It wasn’t hard to learn to recognize the birds. The commonest and the most conspicuous were the yellowhammers. You could hardly miss them, for they seemed to have scarcely any fear of humans, and would sing out their little phrase from a hawthorn bush or a juniper almost at your elbow. There were cirl buntings too, but since in those days my bird-watching was spontaneous and largely uninstructed, I didn’t distinguish between them and yellowhammers. The linnets I liked, partly for their song but mainly, I think, because (by English ornithological standards, anyway) the males are rather showy, with their deep pink breasts and foreheads. Best of all were the goldfinches. They forage along the downs in small flocks (‘charms’) feeding on thistle seeds, groundsel and the like. I defy anyone not to be stirred by the sudden, twittering arrival of four or five goldfinches, fluttering and pecking from one thistle to another. I remember calling out in delight ‘Oh, Daddy, look!’ and getting the wonted reply ‘Aren’t they a lot of splendid chaps?’ Kestrels were not uncommon, and once I took one unawares, coming round the sharp corner of a beech hanger in time to get a close look at it sitting on a strand of wire, before it took alarm and flew away. What I chiefly noticed was the black band round the edge of the tail and the black spots, or speckling, all over the chestnut-coloured back.
Hares, too, were common in those days. In fact, you could hardly go up on the downs without seeing one or two. If you happened to be down-wind of them, and particularly if you could stand still in some sort of cover or half-cover such as a juniper (gorse doesn’t grow much on the Hampshire downs), they would sometimes come quite near before suddenly realizing what you were and dashing away. The thing I have always admired in hares is their ability to rotate their huge ears through at least 180° and, I wouldn’t be surprised, even a little more. In spring they caper in the open in a most arresting way, although I can’t actually recall seeing them do this when I was a little boy. It is a courtship display, or so I have read.
The highest point on these downs is Beacon Hill, which forms part of the Carnarvon estate. There is still a public footpath up it from the A34 on the east side (or the Earl allows people to climb it, anyway) but in those days, before Hitler’s war, there was a golf course below the hill, on the west side. It wasn’t much of a course by exacting standards - the turf was spongy and the greens were slow - but from the age of about eight I used to enjoy playing there and it was novel and pleasant to be driven a matter of nearly two miles through the woods of Highclere Park. This is why, when I was a little boy, we always used to climb Beacon Hill from the west side, where the golf course was. You can’t do that any more. The fascination of climbing Beacon Hill was that on the top lay — and still lies - Lord Carnarvon’s grave. This is that Lord Carnarvon who, with his faithful henchman Mr Carter, discovered Tutankhamen’s tomb. (In those days everybody used to pronounce it Tootang-Karmen, and I still do.) We all knew the story: how the findings were more wonderful than anything ever seen (though no one had seen them as yet): how there was a terrible curse of the Pharaohs on molesters of the tomb, which had carried off Lord Carnarvon for a start: and that was only the beginning. Of course, it wasn’t my mother and father who told me about the Curse and its effects; but Constance did, and Thorn the gardener, and several other people in the village. It was common local knowledge.
Although there is a stone now, in those days the grave was unmarked; I suppose because the ground hadn’t yet settled, or for some such reason. The site, perhaps five yards square, was surrounded (as now) by high, stout iron railings and mown smooth. In the middle the turf rose into the man-long hump of the interment, at which I used to stare in numinous awe. There lay the Earl who had been killed by the Pharaoh’s Curse. This had all been his land, and his great castle could be seen a mile away among the trees. He had known the King George V. Yet none of this grandeur had served to avert the curse.
He had been such a nice man, by all accounts. There was an anecdote current which I had been told as an example of the manners of a true gentleman (and I have always remembered it). It seems that at some midsummer before the Great War, Lord Carnarvon was giving a fete in the grounds. There was a cricket match, and a marquee had been put up, in which the Earl’s tenants were sat down to a generous feast. Lord Carnarvon himself was strolling round, talking to people and making sure that everyone was having a good time, when he came across an old fellow who was addressing himself to a slab of ice pudding.
