by M. M. Kaye
The mornings were all right, because one could play in the gardens. And I discovered that I could cope with bees without getting stung; which pleased Grandpapa, who used to take me down with him to the row of beehives in the upper orchard to help him remove old frames or fumigate the hives, and would watch approvingly when (carefully veiled, I may say) I let swarms of the little insects crawl all over my hands. I can only suppose I must have had the sort of smell that bees like.
Lunch, however, was to be dreaded, because Grandpapa liked to drink beer that was drawn fresh from the cask, and it was always one of his grandchildren who had to fetch it for him. ‘Let a child do it!’ was his invariable command, and we never knew which of us his beady eye would light upon. We all hated fetching the stuff, because the casks were kept in the wine cellar; a damp, pitch-black dungeon of a place with a vaulted roof and pillars draped with cobwebs like something out of a horror film. But it was neither the dark nor the spiders that scared us. It was frogs. Or rather toads, of which there were any number, squatting fecklessly on the wet stone flags and brooding on infinity, regardless of the fact that they were almost impossible to see by the light of a single wavering candle. Have you ever trodden on a frog? Or, worse still, on a toad? I do not recommend it. They explode with a horrid pop, followed by a squish as one slips wildly on the remains of the deceased.
Armed with the beer-jug and a candle I would grope my way down the slimy steps into musty, beer-smelling blackness, praying that I would not tread on a frog or be dropped on by a spider; and having balanced the candlestick on the top of a cask, cautiously turn the spigot and attempt to fill the jug without getting too much froth on top or spilling too much beer. There would always be a certain amount of spillage, of course, and I can only presume that the reason why those wretched toads didn’t hop out of the way was because they were permanently sozzled.
I was always terrified that the candle would go out and leave me in that toad-filled darkness, or that I would drop Grandpapa’s favourite jug and get skinned by his razor-edged tongue for doing so. The whole business was a terrifying ordeal and probably the reason why I am afraid of the dark to this day. And just to add to everything else, the house was haunted. It had a resident ghost…
Given the choice between the ghost and the toads, I would have preferred the ghost every time; in spite of that hair-raising experience at The Bower. For one thing, this ghost was the only truly kind-hearted one I have ever heard of. She had no known history, and even the Oldest Inhabitant in the village could not say when she had started haunting the house; only that it was ‘before me time’. One really should not be scared of benevolent ghosts; and if there had to be a ghost in the house it was obviously better to have a friendly one. Speaking for myself I would have preferred to have no ghost at all, and the fact that the house harboured one was not conducive to peaceful sleep at night.
The Upton House ghost was that of a young woman; a girl in her late teens or early twenties according to those who had seen her, and judging from her dress she must once have been a housemaid, for even in my day, in the depths of the country young village girls ‘in service’ still wore print dresses, aprons and mob caps; as they had done for several hundred years. One can only suppose that this one, when she was alive and in service in that house, was treated with great kindness by someone who lived in it, and was so grateful that even after her death her ghost would return to the house whenever those who lived in it were in need of help.
It was not easy, in those post-war years, to find household help even for a modern, labour-saving house, while for one such as Upton House — old and stone-built, with long ice-cold passages leading to large stone-flagged kitchen quarters, not a hint of All Mod. Cons. anywhere, no electricity, no gas, miles from the nearest town where there was a cinema, good shops or, for that matter, a barracks — it was getting almost impossible to obtain staff. The women who once worked in such houses, and had left to work in munitions factories, hospitals and a dozen other spheres during the war years, would never come back; while the young had no desire to take work in out-of-the-way places where there were few if any young men to take them out on their days off.
