Snakes and Ladders

by Dirk Bogarde

  No one, however, could relax, and no one did. I decided that it was perhaps now the moment for me to have for the first time in my life, a real bought-and-paid-for house of my own. I had my eye on one, not very far away, which was empty and for sale. However, it would of course mean leaving Bendrose.

  The Bendrose days were the happiest; although there were to be grander houses, greater riches, finer views, it is always to Bendrose that I look with nostalgia and happiness.

  Perhaps it was because we were all so much younger then; because the calm of the countryside, after the depressed austerity of London, healed so well, or just perhaps it was because we were all content with so much less after the long strain of the war years so recently over, that even a shabby, still-rationed peace was better than anything which had gone before.

  Bendrose House stood in three hundred acres of corn and mangolds surrounded by a vast cherry orchard. The estate belonged to the Forwoods, and they allowed me to rent the house and gardens at a very modest yearly rental.

  Hardly to the delight and relief of the Studio Publicity Department who had already dubbed me as being unco-operative; along with the small head and the long legs and small trunk so despaired of by Earl St John, I also refused to play the game by attending premieres, escorting resting-actresses to night clubs, buying diamonds, fast cars, or fighting with waiters; I didn’t even try to crash Society (a popular pastime then) by hobnobbing with minor Royalty, playing polo at Cowdray or trying to dance with Princess Margaret at Charity Balls. All the Publicity Department could scrape together was a sorry list of trivia, assembled by a harassed lady in a feathered hat one day, which stated, among other things, that I made my own lampshades, bred tropical fish, and was descended on my father’s side from Anne of Cleves. Even I could see that this was hardly good news. Therefore the move from the shabby canyon of Chester Row to the elysian fields of Amersham Common was pounced upon with alacrity. I could now be given a Country Background; rolling fields, sunsets, a man of the earth, brooding solitude in the sombre plough of the Home Counties. A kind of anaemic Heathcliff. They dubbed me Lord of the Manor and only retracted a little when it was pointed out that Bendrose was not a manor nor mine, and substituted Country Squire, which anyway sounded better in a utilitarian, democratic, Socialist Britain. I was deeply relieved and brooded all over the place; anything so long as I was not forced into a black tie and the Orchid Room nightly, with a twenty pound bottle of champagne. I made the image stick.

  It was not the most comfortable of houses—filled with icy draughts, twisting passages, floors on all levels and forests of dark-stained beams. The heart of the house, a modest sixteenth century cottage, stood smothered in a splendid muddle of Edwardian-Tudor extensions which ran in all directions. Forwood’s grandfather, who had made it the family house, bought most of his material from builders’ yards and the demolition of old houses throughout the county. Latticed windows nudged cheerfully at Georgian; four-poster beds were dismantled, cut to pieces, and formed ornate, if bewildering, fireplaces; walls were panelled with yards of cheap three-ply wood, bought in bulk from aeroplane factories after the First World War; and the kitchens lay miles from the dining room so that the food arrived frozen or spilled, since there were two floor levels to endure before arriving at the dining hatch, which fell down and jammed one’s fingers every time it was raised to admit the chilling dishes. Forwood Senior bought and built expressively, and economically. One day at luncheon his wife had asked mildly what it could be she saw coming up the drive, and he replied that it was the railway station. It was. Shortly afterwards Chalfont and Latimer Station was re-erected opposite the dairy to house the hay and mangolds, proving to be a very economical barn.

  On my arrival the house was empty and cobwebby, shabby, but loving, and with a van load of furniture which my father gave me from our old house in Sussex (which had been lying in store all the war) plus the bits and pieces I had got from junk shops for Chester Row, carpets and curtains bought at local village auctions, the house started to thrive again, and although it was always to be happily untidy and unplanned, it very soon became a home once more.

  Bond, my driver, came from London to be odd job and handy man and to drive me to the Studios; Mr and Mrs Wally, from the Farm, came in daily, she to “do” and he to help untangle the wilderness of the gardens; and I sought and obtained a manservant. Cook General was what I had asked for and is what I was told I had got when Catchpole arrived with his suitcase and a head of tight red wavy hair. He spent all his working time scrubbing out the kitchen and cooking cod steaks in heavy curry sauce. I don’t think he knew anything else. His days off were spent entirely at the Windmill Theatre, from the first show till the last, and when he left, as leave he finally did, thankfully, glossy photographs of ladies arrived from time to time with polite letters regretting that, “We have no photographs of Valerie with Doves, but thought you might like to have these of Clarice with Balloons.” I couldn’t send them on to him since he had left in a huff without a forwarding address.