‘Hullo, Giles,’ he said. ‘’Hope you’re enjoying yourself?’
‘Well, my lord,’ replied Giles, ‘I don’t reckon much to this ’ere pudden. Why, ’tis stone cold.’
Lord Carnarvon picked up a spoon and tasted it. ‘So it is!’ he said. ‘What a shame! Smithers, take this away and bring Mr Giles some of that hot apple pie.’
A good seven miles westward along the downs stood and still stands Combe Gibbet. Although it was thought rather a long way in those days, we sometimes drove out there for a picnic. The story of the gibbet - what little we know of it - is a grim one, but even as a little boy I’d had it told to me. In 1676 two villagers of Inkpen, George Broomham and Dorothy Newman, were convicted at Winchester Assizes of murdering Broomham’s wife and son ‘with a staff on Inkpen Down. The crime excited so much local horror and vengeful indignation that the pair were sentenced, exceptionally, to be hanged ‘on the highest point in the county’ (Hampshire), which by a coincidence happened to be the summit of Combe Down. (It’s Inkpen Down on the north side of the ridge and Combe Down on the south. The summit is not quite 1,000 feet.) A double gallows was erected for the purpose and the pair were duly hanged. No one else has ever been hanged there, but it has become traditional to maintain the gallows. (I believe there is an obligation upon either the landlord or the tenant: I have been told which, but I forget.) When it becomes worn out by wind and weather it is replaced. The one there at the moment is quite recent, stout and good for years, I would say: but in the ‘twenties, when I first went up there, the gibbet was old, the tall upright rifted and leaning awry, the lateral arms, not very long, rifted and tapered by weather. I didn’t know it wasn’t the original. I used to imagine the scene, two hundred and fifty years before; the jeering villagers, the hangman and his wretched victims in the cart, the horses blown from their long pull up, no doubt some dignified J.P. or magistrate in charge, the clergyman with his book, all in the stiff west wind along the down. How long did it take them to strangle?
And yet I have never heard that anyone has felt the place to be sinister or eerie. Certainly I never did. It is difficult to feel anything but delight and elation as you look northwards, out across the fields and woodlands of the Kennet valley to the White Horse downs fifteen miles away. Newbury today is spoilt, its former character and comeliness ruined, but in those days, sixty years ago, from Combe Gibbet you could see it, six or seven miles away to the north-east, a trim little market town of red brick, between the hospital on the south and, on the north, the Lambourn river flowing past Donnington and Shaw to join the Kennet north of the race course.
Ah, yes, the race course!
My father was doctor and surgeon to the Newbury races. This meant that when there were meetings our family received honorary passes to the members’ enclosure and had lunch in the members’ dining-room. To this day the smell of cigars always recalls to me the noise and tumult of the race course - the esoteric bawling of the bookies (‘Two to one bar one! Two to one bar one!’ ‘I’ll lay six to four the field! Six to four the field!’), the tic-tac men in trilby hats, standing on the high points of the grandstand as they flailed their arms in gesticulations whose recipients one could never make out in the crowd below; the electric tote flashing its figures as the bets mounted; the bookies’ clerks, with polished brass boutonnières announcing their firms’ names, scribbling on great clipboards and handing out bright-coloured, numbered tickets; the debris, as the afternoon went on, of those same, torn-up tickets littering the tarmac and the trampled, aromatic turf; the jockeys’ names run up on a kind of
hoist between two posts (Donohue, Wragg, Beery, Fox); the bowler hats (my father never wore one on any other occasion, though he did for a while when King George V died) and above all the beautiful, shining, lissom horses led round and round the paddock before the race, while the owners conversed with their overcoated jockeys. I knew Dorothy Paget by sight, and her colours (blue with a yellow hoop, cap yellow with a blue hoop), together with a few of the other famous owners of the day. I recall Golden Miller, that unbeatable horse, passing the post amid a storm of cheering, and Dorothy Paget leading him in.