With no boy-friends, no bright lights, no fun! — and that human battle-axe, Aunt Molly, chasing them around to see that they ‘kept up to the mark’ — it was not surprising that the staff at Upton House were always downing tools and departing at short notice, leaving Aunt Molly and Cousin Maggie, and any other available grandchild who happened to be present, to cope with the housework and cooking while Cousin Grace trundled off in the family car to do the shopping and to plead with the nearest employment agency to find yet another set of replacements willing to take on the drudgery and boredom of Upton House and put up with Aunt Molly’s ideas of discipline. On at least two such occasions (there may have been more when she wasn’t spotted) the ghostly housemaid rushed to the rescue and did her stuff. That girl really must have had a heart of gold.
On the first of those two occasions it was my cousin Tom Polwhele, elder son of Tacklow’s beloved sister Nan, who saw her. Tom, a naval Lieutenant, was on leave and due to spend a few days with his grandfather. Since he had written to say that he would be arriving late at night and that no one need bother to stay up for him, a cold supper was left for him in the dining-room and a candlestick in the hall, where all our candlesticks were put out for us every evening; each of us lighting one and carrying it upstairs when we went to bed. We did not hear him arrive and no one had thought to tell him that the staff had walked out en masse on the previous day. He came down next morning to find us all at breakfast, and having apologized for being late and dutifully greeted his grandfather, kissed his aunt, and grinned at his assembled cousins, he collected himself a plateful of food from the sideboard and remarked casually that if he hadn’t been woken up he would probably not have surfaced until well into the afternoon: ‘Who’s the new girl who woke me up this morning?’ inquired Tom: ‘Haven’t seen her before. Pretty little thing.’
Everyone stopped eating and there was dead silence in the dining-room as we all stared at him, open-mouthed. Then someone said: ‘What did you mean … she woke you? How?’
‘Oh, she just tapped on the door and came in and pulled the curtains, smiled at me and made a nice little bob and went out again. Why? — what else would she do?’
‘The ghost!’ yelped his cousins in chorus: ‘He’s seen the ghost!’
Tom, who was a stolid, ‘Silent Service’ Navy type, not given to practical jokes or playing tricks on people (and besides being unaware that there were no servants in the house, he had never heard that there was a resident ghost), demanded to know what we were all yowling about, and on being told, leapt to the conclusion that one of us had persuaded a friend to dress the part in order to pull his leg. When he realized that this was not so, and that there really were no servants at Upton House, he first became extremely cross and stuffy and said the whole thing was rubbish because no ghost could possibly open and close doors and pull curtains, and then fell back again on insisting that we must have put someone up to doing it and that he didn’t think it was in the least funny.
The girl was not seen again for the best part of a year. And next time it was Aunt Molly, of all people, who saw her. Once again there had been high words with the staff who, with admirable solidarity, had flounced out in a body. Shortly afterwards, my formidable aunt, feeling cross and distrait, came downstairs to prepare luncheon and, on her way down, passed a housemaid who was on her knees brushing the stair-carpet. The girl drew aside to let her pass, which Aunt Molly did automatically and without thinking, and it was only when she had taken the last step and reached the hall that it flashed into her mind that all the staff had already left. She whirled round and looked back up the staircase; and of course there was no one there.
I gather she tottered into the dining-room and helped herself to a stiff brandy, and spent the next half-hour lying on the sofa in the drawing-room sniffing smelling-salts. She did not c
ook the lunch: I suppose Maggie did.
What with ghosts and toads and Grandpapa and a strong-minded aunt, it is hardly surprising that I disliked staying at Upton House. The room I slept in was known as the ‘Battle of the Blues’ because its once fashionable William Morris-style wallpaper was a riot of hydrangeas, lilies and larkspur in various shades of blue on a prussian blue background, and there were curtains of navy blue rep on the four-poster bed and at the windows. The furniture was mahogany and massive, and the room so large that the single candle permitted to a child (the older grown-ups had oil lamps) made such a small pool of light in that waste of shadows that on one occasion I spent all my pocket-money on extra candles, because I had come across a book in the library called Carnaki the Ghost Finder which so scared me that I did not dare go to sleep in the dark.
