Mamma’s mother, Mary Wedderburn, and her twin brother had been born prematurely on the ship bringing their parents home on leave. Their father served in the Indian Civil Service for thirty-six years and rose to be Collector of Madras. There were three older siblings, unhappy remittance children, farmed out in the Kipling tradition.
Their ancestor, Sir John Wedderburn, who came out in ’45, was captured at Culloden, brought south, imprisoned in Southwark and hanged, drawn and quartered at the Oval in 1746. His eldest surviving son was smuggled out of the country; leaving by Wapping Old Stairs he took ship for the West Indies. A fifteen-year-old younger son, Jamie, rode on his pony from Dundee to London, carrying letters to those whom it was thought might help his father. When no help was forthcoming he visited his father in prison the night before his execution, and later rode back to Scotland, according to family mythology, with Sir John’s head in his saddlebag. It was from Jamie that we were descended.
Granny’s mother, Joanna Kier, also came from a family that had suffered as a result of the rising in 1745. She was a Macgregor, a descendant of Rob Roy’s youngest son who had called himself Kier when the family was proscribed. Her mother was French, her father a physician to the reigning Czar, and she was brought up at the Court of St Petersburg. When her mother died, she went home to Scotland and, in Edinburgh, met and married our great-grandfather.
It was obvious that with so few people in the family having had secure and loving childhoods, the Cannan parents were not altogether to blame for a lack of warmth in their parenting. But the three sisters Dorothea, May and Joanna always felt that they had been neglected and left too much with Nana.
Nana, Ellen Hall, the daughter of a coachman from the north Oxfordshire town of Witney, had been reared by a widowed mother who, despite her poverty, scraped up a penny a week to send her children to Dame school. Ellen was obviously intelligent, she wrote and read well, and she became nursemaid to the children of a local doctor. Later she left home for a post as nurse in Surrey, but we could never persuade her to tell us anything about the children she looked after there.
The Cannans were her third place, she was twenty-four, and Aunt Dorothea, the eldest of the three girls, was one month old. One of Nana’s responsibilities was to take the three small girls to stay with their relations in Scotland while their parents climbed in Switzerland. Some of the houses were very formal, especially below stairs, but Roshven was different. A remote house in the West Highlands, owned by their Wedderburn great-aunt and her retired professor husband, it was the Cannan girls’ idea of heaven and they spent several weeks there every summer.
Great-Aunt Jemima had known many of the literary men of her day and had travelled round Iceland in a party with Anthony Trollope: some of her paintings and drawings illustrate his travel book. But it was their cousin Margaret, always known as ‘Lady’, who was to have a lifelong influence on the three girls – an influence that trickled down to us. Lady turned them from town children into country ones. They rode the donkey and later the Highland ponies, they were taught to swim and row a boat and to fish. They were expected to be strong and resolute and to possess the attribute, which my mother was always to admire, of being ‘good on a desert island’.
At eight Denis went as a day boy to King’s College School, which he hated. But Cappy, loyal by nature, would not listen to complaints against the school or his old friend Woodhill, the headmaster.
Frustrated, Denis had the machiavellian idea of training me to make his subversive remarks for him. In the privacy of the garden shed he taught me to say ‘Silly old Woodhill, silly old Woody,’ and to repeat it in Cappy’s hearing. I obliged enthusiastically but, to my disappointment, I was ignored.
Denis made objects with Meccano, he fret-sawed, he kept silkworms which ate leaves from the mulberry tree in the garden, and he rolled out peppermint creams on the nursery table. The greyish tinge – from unwashed hands or my doll’s cup, which he used as a cutter – put off the adults, who only tasted out of politeness, but we ate them with relish.
The twins grew large and very active. Poor Nana could be heard exhorting them, ‘Now if you could sit still, just for one minute …’
At that time I had no place in their lives. Speaking only their own language, they viewed me as an outsider. On their third or fourth birthday, the parents had given one a toy wheelbarrow and the other a garden roller. October the first was a fine day and I remember standing on the nursery balcony, with Dobbin the rocking horse, and feeling very alone as I watched the two figures running up and down with their new toys. It was about then that I began to tell people that the tennis court was my twin.
