Fair Girls and Grey Horses

by Christine Pullein-Thompson

  At seven or eight years old when Diana and I went with my mother to stay with Carola Oman at Bride Hall in Hertfordshire, we were in our best clothes and on our best behaviour. I remember wearing a skirt and sticking cut-outs provided by Carola into a very tidy scrap book and making such a mess of it that the book was ruined. We spent that night in a palatial bedroom – or so it seemed to me then – each in a large impressive bed with a blazing fire in the grate. But soon after eight o’clock, coal fell out of the fire and there was no fire guard, only a beautifully polished brass fender. I remember my heart beating faster and longing to call, ‘Fire, fire.’ Diana and I looked at each other and, after a short discussion, decided to pull the bell rope near our beds. This brought a butler, who soon put the coals back on the fire, but afterwards my mother was to say that it had taken a long time to settle us that night, and that the dinner party downstairs was badly interrupted. For years after, I felt guilty about this episode. But what should we have done? Were we big enough to put the coals back on the fire? But even if we were, we had been brought up on ‘Willy in one of his bright blue sashes, Fell on the fire and was burnt to ashes. The fire died down and the room grows chilly. But we haven’t the heart to poke poor Willy.’ And Willy had played with fire, so we decided to play safe.

  In my book of doggerel I wrote, ‘Mummy is right by day and by night’. And I really did believe it – in my eyes she could do no wrong. And though once, offended by something she said, I ran away and hid in Spring Wood, when she hurried by, calling to me in a distracted voice, I coughed loudly, wanting to be found, and was taken home in disgrace and sent to bed. But on the whole punishments were rare at The Grove. My father would occasionally set lines for us, a hangover I suspect from his days as a schoolteacher. I MUST SHUT THE DOOR was something I was told to write one hundred times. After scribbling it one hundred times with different coloured and increasingly blunt crayons in an old exercise book, I handed it to him and then slammed the door after me and was instantly recalled and told to write I MUST NOT SLAM THE DOOR fifty times. I don’t remember feeling resentful, just a sense of boredom and the thought that it was just Cappy in a bad mood again. And to this day I still don’t shut doors after me, though gates are a different matter altogether!

  Josephine says that during our first year at The Grove we began to speak proper English instead of twin language. I suspect we had used both for some time, but were sometimes misunderstood. It was about this time too that I wrote a ditty about my large and beloved teddy bear whose head was missing. It was surely my first entry in my red exercise book and went as follows: ‘Teddy’s heady has come off and you can see his guts, they are not nuts.’ Hardly an inspired bit of writing – a small beginning, I suppose. But I was still backward. I still existed as a family rather than as a person on my own. For me no one on earth counted for as much as Mamma; her word was law in my eyes and would be for many years to come. I respected Cappy, but did not love him. I fought with Diana, but not with Josephine, whom I respected for being older and maybe wiser. Nana, once so important in my life, was not always obeyed now, nor loved as much as Mamma whom I worshipped. I don’t think I talked much to Denis. I admired him and his intellect so much that I felt incapable of holding a conversation with him. Diana had a far better relationship with Denis and on numerous occasions he took her side when Josephine and I teamed up together. Mamma called me Rosie Posie and Cris-Cross, while Diana was Jumbo and Josephine was Jo Jo, particularly to Cappy. Once, when Cappy had been away, he brought us back a scarf each. We were told to choose which we wanted in order of age which meant that I, being the youngest, had no choice at all. (I still have that scarf, a little red silk one with a West Highland terrier on it.) My father always said, ‘Eldest first’. My mother, perhaps she had been the youngest but more likely from an inherent sense of fairness, sometimes said, ‘Youngest chooses first this time.’ So Diana remained in the middle, which wasn’t quite fair either.

  But mostly we drew lots for things, for there is always something which can be used for lots – blades of grass, torn paper, twigs, hay; even strands of wool held firmly will do. Overall, life at The Grove seemed perfect to me and I only desired that it should stay the same, for I was part of the tribe which lived there and though we were so different from other children in so many ways, it was to me the best tribe in the world.

  Christine’s Doggerel

  Georgy is big,

  He likes a fig.

  Mummy is right,

  By day and by night.

  Cappy is large,

  And would like a barge.

  Denis is high,

  I don’t know why.

  Nana is niether big or tall,

  Nana is niether tiny or small.

  Diana is wee

  And likes the sea.

  Josephine is low,

  And very slow.

  Christine is midling

  And always fiddling.

  Bowley is little,

  And his nails are brittle.

  Mrs Pearce is stumpy

  And always grumpy.

  Winnie is tall

  And comes to the call.

  Georgy was Winnie’s boyfriend, later her husband. In a later edition Mummy becomes ‘tiny and always shiny’ and the piece is called ‘Sizes of People (Comical)’. I am not sure why Mamma was demoted.

  Diana

  Which of us fell into the tank of dirty gutter water which stood against the stable’s northern brick and flint wall, wearing an emerald green embroidered skirt which we shared? Christine or me? There was a time when we argued about this, but eventually Christine forgot the incident, so perhaps I was the clumsy one, who perched on the tank’s narrow edge and slipped.