The only other thing that I remember clearly about Upton House is that it was here, during a weekend when my parents were also present, that I first realized with an appalling sense of shock that my gay, pretty mother was a complete nit-wit. I can even pinpoint the moment. It happened during a sunny half-term holiday and I was sitting on the grass bank at one end of the tennis court with my cousin Maggie, who was umpiring. Mother was one of the players and I can see her still; the afternoon sun making her hair the colour of horse chestnuts. She is wearing a very becoming white dress and laughing. I haven’t the faintest recollection of what it was that she said or did; I only know that whatever it was it made me suddenly aware, as though a blinding light had been switched on and blazed in my face, that she was silly. A charming, butterfly-minded bird-brain … what Victorians would have called a ‘goose-cap’.
It was a horrible moment. Nowadays I don’t suppose that anyone under the age of fifty could have any conception what it was like, because with the arrival of the Bright Young Things in the Roaring Twenties, and the appalling prospect of a second world war, standards crumbled, many illusions perished, and it became fashionable to criticize one’s parents and anyone of an older generation. But in my day the vast majority of children still regarded their parents as the fount of all wisdom, and the sudden revelation that one’s own mother was, to put it crudely, plain stupid, was shocking beyond words. It couldn’t be true and I must be some kind of horrible freak for even thinking such a thing: for didn’t the Bible say: ‘Honour thy Father and thy Mother that thy days may be long in the land that the Lord thy God giveth thee’? My days couldn’t be long at this rate, and for the first time I wished I was a Catholic and could rush off to Confession and be given a penance, and be shriven. Because if I was right about Mother — and I knew very well that I was — then nothing was safe and the very earth under my feet was not solid any more.
It took me a long time to come to terms with that discovery and it was only after I left school, and became used to it, that I mentioned it to Tacklow: and was charmed and comforted by his answer.
‘But I never wanted a brainy wife,’ said Tacklow. ‘I have to use my brain all day in the office, and when I get home I don’t want intelligent conversation — I can get that at the Club. I want a beautiful woman who can take my mind off work and worry, and make me laugh; and your mother has always been, and always will be, a source of pride and delight to me.’ I felt a lot better after that: and less ashamed of myself. But the incident played its part in casting a shadow over Grandpapa’s house. Even though I was beginning to know that cantankerous old curmudgeon rather better because of the hours we spent together messing about among the beehives. I also admired the way he refused to be bossed about by Aunt Battle-axe, and one particularly pleasant memory of him remains with me: his reply to her when she announced at breakfast one morning, after opening her mail, that her dear friends, Eustacia and Hugo Smith-Piggot let us say, had accepted her invitation to spend a couple of nights at Upton House next month and would be arriving in time for luncheon on the fourteenth and leaving after breakfast on the sixteenth — or whatever. She had not asked her father’s permission, or expected it; she just stated the fact. Grandpapa merely nodded and said musingly: ‘Ah, yes, the Smith-Piggots. The fourteenth to the sixteenth, I think you said? … Um … I’m afraid I shall not be very well on the fourteenth — or on the next two days either.’ And he wasn’t. He remained firmly in bed for two and a half days, coming down again only after the guests had departed.
Apart from members of his family, whom he endured rather than enjoyed having to stay, he detested guests, and ‘not being well on the twentieth to the twenty-second of next month’ (or whenever it was his daughter-cum-housekeeper announced the arrival of visitors), was a well-known gambit of his. But he didn’t always win, for I also remember an occasion when Aunt Molly told an extremely overpowering and talkative guest, who had been saying how very sorry she was to ‘miss seeing your dear father’, that Papa was quite well enough to receive a visitor who was such an old friend and who would not expect him to talk too much and tire himself. With which she ushered the ‘old friend’ into his bedroom and left him to endure an hour of non-stop chat from which there was no escape, since he was clad in pyjamas and tucked up in bed.