  Then came Philpot with a long record in the Merchant Navy, spick and span, and shipshape. He was carrying The Economist when he arrived for his first interview, so perhaps I should have been warned. Floors became decks, the twisting staircase companionways, the kitchen the galley, and he served meals, wearing a neat white apron and a Merchant Navy jacket. The meals themselves consisted mostly of corned beef in various disguises, mashed potatoes, and a rather ugly little pudding with a pink cherry on top. For the first week I let it pass, believing that I should soon wean him away from ship fare; even though rationing was still with us the diet could, I felt, be varied just a little.

  Five days after he arrived I went to visit my parents, telling him to settle in and have a good clean up. Which he did. Following my instructions to the letter. On my return to Bendrose not a light shone, not a door was locked, no hens had been fed, and my open wardrobe doors revealed a softly swinging row of empty coat hangers. When they finally arrested him, in one of my suits coming down the steps of St Pancras Station, it was disheartening to discover that the nearest he had ever been to the sea, or a ship, was the Mersey ferry, and that he had spent most of his life in clink for pinching anything from a roll of linoleum to a hurricane lamp.

  When I offered, rather stupidly, to stand bail for him he begged me, as one ex-serviceman to another, not to.

  “I know you’re a good Officer, could smell it as soon as I came aboard, but I’ll only do it again, you see. It’s my kick. Can’t seem to get off it.” He also added, confidentially in the cell at Chesham Police Station, that he had done a shocking deal on my Rolleiflex, my dinner jacket didn’t fit him, or anyone else he knew, but that he had made a tidy bit on the silver lighters and the Chelsea figures.

  Loyalty for my ex-service comrades gently faded, and indeed, need never have been applied in this particular instance. So I left Philpot to the Law and sought a well-experienced Lady Cook General. Mrs Walters sped down on winged feet, slim, trim, no nonsense, late sixties, umbrella and, instead of The Economist a thin red volume entitled Get to Know Jesus.

  She said that she had very good references, and I said that I had no intention of being converted to anything. With a hearty laugh she said that she was just a seeker herself and that the only thing she wouldn’t brook was women pottering in and out of her kitchen. When I assured her that she would be perfectly safe, she agreed to give me a try and said that the fee I was offering was too high, she could manage on two pounds less, and that I was too extravagant by far. We made a deal, on condition that there was something to help her with the trays. “I’m not about to carry trays from that kitchen, half a mile to the dining room, that I can tell you. Not at my age. You get me a nice little trolley with wheels and we’ll all be as right as rain.”

  For weeks to come every meal was preceded by the rumbling of tumbrils; and the shattering of falling china. Her concern for my extravagance had touched me deeply, until it became apparent that it also applied to her
cooking. Dead whiting we had; tails stuffed into glazed-eyed heads, smothered in sticky white sauce and buried, comfortingly, in wreaths of parsley; Lancashire hot pot, more pot than hot, shards of grey meat, swollen kidney, carrots, bullet-hard slices of blue potatoes swimming in a lake of thin gruel. One evening, returning late and hungry from London with Forwood and an old friend of his, Kay Young, she said all she could manage at that time of an evening was an egg. I lost my temper and my head and threw every tin I could lay hands upon in the larder at her. She ducked nimbly for ten minutes, while I shattered every plate and cup and saucer on the dresser, before which she was inconveniently standing.

  After a glass of champagne, which she accepted cheerfully, we agreed that perhaps my irregular hours, and moods, might be tiresome for her and she left on a Green Line Bus for another post with a retired Colonel in Aylesbury.

  A week later, a sullen couple of French people arrived from Lyons. They wore plimsolls, carried all their belongings in two paper bags, and took possession of the kitchen and the house which they filled with the just-remembered scents of garlic, thyme, and olive oil. Sullen they were, but cook and work they did. And Bendrose started to heave itself out of a rut and to run smoothly.

