your job.”

  I can imagine her beginning to panic—remember, this was a woman who suffered claustrophobia following that bombing during the war when she had been trapped under the rubble of her house. Just being below ground must have terrified her. She asked again what would happen if she just wanted to go home.

  The supervisor took a bunch of keys from her pocket and selected one, then unlocked a cupboard and pointed to the firearms inside.

  “This is what happens, Joyce,” said the supervisor.

  That afternoon while at work, my mother placed a call to the farm manager at Forge Farm, who told her that since she’d returned to London, it had only taken a matter of weeks for his accounts to become a mess across all four farms—and just by chance another tied cottage had just become vacant, and it would be theirs if they wanted it. It would be attached to her job, not my father’s. Mum was reminded that the farmer was not one to forgive and forget, and even if my father came on his knees, he would not get his old job back.

  Of course I didn’t know the details, but I do remember her coming home from the telephone exchange, hurriedly putting on my coat and hat and taking me by bus to find my father, who was with a crew painting a tall building. We stood at the foot of the scaffolding and my mother called his name. He was high up near the roof and didn’t hear, so she filled her lungs and called again. Then I saw a tiny figure in white overalls stop, look over the scaffolding and wave.

  “Alby—we’re going home!” yelled my mother, her hands cupping her mouth. “We’re going back!”

  I watched as that white figure in the distance ran along the scaffolding, then down a ladder, and along more scaffolding, then down another ladder; a human marker growing larger on the snakes and ladders board as he came closer to the beginning of the game. And it was the beginning—the start of a journey back to our home, our real home, because even though everyone my parents loved was in London, the years of living close to the land had marked them. They were country folk through and through now, and they were drawing back another veil, and moving on.

  8

  Back to the Land

  I was at the airport in Houston, heading toward the gate for a flight to Phoenix, the next destination on my book tour, when I passed my father. His silver-grey hair, royal blue blazer, crisp white shirt and navy blue tie, finished with the all-important Windsor knot, were instantly recognizable. I spun around, ready to run after him. But he was gone. There was no man in a royal blue blazer. No silver crown in the distance. And my father had been dead for nine months.

  I sat down on the nearest seat and called my brother, who said, “Oh, Jack . . .”

  I heard a catch in his voice. There was no teasing on his part. No “Oh for goodness sake, Sis.” He understood. We talked a little more, but soon I had to board the aircraft. And I remembered, then, a comment my cousin had made years before. “Oh, you Winspears, you’re all a bit fey,” she’d said. I had to look up the original meaning. Otherworldliness. Magical. But I knew what I’d seen, and John knew it too. So, perhaps we were a bit fey. Perhaps we did believe in that which could not be explained.

  When I look back, living at Brown House Cottage was magical. On the day we moved in, as we walked along the sloping path at the side of the cottage, past the big red water pipe, and as we entered the small scullery kitchen and the low-beamed sitting room, I felt cocooned. I remember the narrow staircase that led up to two small bedrooms, one of which would be mine. Everything seemed magical in the sixteenth-century cottage—even the fact that someone had dumped a load of sand against the five-bar gate leading to the field opposite seemed fortuitous; my mother told me it belonged to the sandman, because he had to keep his sand somewhere and wasn’t it lucky it was so close to our new house, because we’d all sleep so well. Oh yes, now we were away from London, we’d all sleep well—indeed, hadn’t the Prime Minister, Harold MacMillan, told everyone in the country just that year that they’d never had it so good?

  Every day Mum and I would walk down to the farm so Mum could work on the accounts. I always had a toy or two, a coloring book and my pencils, and a story to read. We’d often detour through woodland on the way home, perhaps to collect a treasure—a fallen chestnut, a perfect red leaf, a posy of wildflowers—or we would look for fairy doors, those places at the base of a tree where the bark had grown away from the trunk, and which seemed for all the world like a little door to another world. Mum would knock first and listen, then I would knock and she would shake her head and tell me that fairies were shy. Or perhaps they were just not home that day. Dandelion seeds caught on the air would always be fairies, on their way to help any bees that were weary as they went about their day’s work. There was magic everywhere when we lived at Brown House—even a wishing well in the middle of Bedgebury Forest, “Crown Lands,” which surrounded the farm and were owned by the monarchy.

