Fair Girls and Grey Horses

by Christine Pullein-Thompson

  The stables were as old as the house, with a weathervane in the shape of an arrow on the top. There were just two stalls when we arrived, and a dark, earth-floored harness room with a gig house next door; and what we called the bean hole, because it housed the bean sticks. There was also a large wooden building which had recently been used as a chicken house. My parents were not slow to make changes. The two stalls were quickly converted into loose boxes, the harness room became part of the gig house, which became a garage. But it took longer for our neighbours’ cows to leave the fields, and for the hideous dark wallpaper to be stripped from the passages, stairs, hall and landing inside the house. But I’ve forgotten the Granary, which stood on staddle stones and was entered by a small ladder. Bantams sat on their nests there. Cats had their kittens there. They did not kill each other. So maternal were the bantams that more than once a broody hen moved to sit on mewing kittens to keep them warm, one even taking her chicks with her.

  Our first Christmas at The Grove was memorable. Our parents decorated the house as they never did again. On Christmas morning we woke to find it transformed. Cut-outs of Father Christmas and reindeer lined the stairs, decorations and tinsel were everywhere and the dining room was bright with greenery and holly berries. It must have been during our first summer at The Grove that my parents held a party for their London friends. I remember it so well – the Chinese lanterns shining amid the trees as dusk fell, the ice Cappy collected from the fishmongers in Reading, some of which he brought to us to suck in our beds, the laughter and the music which seemed to last for ever, as the night was danced away on the lawn. Sadly they never held such a party again.

  Around this time, Josephine was in the habit of sleepwalking. One night when we all still slept in one bedroom she accused me of sleeping in her bed – but first she switched the light on and off exclaiming, ‘I’ve eaten the first chick food.’ Off went the light. ‘And I’ve eaten the second chick food.’ On went the light, then off again, before she accused me of being in her bed and tried to push me onto the floor. Fortunately I was as big as she and quite capable of looking after myself. In the evenings in those early days at The Grove, Nana came to put us to bed; and we had to be in bed by seven. In winter we wore bedsocks above our knees and spent many a sleepless hour picking the wool off the blankets on our beds and making it into little woolly balls. Often, still full of energy, we rampaged about our bedrooms, acting as characters in the books my mother read to us, and then Nana would call up the stairs, ‘If you don’t behave, I’ll tell your father,’ until finally we subsided into our beds, beginning what we called ‘an imag’. At first these were about our alarm clocks – mine was blue, Josephine’s red, Diana’s green – and they had many a strange adventure. Later an imag became far more personal. They lasted well into Diana’s and my teens. Often then an imag was frightening and concerned people we knew; but never our parents. Other times I was so tired I cried myself to sleep. Once we had hiccups and Denis appeared in our room to tell us that if we hiccupped more than a hundred times we would die. After that I remember lying in bed counting my hiccups, growing more agitated as the number grew, until finally they reached and passed one hundred. I think that was the last time I totally believed my brother. On another dreadful occasion when we were in bed trying to sleep, Diana and I suddenly faced the nothingness of death. I can still vividly recall the terror and the coldness which stole over me then, which became even worse when my mother appeared to kiss us goodnight, and had no soothing answer to our terror.

  Next to our bedroom was Cappy’s dressing room and it was here that the cook-general, whichever was in charge, would put a tray with cups of tea on it for our parents at seven each morning before calling on us to wake up. Then, after much grumbling the child whose turn it was would finally leave her bed and take the tea into Mamma and Cappy, who would complain often that it was cold. They had twin beds and sometimes they were each in their own and other times together in one, something which I suppose they did not wish anyone but us innocents to see.

  Free of Nana for much of the day now, we enjoyed a civilised breakfast with our parents in the dining room where there was fish or eggs on the sideboard and three kinds of marmalade on the table – Coopers’ Oxford Marmalade for my mother, Dundee for my father, Golden Shred with a golliwog on it for us. There were different kinds of sugar too and of course plenty of toast in a silver toast rack. We drank milk out of our silver christening mugs, sitting on chairs which our parents had had made, plus a long table, with wood from local beech woods.