  And so with excellent food at last, log fires, acres of fields in which to wander with the dogs, and assorted cats even, faded chintzes and a well-stocked drink-table, Bendrose was ready to accept its guests who came down every week-end and gave the place the feeling of a pleasant, if shabby, well-run boarding house.

  We were always a mixed group; the steadies providing the solid background; these were the friends who had been summoned by Glynis and Forwood in the days of hysteria and who provided a safe and affectionate security without which I know that I could not have survived. Irene Howard, Kay Young, Michael Wilding, Jean Simmons, Michael Gough and his wife Anne Leon, Margaret Leighton and Olive Dodds; and they in turn brought other people who brought other people, and Bendrose Sundays became established.

  Jessie Matthews did high kicks in the Oak Room; Gene Kelly danced up and down the staircase of an unfinished council house on a housing estate in nearby Bell Lane; Noel Coward asked me if I would like to revive his play “The Vortex”; Elizabeth Taylor, a constantly hungry eighteen, consumed endless portions of Christmas pudding; Ava Gardner warmed her naked feet against the dogs, all of them sprawled together before the big fireplace; and Forwood brought Kay Kendall down to tea and supper one Friday evening.

  “I know you aren’t mad on her; she can seem rather grand, but she really is lovely, and funny, and you’d like her and she is not grand at all. It’s just her manner, she’s a bit unconfident really.”

  I had met Miss Kendall once at the Studios and had been frightened out of my wits by her apparently Royal Manner, but as Forwood had worked with her on a film, and assured me that she was lovely I took his advice, and let her come.

  She didn’t seem to need confidence at all; she arrived dressed elegantly in the honey colours which she favoured and indeed she seemed as faintly condescending as before, patronising, and possessing the disdain of a Lama. It didn’t really take long to discover that this was all a cover for an extremely soft centre. Forwood was right, as usual, but it was not immediately apparent.

  After we had all had tea and done the walk round the gardens she thoughtfully settled herself into a deck chair and, nodding gentle approval all round, sipped her large gin and tonic. She decided to drop her Royal Manner for the role of Dorothy Adorable; which she played sickeningly well.

  “What a sweet little housey pousey you have! Do you do it all yourself? So clever … such a lot of work … I’ve got a teeny weeny little flat in horrid London, too awful, and no dear little garden like this.” (There were four acres.)

  “I’m a bit square, you know. Country born and bred.”

  “I adore the country. So real.”

  “Yes …”

  “How many rooms do you have here?”

  “About, um, fifteen I think.”

  “Bedrooms I mean?” She was smiling sweetly.

  “Eight.”

  “Oh poor little me …” Deep sighs.

  “Only one bathroom though.”

  “That wouldn’t matter.” Wistful look.

  “Frightfully cold in the winter, full of draughts …”

  “But so near the Studios … those ghastly morning journeys … Ohhh …” More sighs.

  “Twenty minutes about.”

  “Perfect.” Eyes closing.

  “And dreadfully quiet.”

  “I adore quiet.” Eyes closed dreamily.

  “So do I.”

  “I wouldn’t utter!” Eyebrows arched like half hoops, finger to lips.

  “Smelly from the farm though; cows, pigs, manure …”

  “I have no sense of taste or smell.”

  “None?”

  “None at all. A car crash.” Suddenly she grabbed her nose and pulled it upwards like a wild Pinocchio. “This is all McIndoe; he only had two sorts of noses in those days, this and one other; squatter. I chose this. I look like a clown in a fright-wig … God knows why Rank ever signed me, they can’t shoot my profile.”

  “But can’t you taste anything at all?”

  “Nothing, wifey. Someone gave me a red chilli last week somewhere …”

  “But you tasted that?”

  “Just. Divine.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  She thrust my finger into her face.

  “Wheeee! You see? No bones, all cartilage. I’m Old Mother Riley in drag.”

  “He is in drag.”

  “Well, you know … in or out, oh dear, oh dear, what’s to become of me, wifey?”

  We sat there for a moment looking at each other seriously, and suddenly we burst into laughter, she laughed until the tears ran down her boneless face, and made her nose run which she wiped with the back of her hand helplessly.

  “Oh dear! Poor me. I’m a ruin, a ruin … I need someone to look after me, wifey!”