  I remember our walks into Goudhurst to do the shopping, and I remember the lady we passed every day as we made our way down to the farm. Hands in pockets, she seemed to be stepping out for the exercise rather than having a destination in mind. I was almost three years of age, and I recall her wearing a dark raincoat, and always a hat pulled down over her eyes. At first she didn’t reply to my mother’s cheery “good morning” but then she softened and smiled, at last responding with her own greeting and sometimes a “How are you?” One morning, as she passed, my mother leaned down and whispered to me, “She’s one of those women who parachuted into France during the war—Mrs. Mackie told me.” It was probably only when I asked what a parachute was that she remembered my age, and that it was perhaps a story that could wait until later, when I was older, though I
returned to my questions about the woman again and again as I grew up, fascinated by the notion of secrecy. She lived in a “grace and favor” house on the edge of the forest, which was the property of the Crown. Her home was a dwelling given to a person to use for the rest of their lifetime, by the grace and favor of the monarch, in recognition of their service to the country. The image of that woman has been tucked away in my bank of memories for a good number of years, waiting to be drawn out and explored.

  While living at Brown House Cottage I had two accidents—and I’m now beginning to see something of a pattern here. The first was a fall when I refused to hold my mother’s hand. Instead I ran ahead along the rough track to the farm, whereupon I lost my footing and tripped face-first onto a large, sharp stone that tore into the flesh across my forehead—I still have the scar. I didn’t feel a thing due to lingering shock from the scalding, and I remember looking up into my mother’s face and giggling as she wiped my forehead with her handkerchief. Once again the farmer was enlisted to rush me to the doctor, this time for stitches.

  The other accident happened while Auntie Rene was staying at the cottage with her husband, Eric. I would not have known this at the time, but the visit came when she had just lost her first and only child as she was being born; the umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck. My aunt must have been devastated, but I can only remember her smiling and playing with me. We walked into Goudhurst on a bright morning—it was a good two miles along the road—and one of the first stops was the butcher’s shop, which was situated at the top of the hill next to the Star and Eagle hotel and restaurant, where in my mid-teens I would spend Saturday nights washing dishes.

  To get to the door of the butcher’s shop, you had to climb a flight of stone steps that must have been there since the Middle Ages. We had both dogs with us—Bess and her daughter, Lassie—so while my mother went into the shop, my aunt waited outside at the top of the steps. The pharmacy was just across the street, and there was something my aunt needed urgently. I remember her saying, “I’ll just nip over the road,” before wrapping the leashes around my little hand and telling the dogs and me to “wait there.” But these were farm dogs, as familiar with hand signals as my father’s whistle. Upon reaching the other side of the road, my aunt decided to wave to me. I remember her smiling as she raised her hand. The dogs launched themselves down the steps with me in tow.

  Everything went black, then I looked up and saw faces staring down at me. Someone lifted my head because I was coughing up blood and a big red stain was appearing across the front of my cardigan. My mother heard the screams from inside the butcher’s shop and ran down the steps, pushing through the onlookers to pick me up. In another shop someone had already called the ambulance and I was rushed to the Kent and Sussex Hospital, emerging some days later with only three or four baby teeth remaining in my mouth and deep grazes on my face, arms and legs. That accident would cost me many sixpenny pieces I never received from the tooth fairy. Later, after I’d started my education at Cranbrook Primary School, when it came time for the annual school photograph my mother always instructed me to, “Keep your mouth shut. We don’t want everyone to see your gums.”

  Only now in writing about these events do I realize I was probably quite accident prone from early childhood. And I always thought my brother was the one to keep an eye on.

  We didn’t stay long at Brown House, probably just over a year, all told. Within about nine or ten months my mother was pregnant with my brother and my father had landed a job as foreman with Abnett’s, a firm of painters and decorators in Hawkhurst, so we needed to live on the bus route because we no longer had a car—it had been sold soon after we arrived back in London. I know I felt safe at Brown House Cottage, though on the day we moved I was so terrified of being left behind that I clambered aboard the removal lorry and hid behind a wardrobe. My mother found me snuggled there with Lassie, the dog—Bess had gone on her way to die alone by then. Soon the back doors of the lorry were closed up and we all sat alongside the driver. We were on our way to our new house in the tiny hamlet of Hartley, on the bus route between Cranbrook and Hawkhurst. I remember looking back at Brown House and feeling sorry for the cottage—to this day I hate to see empty houses; homes from which the soul of family has taken flight.

  I sometimes drive past the cottage when I return to Kent, though now it is a much larger country home, having years ago been remodeled together with the neighboring dwelling. It has a posher name, too, though to me it will always be Brown House. Living there marked the end of those years when we were never truly settled. Now we were moving to the home where John would be born and that my parents would eventually buy. They would live in the house at the end of The Terrace for some twenty-four years, before moving to Sussex in 1982. Their Gypsy days were truly over. But those peripatetic years had marked us all, becoming part of our family story—perhaps the most magical part for us fey Winspears.