  At this time our neighbours’ cows – blue and red and white – still grazed our land. The Kews ran a shop and a bakery as well as a small mixed farm. Old Charlie Kew had married his cousin and nearly every one of their children had some defect or other. Will was the worst afflicted. Known as Bumper, he worked in the bakery, kneading the bread in a white coat. I dreamt about him once – my parents were trying to reach heaven, my father was desperately pulling my mother up and over gigantic squares of ice, while Bumper was standing above them in his white coat, and Bumper was God! One brother, Morris, was normal and ran a post office and shop. Art, probably named Arthur, was badly afflicted and unable to talk at all, while poor Daisy could only speak in a whisper, and Polly her sister was very nervous and completely dumb. Sometimes Polly worked for us. Arriving very early in the morning, she would scrub the scullery, the dairy, the kitchen and the dining room before doing anything else, and nobody could stop her. Seeing her looking so careworn on her knees I found a sad sight, I think we all did. Daisy delivered the milk twice a day to us in our early years at The Grove; she also ran the shop. Daisy was quite bright and a young man had wanted to marry her, on condition she could be helped with her speech, either by an operation or therapy. But though she must have been nearly thirty by then, her parents refused to give permission, no doubt believing her state was God’s will.

  As the years passed, old Charlie Kew grew old and was turned out of the house during the day to sit in a small shed hung with horse brasses. He was allowed back in the evenings, and it was said if you went past the house at a certain time, you could hear him saying his prayers kneeling by his bed. The Kews ate off tin plates, and Fred and Ted, who were normal, delivered the bread; Ted with a cob called Nobby and a cart, Fred with a van. It was Fred who showed my parents how to bridle our first horse. It was Fred who separated Diana and me once when we were fighting, as we often were at that time – the trouble being that we were an even match, so neither ever won. Once the Rector separated us. When Cappy did it, he made us kiss each other, which put me off kissing for a long time.

  Josephine says that the Kews had only one pair of spectacles between them. In spite of this, Daisy and her mother had beautiful handwriting. I doubt whether any of them had ever left the area or had a holiday, except for Ted who had joined the Navy; hating it, he had had to be bought out by the rest of the family and now ran a pub with his wife at Greys when he wasn’t at the farm. As well as Nobby, the Kews had a bay mare called Jane, whom Charlie would drive in a water cart to Spring Wood each morning to collect water from the well there. Jane had an army brand and was said to have been a gun horse in the war.

  The Kews were good neighbours and very honest. The only problem was to make oneself understood; it was said that my mother once asked for a tin of sardines and soon after a load of hay was delivered. They had various dogs chained to kennels and pigs in sties, and milking was, of course done by hand. My mother kept an account with Miss Kew and when we had no money at all, we would buy some cream and book it, then hang it in our dairy in muslin until it turned into cream cheese, which we then sold to our grandmother. It was during those early days at The Grove that we stopped calling our father Daddy. In one of our comics the hero was a sterling character, a Captain called Cappy. I don’t think Denis liked the idea, but our father was delighted with the suggestion; he became Cappy and remained so until we were grown up.

  Before we had a pony of our own, my mother would
take us for walks with the two spaniels, Barney and Dinah. Our favourite walk was when we went to see Fluffy, a small pony which leant over a fence waiting for us. At least we called him Fluffy because he was fluffy, what his real name was we never knew. Fluffy lived alone in a field near The Red House in Sonning Common which was a spread-out village then, without a church or a real centre, but with a scattering of shops and a regular bus service to Reading. On our way to see Fluffy we would pass The Butcher’s Arms, a small old pub in those days; and then go past the nearby pond which my mother called Bottomless Pond, because it was said that a coach and horses lay at the bottom of its dark waters, and that when the Council tried to drain it, they came to the topmost branches of an oak tree and gave up. Nowadays it looks safe and respectable. Called Widmore Pond, with a small refined island in the middle, all the mystery has gone. We wanted our parents to buy Fluffy and nagged and nagged until finally my mother contacted his owners and was told that he was definitely not for sale.