In fact the twins’ birthday was always a trial to me when small, for with Denis at school, I seemed to be the only child not getting a present. When my mother noticed my struggles with envious tears, she took to buying me a tiny present as a sop.
Mamma read to us regularly: Beatrix Potter, Little Black Sambo, poems from a large fat treasury of children’s verse. She suddenly banned Struwwelpeter, I imagine that one of us had bad dreams or was frightened by the brutal scissor man and, remembering her own horror on being given Foxe’s Book of Martyrs to read on Sundays when a child, she sympathised. I don’t think she approved of our weekly comics, but they were really taken for Nana, who read all three of them avidly. The only strip I can remember had a fat character called Porky boy, who thought only of food and always seemed to be opening hampers of good things, but Diana remembers enjoying one about a shelf of saucepans which came to life.
I have no recollection of actually learning to read, but I remember a scene when Nana, who would have thought it a terrible disgrace if any child had left her nursery unable to read and write, was teaching the twins and I sat, fingers in ears, mouthing each word silently, deep in a Victorian work, Tales to Read to Myself.
For Christmas and birthdays I was given books in a series about another Josephine and her dolls, which, no doubt for egoistical reasons of identification, gave me great pleasure. The dolls – Josephine’s family – ranged from a pair of Korean females in national dress, to wicked Quackie and one-legged Patrick; I was devoted to them all.
We were not great doll lovers, but we each had a very charming one given to us by Cappy when he worked for Chad Valley; I had named mine Party. I also had two very beautiful Swedish dolls in national dress, which Carola Oman had given me. I named them Sailor – obviously no one explained about national dress – and Sweetest. These elegant dolls lived, with the Solitaire board, in the cupboard of the satinwood bookcase, they were drawing-room toys, only to be played with on Sundays, when Nana shut our toy cupboards and took her afternoon off. I also had a large shabby dog called Rover, a lion called Gilbert, and a small teddy bear, all of whom meant more to me than the grand dolls.
Nana didn’t like men – except perhaps Charles Cannan – and as Denis grew older she seemed to transfer her love for him to Christine, while he had begun to find some of her habits irritating. He most loathed her practice of disturbing us as we sat round a roaring nursery fire and announcing, as she deadened it to a smoking heap with coal slack, ‘There, that’ll be a nice fire presently!’
Ants brought about the final break. The lower boys at King’s College School had discovered that the sun, directed by magnifying glasses, could frizzle ants to death and Mamma hearing this had given Denis a lecture on kindness to insects as well as animals.
A few days later he came home from school and found Nana, in the wild part of the garden where the washing was hung out, pouring boiling water on an ants’ nest. I don’t know what they said to each other, but it ended with Denis hurling a missile at her, which fortunately missed. I remember Nana rushing indoors, and barricading herself and us in the nursery as though he were in pursuit. Somehow Mamma patched things up, but their relationship had changed, and when he went to boarding school, she always referred to him as ‘that poor boy’.
Mamma, reared by an atheist father whom she loved and respected and a worldl
y mother who had her daughters confirmed ‘in case they married bishops’, had I think a secret longing for faith. Cappy, though an avowed agnostic, was fiercely patriotic and often took us to Armistice Day services. (He also had an embarrassing habit of knocking the hats off men who failed to remove them for the National Anthem.) So, hamstrung by their religious upbringings, they allowed Nana to be responsible for ours.
She made us say our prayers and encouraged us to learn our favourite hymns. Being an optimist, I chose ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’, and it was some time before the birth of a social conscience made me leave out the third verse. Christine chose ‘Now Day is Over’, which was Nana’s favourite, and Diana, to my surprise, for I already hated the brutality of the crucifixion, ‘There is a Green Hill Far Away’. I very much disliked singing the verse of ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ – ‘Little Children all must be, Mild obedient, good as He.’ I didn’t particularly wish to be good or mild and certainly not obedient.