  Later, as the long evening shadows crept across the lawns, I took her round the farm to see the pigs, pick some raspberries and watch the dairy being hosed and scrubbed after milking. She got her feet wet and took off her shoes to plod cheerfully after me through the vegetables and down among the hens and ducks. She found it all “ravishing”, and when we got back to the others sitting about on the terrace with their drinks, she announced that it was just what she had been looking for, and what on earth could I do with a huge house and all those rooms while she had a miserable little flat which made her depressed and lonely. Surely I could spare a teeny weeny bit of the house just for her at weekends? She’d be no trouble, she would knit a lot and do any mending, and help out with the drinks as a form of rent.

  It was a bloody good act.

  She moved into the double front bedroom the following Friday, with a bundle of old country clothes, her bottles of “ox blood for her anaemia”, and a small white rug for the side of her bed. She stayed, on and off, for about five years. There had never been a happier decision ever made. And it was entirely her own. Kate always made her own decisions, I was to discover. That was Bendrose.

  Beel House stood in the centre of a fifty-acre ring fence. Tudor by origin it now wore its Georgian facade, and later additions, with some elegance amidst sweeping lawns and herbaceous borders; it was ten minutes’ walk from Bendrose, past the piggeries, and across Finch Lane. Empty and up for sale, it stood forlorn and uncared for, one great circular bed of Ophelia roses, shabbily scattering petals, the windows cobwebbed, the terrace greening with mosses. Standing in the shade of the two giant cedar trees which stood sentinel before its ivied West Front, I wondered how I could manage to buy it.

  People who had wandered about its empty echoing rooms and dark, stone-floored kitchens, shivered at the gloom of it and said that it was a hopeless proposition. Too many rooms, nothing facing the right way, poor lighting and water systems, badly proportioned rooms and too much land to maintain. But the land
joined the Forwoods’ land and was excellent grazing; they thought they might extend their farm but didn’t want the house. They bought the land, I bought the house and seven acres of pleasure gardens from them for the improbable sum of £4,000, and with the help of a local builder in the village and his two brothers ripped down a wing of eleven ugly rooms, tore out the kitchens, gutted the house and started from scratch, ripping down years of ivy, opening up long-blocked-in windows, and covering everything with layers of clean white paint. Beel House became manageable, bright, comfortable and my home, my first real home, for the next eight years.

  We had one final family Christmas at Bendrose and moved out across the fields a week later with all my goods and chattels, the dogs, a couple of Bendrose rose bushes, but minus the sullen couple from Lyons who had become more and more sullen, refusing, on occasions, to serve at table if there were Jews or Negroes present. They went off in their plimsolls to a millionaire in Sunningdale at six times the salary and with a modest reference extolling the virtues of their cooking if not their racial charity.

  We built a swimming pool, laid out a croquet lawn, turned the long-neglected tennis courts into chicken-runs and filled the enormous conservatory, which ran the entire length of the south terrace and was the only room in the house to receive any direct sun all year round, with palms, mimosa, geraniums, plumbago and heavily scented trumpet trees and an aviary of fifty tropical birds. In spite of its Victorian glamour, to me, Kate always called it the Out-Patients Department and so it remained. The sullen Lyonnais were swiftly replaced by Agnes and Hans Zwickl from Vienna, who brought a friend called Florian to tend the gardens and the vegetables, and every year, in September, we had the local gymkhana in the park when I, in tweed cap and cavalry twill, presented the cups at the end of the day. The Country Squire was fast in danger of believing his own image and changing to Lord of the Manor. It is an insidious business.

  Christmas was still very much a family affair. We had a giant Christmas tree in the drawing room, my mother made all the pies and the puddings, as she always had done (except for the war years), fires blazed in every room, Hans and Florian smothered every picture, beam, and door with boughs of pine, holly and fir-cones, but the mistletoe, at my father’s insistence, was hung from the brass lamp in the front hall just inside the front door so that he could smack a kiss on to the cheek of every woman who arrived. We had presents at tea-time which ran into drink time with considerable ease, and everyone dressed for dinner; candles winking on silver and glass, logs spitting, crackers, and reading the awful mottoes … and then there was the Loyal Toast, and the one which made everyone a little thoughtful: to absent friends. Afterwards, sitting about comfortably in the drawing room, a film show, or else a word game, dancing in the wide bay window, the tree shimmering with tinsel and golden stars. So much laughter; so much sureness.