  9

  We Four

  The Victorian terrace house my parents rented was at the end of a row of three-story dwellings built in 1878 to accommodate the families of men working on construction of the railway and the new branch line station that would link Cranbrook not only to the bigger towns of Tonbridge, Paddock Wood and Tunbridge Wells, but to London. When we moved in, the row of houses was still painted in the olive green and cream livery of the Southern Railway. Ah, but this house had electricity, although the wiring was dodgy. My brother still laughs when he talks about Dad rewiring the house, bit by bit, and the day he gave him one end of a wire and, pointing to the dark space under the dining room floor, said, “All right, son, just crawl under there until you see my hand poking through, and pass that wire up to me.” The wire was live and my brother was five years of age at the time.

  There was no bathroom—there wouldn’t be a bathroom until I was almost fourteen, the same year America put a man on the moon. But we had a proper outside WC with a tall rusting iron cistern high up on the wall and a chain for the flush. There was no mains drainage and it often fell to my father to unblock the septic because the access cover for the system that served the whole street was just outside our kitchen window. Oh, those Victorian builders were a clever lot!

  There was a fireplace in every room and the cast-iron stove in the kitchen also heated our water via a “copper” at the side of the inglenook. A copper was a sort of wide and deep cylindrical copper sink embedded in sandstone cement. A tap above the sink was used to fill the copper with cold water, and another miracle of Victorian engineering heated it. When it was hot, another tap below was used to empty the hot water—into a tin bath, or a bucket or bowl; whatever you needed hot water for. We didn’t have a washing machine—that would come when I was fifteen—but in those early days my mother had an old and heavy iron wringer with wooden rollers and a long handle. It was set up in the garden; she would run the washed laundry through the rollers to squeeze out the water, usually to a refrain of “Mind your fingers!” if I was helping.

  We moved into the house in November 1958, and it was freezing cold. My room was at the back of the house overlooking the garden and during that first winter I remember scraping ice from inside the window so I could see outside. The cistern overflowed as the water inside froze, so you had to be careful when you sat on the toilet because the seat became encrusted with ice and it was easy to slide off onto the cold stone floor. And there were often spiders on that floor.

  The rent must have been a stretch, because my mother wore a furrowed brow more often than not, and became nervous when the landlady came every Friday to collect the rent money. Her name was Mrs. Drill, and she had grey permed hair and a circle of frosted glass on one side of her spectacles, plain glass on the other. I would watch while she counted the cash my mother handed her in a used envelope, and marked up our rent book with the date and amount paid. I was always aching to ask about her spectacles. I suppose it was around this time that my mother began warning me to “not say any
thing” when we went out, or to “mind what I said” in front of people. I was a curious child, always with lots of questions, and like many small children I didn’t really have a filter. My mother maintained that one of her most embarrassing moments was when she was at the doctor’s surgery for a pre-natal appointment, and having left me in the waiting room—I may have been only three and a half years old but I could be left alone and would simply get on with talking to other people—she heard me ask a particularly portly patient if he was expecting a baby, too. It must have been a relief when laughter followed my inquiry.

  We lived two miles outside Cranbrook, the small town I think of as home. That town was like a metropolis to me. My American husband thought it was “quaint” and “charming” when I took him back there, proudly showing him the landmarks of my growing. This is where I went to primary school, and this is where I would catch the bus home. This is where a boy named Peter used to pull off my hair ribbons and throw them down the drain, and this is the grocery store where a shop assistant told my mother to go to the doctor to find out if she was pregnant again, because mum was buying onions and happened to say she had a real craving for them. I pointed out the pub where I was caught, drink in hand, by one of the teachers on the day before I left school, my place at college assured. The drinking part was legal—I was eighteen, after all—but it was probably the nonchalance with which I relaxed, sitting back in the chair while sipping my Dubonnet and lemonade as I responded, “Oh, it’s all right, sir, we’ll be leaving soon anyway.” I wasn’t what you’d call a drinker and I’d never been cheeky with teachers, but I liked the Dubonnet TV advertisement, and I so wanted to be that slender, confident French woman in a floaty dress who was languishing in a vineyard and sharing a Dubonnet with a gorgeous bloke. In truth I was in the George pub with three lads wearing school uniforms who were getting a bit tipsy on half pints of lager. But drinks with boys were long in the future when we moved to the house at the end of The Terrace.