I think my loneliness grew at this time with Denis away and Diana and Christine so wrapped up in each other, and no friends provided. On our birthdays we were allowed to choose our favourite food – I always chose pancakes and once managed to eat seven – but no other children were invited. On walks we sometimes met two very attractive little boys called Scudamore. They wore the kilt and their mother told mine that they often fought over me, but for some reason (could it have been Nana?) they were never asked to tea.
Then I suppose my isolation was noticed, because I was provided with a red velvet dress and taken to dancing classes at the Study. I also had a trial run with the Brownies. I was too young to join and had no uniform, but I was put in a six with a leader called Pat. After the pack activities and games we were sent back to our sixes to model in papier mâché. At the end of the session we had to clear up and Pat handed me a broom and told me to sweep the floor.
When the same thing happened at the next rally, I rebelled and pointed out that it was someone else’s turn to sweep. Pat was furious and, twisting my arm behind my back, demanded that I did as I was told. Equally obstinate, I resisted and eventually it was she who gave way. I don’t remember going again and I never acquired the uniform, but I don’t think I told anyone why I disliked the Brownies.
At seven I went to school at the Study. I learnt to cross the road by myself, watched from an upper window by Nana or Mamma and the twins. For some reason there were two of us who sat apart from the rest of the class. We may have been younger than the others, or possibly our parents had waited for our seventh birthdays, instead of sending us at the beginning of the school year, but, whatever the reason, we seemed out of things and neglected.
My memory, which must be wrong, tells me that I spent my entire time sitting and staring at pages of incomprehensible ‘sums’. The figures meant nothing to me. I could count, but no one had taught me how to add and subtract with blocks or beans, and I had almost no experience of handling money. To my fury, my fellow outcast, Beryl, knew the secret. I hated her for this and one day when her mother slammed the car door on her hand, I was shocked to find myself almost happy at her screams and tears.
Julia, aged about ten, gave a Christmas party and asked all the juniors. Cappy drove me there and gave a lift to our pretty young teacher, Miss MacGregor. I can remember the mildly flirtatious atmosphere in the car and a feeling of pride that he actually liked my teacher.
Julia’s family were rich and it was a lavish party. At the moment of cake-cutting, artificial snowflakes descended. ‘Look, it’s snowing!’ exclaimed the grown-ups. As I pulled a thick velvet curtain aside and peered outside to check, I heard a saccharine voice saying, ‘Oh look at that little girl, she’s looking to see if it’s really snowing. Isn’t she sweet!’
Life outside the home seemed full of minor embarrassments and Nana’s individualistic vocabulary and euphemisms didn’t help. Chamber pots were called ‘Articles’. Bedroom slippers became night slippers, you washed your head instead of your hair and worst of all was ‘making yourself comfortable’. When visiting a friend of Denis’s, probably on the day that the twins had their teeth out, I told Joyce, the elder sister, that I wanted to make myself comfortable. She looked surprised and said, ‘Well, do it on that chair.’ Being an old soul I sat on the chair for a few tactful minutes, and then tried again. This time I asked for the lavatory.
When I was very small, Cappy and Denis had elicited strange noises from a cat’s whisker and crystal set, but as the wireless came into general use, our parents seemed to suspect it of having some sort of malign influence on the young. For most of our childhood Nana owned the only wireless in the house – one of those sets with a rising sun on the façade – and she listened to the bands of Henry Hall and Jack Payne after we had gone to bed.
We listened to Children’s Hour occasionally, perhaps when Mamma wasn’t there to read to us, and we loved hearing the names of the birthday children read out. There was wild excitement whenever the announcer paused, as though in surprise, to say, ‘Hullo, Twins!’ Once, Diana and Christine’s names were sent in, but I think they were awed rather than thrilled to hear themselves mentioned.