Unlike going to the children’s parties, going to the races was not frightening or disconcerting. There was more than one reason for this. First, nothing was expected of you. You didn’t have to do anything in particular or talk to anyone you didn’t want to. I was allowed to go anywhere I liked by myself, from the paddock to the top of the grandstand, and as I grew older my father often used to lend me his binoculars. I know what it is to be literally alone in a crowd. No one took any notice of a small boy edging his way between fur coats and cigars to the paddock rails, to watch Forbra or Limelight led past almost within touching distance. In a crowd of adults I remained solitary. I had my own bookie, though; a dark, toothy gentleman called Mr Bingham, who, from me, good-naturedly accepted sixpenny bets. (Several other bookies had refused.) Having placed the bet, I would climb to the topmost point of the stand, race-card in hand, there to identify the runners as they were mounted and then watch them led out and released to canter up the course to the start. The very sight of the bright racing colours was exciting. Through the binoculars I could make out the mêlée, walking to and fro down at the starting-gate. Then the bell would ring - ‘They’re off!’ - and I would lean hard on the wall, elbows splayed and binoculars pressed close, watching my horse. Or sometimes, if it were steeplechasing, I would leave the members’ enclosure by way of the gate onto the flat course, cross it to the steeplechasing course and take up my stand at the water-jump to see them go over. I have a memory of a dismounted jockey actually up to his neck in the water - the only time I ever saw it - but I was still quite small and remember no details. The horse must have refused, I suppose, and pitched him over its head.
In winter, at the steeplechase meetings, Newbury race course was - and no doubt still is - notorious for being bitterly cold, with cutting winds. Two or three great, open braziers, each about six feet in diameter and piled with glowing coke, were situated about the members’ enclosure, and between races a circle of people two or three deep would form round them, stretching out their hands for warmth. It was near one of these that I saw, for the only time, King George V and Queen Mary; the only time, but it couldn’t have been to much better advantage. It was known, of course, that they were coming to the meeting that day. I hadn’t seen them arrive, although I had caught a distant glimpse of an entourage of grand-looking people up in the glass-enclosed royal box. One of the big braziers was sited round at the back of the members’ enclosure, on the tarmac leading down to the paddock and the jockeys’ changing-rooms. I was wedged in among people standing round this when I became aware of a stir. The crowd broke up and moved this way and that. Naturally, I moved too, and then, looking round, saw the King and Queen approaching. They looked exactly like the photographs of themselves in the newspapers; the King bearded and moustached, with the face of someone who - you would think -didn’t smile much; Queen Mary tall and majestic, with a purple toque and a spotted veil. They paused for a few moments by the brazier, chatting quietly to two or three people with them, and then made their way down to the paddock. I can see clearly, in memory, the King studying his race-card as he walked away.
It must be remembered that in those days not only was there no television; there were no newsreels in provincial cinemas — films were silent, anyway - and royal walkabouts hadn’t been invented (though I recall a charming, true story of the King and Queen walking in St James’s Park and stopping deliberately to pose for a little girl with a box camera). To find yourself within spitting distance of the King and Queen was a terrific thrill for a small boy.
I said there was more than one reason for my feeling no nervousness of going to the races. We had, in effect, our own sitting-room — virtually private, and warm as toast on even the bleakest days. This was the race course hospital, a room about as big as a fair-sized drawing-room, situated just behind the members’ grandstand and adjacent to the jockeys’ changing-room. It had three beds made up with sheets and blankets; it had comfortable chairs and a roaring fire — and it had Nurse Lowe.
Nurse Lowe was exactly like a nanny from a Victorian children’s story-book - Maria Edgeworth or Frances Hodgson Burnett. At this time she was, I suppose, in her fifties or even a little more. She was on the plump side, with gold-rimmed spectacles, rosy cheeks, white hair, a gentle voice and a beautiful smile. I’m afraid I was not always a very well-behaved little boy, but in Nurse Lowe’s company it was easy to be as good as gold. Gentleness and kindness surrounded her like an invisible nimbus. I can’t remember anything that we ever said to each other, but I certainly don’t forget sitting by the hospital fire and talking to Nurse Lowe.