Thinking back on the many embarrassments inflicted on us during weekends at Upton House, there is one other incident that deserves mention; Morning Service in the parish church, with whose vicar Grandpapa appeared to be permanently at odds (which did not mean that he would ever consider failing to turn up for the eleven o’clock service every Sunday. Or let any of us skip it, either!). The church was a very old one and the front pews, reserved for centuries by the owners of the few large houses, had high sides and doors that were shut by the verger on the last person to enter. The pew immediately below the pulpit went automatically to the owner of Upton House, and once inside it, with the door closed, only the vicar (or whoever happened to be preaching the sermon) could look into it. Which was just as well, because Grandpapa had a rooted dislike of long sermons. With a view to correcting the vicar’s tendency to talk too much he would make a tower of the coins he intended to put into the plate, carefully piling them one on the other before ostentatiously taking out his pocket-watch and placing it beside them where the preacher, looking down into the pew, could not fail to see them. For the first five minutes of the sermon (very occasionally more, provided Grandpapa was interested) the tower remained untouched; but after that with each circuit of the minute hand on his watch one coin was removed until, if the sermon went on too long, the entire lot had been returned to base and the collection plate got nothing at all from old Mr Kaye of Upton House.*
I used to watch this irreverent performance torn between embarrassment on behalf of the vicar and a wild desire to burst into giggles as I watched his hypnotized gaze creep back again and again to the shrinking tower of coins, and heard his voice begin to speed up. I still don’t know why he didn’t ignore the whole business instead of giving in, Sunday after Sunday, to what can only be described as blackmail. At least it worked; and there have been times when, pinned down in a pew and compelled to listen to the droning of some worthy gentleman in Holy Orders who should never ever have been allowed within five hundred yards of a pulpit, I would have dearly liked to follow Grandpapa’s example and see if I could make it work too.
In the end, however, much as I may have disliked my school-time visits to Upton House, my memories of the place were sweetened by the fact that on my last visit, a good many months after I had left The Lawn and put my hair up (in those days becoming a grown-up meant putting one’s hair up and letting one’s skirts down), I fell in love with a friend of my brother Bill’s. I haven’t the remotest idea what his name was but I can still remember his face as clearly as though I had seen him an hour ago; an attractive puckish face, alight with laughter and made up almost entirely of triangles. He was by no means the first to whom I had lost my heart, for I was always losing it: there was Guy Slater when I was still not five years old, and after him a succession of other idols: young Kurram who wasn’t a bit afraid of horses and looked so lordly and handsome as he galloped, no
se in air, past my plodding pony on the Mall; Gully, who besides having such beautiful eyes and the whitest of teeth, knew everything about everything; Betty Caruana in her character of Jim Blunders in Where the Rainbow Ends; as well as endless characters from books, ranging from Robin Hood to Rupert of Hentzau. Then, briefly, there had been Tommy Richardson, who was succeeded by a red-haired and spotty-faced youth who sang in the choir of St John’s Church at Clevedon, to whom I never even spoke, and who was soon eclipsed by a long list of actors and film-stars, among them, of course, Pitt Chatham who played the part of MacHeath in Polly.
Looking back on my early youth I don’t seem to remember any time after the age of four and a half, which was when I met Guy, that I wasn’t in love with some member of the opposite sex — not counting Tacklow, with whom I had obviously fallen in love at first sight. I think most of my generation were a sentimental lot who in general thought highly of Love. The whole thing became too raucous later on. It was a lot more romantic when such affairs of the heart were a closely guarded secret.
The ‘flicks’ — the silent cinema — were really getting into their stride in the Twenties. And since we saw at least one film, and often two, every week during our holidays (in those days the price of a seat in any one of the front six or eight rows was sixpence!) I fell in love with the hero of practically every film that I saw, and lost my heart on an average of one-and-a-half times every seven days; until the day when I met a real live West End actor who switched my attention from the cinema to the stage and was to make an important contribution to my life.