The gramophone was considered respectable and we inherited the parents’ records – the war songs: ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary’, ‘There’s a Ship that’s Bound for Blighty’, ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’ and ‘There’s a Long Long Trail A’ Winding’, and the songs from the ‘shows’ of their courting days: ‘If You Were the Only Girl in the World’, ‘Maid of the Mountains’, ‘Tea for Two.’
We didn’t have many records of our own. Denis had a treasured one, I think the words went:
I cursed and I swore at my father
I told him his words were a lie,
I packed up my things in a bundle
And went to bid Mother goodbye.
Poor mother she burst out a-crying
She said you are breaking my heart …
Cappy bought us ‘Alfred and the Lion’, recited by Stanley Holloway, which I thought very funny, and a record about a character called Barnacle Bill the Sailor. Barnacle Bill, a male chauvinist, sang:
You moaning woman, you’re driving me mad,
you haven’t as much sense as I thought you had
along with other insults, and one sensed Cappy’s obvious enjoyment and Mamma’s disapproval.
Both parents thought it important that children should be brought up with a dog, and Spic, the only remaining Sealyham, had grown old and irritable and liable to snap at us, so they decided against terriers and bought a black cocker spaniel, whom they named Barnacle Bill.
Barney was an unlucky dog and immediately went down with distemper, in those days an almost certain killer. Mamma nursed him and he seemed to get better, but then he began to have fits. I can remember the horror of him lying on the floor, in convulsions, foaming at the mouth and incontinent, but the vet prescribed bromide and again he recovered.
He slept, in a much chewed basket, in the downstairs cloakroom and one morning he was found with his head firmly wedged behind the basin waste pipe. The parents couldn’t free him, and finally Cappy fetched a wrench and unscrewed the pipe. Barney was unharmed, but the waste pipe was ruined.
We often watched the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race, usually from Putney Bridge, but one year Cappy knew an umpire and was invited to follow in an official launch. Denis and I were taken, but the experience was rather lost on me. I was really more interested in the dark blue favours we all wore and very disappointed that we were Oxford; I preferred light blue.
Being taken to watch tennis on the Centre Court at Wimbledon was also rather a waste when one was only five or six, but, being a debenture holder, Cappy had two Centre Court seats for every day of the championships as well as his own badge. Mamma and Nana had to fill the seats for some of the duller matches, and, because I could sit still, they took me.
Of my mother’s fourth novel Sheila Bothways, the Observer critic wrote: ‘The wit is constant and never cheap’, which b
ecame a family saying. No Walls of Jasper, her sixth, was well reviewed and went into a second impression. It seems to have confirmed her reputation and several critics noted that she was a woman who wrote about men.
Mamma once confessed to me in later life that she never felt entirely adult. Some part of her seemed trapped at the age of twelve, and she attributed this to domination by Nana, until she escaped to Paris, and then to marrying a man twelve years older and so much more experienced than herself.
All through the Wimbledon years she had found it almost impossible to satisfy these two dominating presences; both were strong-minded, with decided opinions on everything, both wanted to run her and the household. It is possible that a move from Wimbledon was seen as a chance to escape from Nana, who had now seen them through the worst of their child-rearing, but also the house had grown too small for us. Six bedrooms were not enough when one was assigned as the day nursery, a nurse and a maid had to be housed, and married men still required dressing rooms.
The twins could not go on sharing a bedroom with Nana, and I had always slept in our parents’ room until wakened one night by the noise of what was, I realised many years later, an orgasm. A little voice enquiring, ‘What’s the matter?’ must have been unpopular and I soon found myself sleeping on a camp bed in Cappy’s dressing room or in Denis’s little room while he was away at school.
Times were still hard and I suspect that the overdraft was again out of control. The thought of finding a larger but cheaper house in the country would have influenced Cappy, while my mother, though she loved the house in Marryat Road, had always found Wimbledon suburban and still hankered for the country.
Fair Girls and Grey Horses Page 3