  Our first cook-general was Beatrice who came from a cottage near Neals Farm, Stoke Row. I remember her as a large dark-haired woman. I don’t think she liked working for us and soon our parents could stand her no longer for she was forever banging drawers and slamming doors, so she left, to be followed briefly by an unsatisfactory manservant and then by Winnie, who was to be our last live-in cook-general. Winnie had short hair held back by a slide. Like Beatrice she had a lot to do. Cooking three meals a day on a temperamental range, she would never bother much with cooking nice meals unless Cappy was at home. If you asked for something special, it was always impossible because it was ‘her flue day’, or ‘her larder day’ or something else. Once Denis put a ferret in her bed; and as she was to relate in later years, he would take her bike and leave it in the orchard and throw down his clothes in the hall the moment he came ‘home from college’. It was Winnie who told my mother that she was going to have trouble with Miss Josephine in later years.

  Bowles was a jobbing gardener who came three days a week. When we were small he would trundle us round the garden in the wheelbarrow. He seemed to me to be the best-natured person in the world and a mine of information. Bowles, who soon became Bowley, was included in my red exercise book of doggerel with the immortal lines, ‘Bowley is little and his nails are brittle’. Jack Bowles to his friends, Bowley was certainly little but I suspect that his nails were only brittle in my ditty for the sake of rhyme. Small, ginger-haired and blue-eyed, it always seemed to me that Bowley could do anything. On wet days in later years he groomed our ponies, making the hissing noise old grooms still made to keep the dust from their throats. Like most of his generation, he had handled working horses from an early age and was a dab hand with a curry comb. I can still see Bowley when a bantam chase was on, outrunning all of us. He was a great wit. Asked how he was, he would usually reply, ‘Just able to get about’. And watching us feebly polishing bit or stirrup he would say, ‘Pop down to the shop and buy a tin of elbow grease. That’ll make it shine.’

  Bowley lived with his wife and family by the church. He said once that our voices were so loud that he would hear them when he was at home. It was Bowley who stripped off the depressing wallpaper at The Grove and with my father redecorated the hall and passages. He smoked incessantly, rolling his own cigarettes. In the evening he had tea in the kitchen, always the same – a pot of tea, a boiled egg and bread and butter. (My aunt’s gardener was given the same, so I suspect it was the custom then.) After tea Bowley would saw wood in the garage, leaving for home around six o’clock riding his bicycle up Peppard Hill past the chalk quarry and down Church Lane just as he had at lunchtime.

  Bowley picked the apples for us, putting them in neat rows in straw in the Granary. He made a clamp in the garden and filled it with vegetables. He did not touch the flower beds which were our parents’ terrain. But he helped my father layer the high hedges which grew between the fields and which in later years we would jump on our ponies with such relish. And if boys appeared to steal the apples, it was Bowley who chased them off. I don’t remember Bowley ever being cross, though at times, following him around, we must have been a terrible trial. It was often Bowley who gave our bantams collective names and, though he was apt to chase a pony rather than simply catch it, he taught us a tremendous amount about life in the country.

  Mrs Pearce was also in my red exercise book, She ‘did’ upstairs for a time, always with a black beret on her head. She smelt rather. Tiny, she was reputed to take home Oxo cubes in her knickers. She found my red exercise book under my bed and, reading ‘Mrs Pearce is Stumpy And Always Grumpy’ was not amused. She lived with her husband in one of our cottages. He had been a most talented carpenter and had made and fitted the bookshelves in my parents’ drawing room. But Mr Pearce had been terribly wounded in the war and had a metal plate in his head, which became hot in warm weather. He would become deranged then and would accuse us of stealing his nails. We were frightened by Mr Pearce. We made up a poem which we chanted to give us courage, but never loud enough for him to hear. It went like this:

  There’s something missing out of my head,

  There’s something missing out of my shed,

  If this don’t cease, I’ll inform the police,

  There’s something missing out of my head.

  Sadly Mr Pearce grew more demented until his doctor advised Mrs Pearce to move away and they went to live at Tadley, near Reading.