She used to knit and she used to darn. She had a great, open bag with her, full of socks and woolly vests and other mending. Her darning egg used to delight me. I haven’t seen another for years past. It was about as big as a man’s fist or perhaps a little smaller, and made of— or at any rate outwardly covered with - celluloid, I suppose (for plastics had not yet come on the market). It was bluntly ovoid; and one end was black while the other was white. The idea was that you put it into, say, the heel of a sock with the appropriately coloured end showing conspicuously through the hole to be darned. Then you held the whole thing clutched in your left hand and darned over the hole until the end of the egg was covered up. I felt that this was what the Americans call ‘neat’: I still think so. I wonder where that egg is now. People don’t darn as much as they used to.
Sometimes Nurse Lowe would get a tip from a jockey - so would my father, for that matter - and give me a shilling or a florin to put on for her; for she was not supposed to leave the hospital. Whenever a jockey was brought in on a stretcher - sometimes unconscious, sometimes moaning or muttering curses in his pain - my brother and my sister and I had to look sharp and slip out quickly and unobtrusively, for we weren’t really allowed to be there, and didn’t want to get my father into trouble or to be ourselves forbidden to frequent the hospital at all. I remember once a jockey being carried in, his stretcher surrounded by two or three obviously important people in bowler hats, carnations and binoculars. My brother was the one who caught it for not becoming invisible quickly enough.
‘Come, tumble out, boy, tumble out!’ barked one of these grandees peremptorily.
I wasn’t used to seeing my elder brother, who to me seemed almost grown-up, scuttling out of the way without a word. But that was what he did. ‘Whoever’s that?’ I asked, as soon as we were both outside, somewhat disordered.
‘Oh, that’s old Baxendale,’ said my brother with an air of patient toleration, rather as though he had been merely humouring the idiosyncrasies of the gentleman by acting in so undignified a way. Mr Baxendale (another patient of my father) I vaguely knew to be in some capacity or other the head of the whole race course and everything in it. I was appropriately impressed and somewhat apprehensive, but nothing more came of the matter.
My father - as I hope to make clear in the course of this book - although so grave and unsmiling in his manner, had a great gift of what one might term cryptic or veiled humour. This quality made friends for him among all manner of people who sensed intuitively this singular mixture of reserve with warmth and even mischief. One of these was the Comic Waiter.
I don’t know by what system the race course authorities recruited staff like barmen, cooks and waiters for the race meetings. They would not, of course, have had a permanent staff, the meetings being relatively infrequent. I suppose they sharked up a list of lawless resolutes. (Ther
e spring to my mind the words used by some contemporary historian - Clarendon? - to describe the shortcomings of a Royalist army in the civil war: he says that it consisted of ‘old, decayed tapsters and the like’.) No doubt a lot of the racecourse people were engaged on a regular basis, as no doubt were my father and Nurse Lowe - and for all I know, Mr Baxendale. Anyhow, the Comic Waiter was always to be found on duty in the members’ dining-room.
The Comic Waiter used to make a great business of serving my father. He would bring the steak (or whatever it was) and put down the plate not in front of my father but a foot or two away, in some convenient place. Then he would add the vegetables himself, commenting appropriately the while (‘This cauliflower is certainly one not to be missed, Doctor’), and finally, having arranged everything on the plate to his satisfaction, would place it before my father, remarking something like ‘There, Doctor; I think you’ll find that’ll taste remarkably good.’
My father used to play up to the Comic Waiter, rather as though they were a sort of duo in a music-hall sketch. He would ask him whether he had a horse for the two-thirty, express the hope that his feet weren’t hurting him, or enquire whether the Stilton cheese was any good. (‘Good, Doctor? Why, it won at Cheltenham only last week!’)
Now one day my father and I were finishing lunch together in the members’ dining-room by ourselves. I can’t remember where the rest of the family were, but anyhow they weren’t there. We had coffee, my father signed the bill and we made our way towards the revolving doors. As we approached them, we became aware of a stout, middle-aged lady who was, as they say, going on a whole piece. The recipient was the poor Comic Waiter, who was getting most of it, although the head waiter, standing near by, was also in the line of fire.
The Day Gone By Page 9