  When Winnie left too, Josephine moved into what had been known up to then as the maid’s room, which looked out towards the stable. The front bedroom which I now shared only with Diana became ‘the twins’ bedroom’. Above the nursery, it looked out on an old beech tree where squirrels swung from branch to branch, and plump wood pigeons cooed what was reputed to be ‘my toes bleeds Betty’.

  Our bedroom wasn’t far from the road and in later years I was always the first to hear hoofs go by in the night. Then I would raise the alarm and within seconds we would be outside searching for an escaped horse or pony, often still in our pyjamas. It was from this room one night that I heard my favourite bantam Bluebell shrieking for help. She had been nesting at the back of the herbaceous border near the beech tree when a fox carted her off to eat. By the time I reached the window, all I could see was the glint of his brush disappearing in the moonlight. After that any doubts I had held about the rights and wrongs of foxhunting vanished for a very long time. Our bedroom had a small pretty Georgian basket fireplace in it where a fire was lit when we were ill. Otherwise we had no heat in our room except in really cold weather when an oil heater was lit. Made of black metal it had diamond-shaped holes in the top and cast strange shadows on the ceiling.

  Denis’s room overlooked the lawn and was above the dining room. Sent away to school and without local friends, I suspect he was bored at times. But he was an original and inspiring brother. It was Denis who converted the smart dolls’ pram given to Josephine by Georgette Heyer into a fire engine. It carried an oil drum filled with water, a ladder, a length of hose and of course a bell. Usually Josephine or Denis, but once Cappy – to our great surprise – would light a fire and then tear around garden or house shouting, ‘Fire! Fire!’ Everyone would then rush to the fire engine, putting on scout belts as they ran and seizing the small wooden axes Denis had made for us. Then, ringing the bell loudly, we would push and pull the fire engine down the narrow box-hedged paths which fenced Bowley’s vegetable garden and, with much excitement, the fire would be put out. So for a brief time we became arsonists.

  Diana’s and my large old pram was converted into a chariot with fixed wheels at the back and the ones on a swivel at the front. We played horses constantly with it and it was used to carry hay in later years. It also became a hearse when bantams died. Pulled by spaniels, Dinah and Barney, with the small corpse in a shoe box draped by a black cloth, the slow procession would wend its way to the graveyard at the top of the potato patch. Sometimes my mother read the service trying to keep a straight face. Other times we managed with
out her, simply saying, ‘Ashes to ashes, Dust to dust. If God won’t have you, the devil must,’ as the corpse was lowered into a prepared grave, after which a cross was erected. More than once the proceedings went disastrously wrong; the spaniels took off and the coffin fell open on the ground. Then the ritual would have to begin all over again. But whatever happened, it was always a sad and serious occasion.

  Playing at horses with Denis posing as a charioteer

  In our first year at The Grove, towards the end of June, the hay was cut in the top meadow by a cutter pulled by Jane. In the evening the Kew men came to turn the hay with caps on their heads and Fred with a watch chain across his waistcoat. Two new five-barred gates were up by then and the hay smelt wonderful. Later, after it had been forked by hand into haycocks, Jane carted the hay away to be put into a stack which would later be thatched.

  Those early days at The Grove seem endless to me now. I cannot remember ever being bored. Diana and I were always on the go and fell down so often that Cappy offered us a halfpenny for every day we stayed up. I cannot recall ever earning it. Or maybe we did, and no one noticed; for such payments were generally erratic, and though we were meant to have a few pence a week pocket money, it was too often forgotten.

  Chased by Denis in a game I fell down the coal hole and he pulled me up by my hair. I cannot recall why it was open; perhaps because Mr Ledbetter was delivering coal from Josey’s the coal merchant in Sonning Common, with his mule. Mr Ledbetter was small, like so many men at that time, but in spite of this immensely strong, put down to the fact that he always ate five beetroots with his tea; to this day, whenever I feel weak I have an overwhelming desire for beetroot. I don’t recall ever talking to Mr Ledbetter’s mule. I suspect he was too tired, too cross or just too plain mulish to be interested in a scruffy small girl. Or perhaps with good reason he hated people for I seem to recall that he was muzzled.