  Predictably, like Christine I deeply loved The Grove, although here and there the emphasis varies. For me the great beech trees that stood sentinel on the south side of the house, their prominent roots covered with pincushions of moss, soft as velvet, were all-important. They were the last thing you saw before the bedroom curtains shut out the night and the first when you flung them back in the morning: immense in the gathering dust, silvered in moonlight, verdant in summer, glorious in autumn and noble still in the bareness of winter, through all the changing seasons a symbol of permanency, of home.

  Beyond our fields, the paddock, orchard and top meadow, lay the magic of Spring Wood, owned by Lady Agnes Peel, who lived half a mile down the road at Blount’s Court, an elderly and distinguished woman, whose habit of ending every sentence with ‘Yes, yes,’ we imitated with many giggles. Spring Wood with its glades and hollows, its winding paths and its spring of clear water, under a brick arch decorated with a carved elephant and Latin words no longer readable, was magical. And by the spring was a spot from which you could see in autumn a stretch of plough leading the eye to a line of trees and the curve of a hillside. I like to think now that it was the genes which inspired Jemima Blackburn to paint and my grandfather’s Huguenot mother, Jane Dorothea Claude, to draw that made me drink in this landscape. Perhaps I shared then in youth a characteristic with Mamma’s largely autobiographical heroine in The Misty Valley which caused her to love places better than people, a characteristic which for almost a decade made me loath to leave The Grove and contributed to my hatred of school. When years later, suffering from TB, I was allowed out briefly after six months’ bed rest, I went first to see that view.

  Soon after our move Granny, who liked to live near Mamma, leased Highclere, an Edwardian villa about a hundred yards away in the more built-up end of Crowsley Park Road, where she installed Nana, now no longer needed full-time by our parents, as housekeeper. Nana hated going; the hurt was deep and for the rest of her long life she resented the way Cappy broke the news. ‘He just said “You must go”,’ she told us later. ‘No thanks for all I had done.’ For Mamma, as Josephine says, it meant greater freedom from a stubborn woman who had dominated her childhood; for Cappy the welcome departure of an ever critical presence; for us a closer bonding to a mother wh
o became an abiding influence. But only to a degree, for Nana still turned up every morning. She still knitted us beautiful socks and sweaters, washed our clothes and watered the hens, and sometimes Mamma invited her to meals, especially tea. And, of course, she child-minded whenever asked. She also invited us when Granny was in France to play in Highclere’s huge empty attic, whose barrenness depressed us. Still bent on turning us into young ladies, she continued to buy us sewing things for our Christmas stockings. Lonely, she got herself a puppy, which she named Tiny, but Tiny grew into a big, lively dog and after enduring many hours tied to a kitchen table, he was eventually found a new home by the Kews.

  On that first Christmas Day at Peppard which Christine remembers so well, our parents gave us a mate for Barney, whom we called Dinah. They had left finding a spaniel bitch rather late and Dinah was, they said, the runt of the litter. Small and short-legged, she looked more like a Sussex than a cocker spaniel. Of course we loved her too much and she used to jump in a chair and sit behind Mamma to escape our affection.

  Mamma took us to Harpsden to buy bantams. Bowley made a hen house and a duck pond was dug. Then Mamma went to a horse dealer, called Sworder, and bought Countess, a broken-down old polo pony recovering from a bout of pneumonia. Dark bay, thin as a rake, Countess towered above us; her head now too large for her wasted body. She was a bad buy, but probably Mamma hoped to nurse her back to health and save her from the knacker’s yard. And although she wasn’t soft like Fluffy, we loved her because she was ours and I have a picture postcard of puppies I sent Mamma in France, which says I gave Countness [sic] a kiss.

  Soon we watched Mamma struggling to bridle Countess. Every time she got the snaffle, which she held with both hands, into Countess’s mouth, the bridle slipped down (an event Mamma described graphically in A Pony For Jean), until she was rescued by Fred Kew. Our parents always expected us all to learn as we went along and much later typically bought a cow without knowing how to milk her.

  Cappy, despite arthritis, ran leading us on Countess, shouting ‘Up down, up down.’ When Christine, who was frightened of him, failed to rise at the trot at the right moment, he pinched her thighs, and I hated him for pinching. Sometimes, happier without the grown-ups, Christine and I sprang early from our beds and still in our pyjamas slipped a halter on Countess, mounted her by step-ladder and took it in turns to ride and lead her. Countess was the inspiration for Cavalier in A Pony For Jean in which the painfully thin pony eventually becomes a prize-winner, a fate which eluded the once beautiful Countess, who, despite Mamma’s efforts, one day lay down for the last time.

  We stood outside the locked stable door when the vet shot her. I don’t think we saw the corpse, which went to the local hunt kennels to feed hounds, but in the country death was ever present. Sweet fledgling birds were caught by cats or simply fell from their nests. Rabbits were shot by Fred Kew, bantams died. You could not walk far in spring without coming across little bodies, sometimes half-eaten, stiffened or limp in the ditches or hedgerows. Butchers’ shops sported graceful dead pheasants hanging by their necks, and huge carcasses of bullocks, sheep or pigs. Later on, when a chicken had to die, you heard its frantic squawks, so like ‘help, help,’ as Bowley carried it upside down by its legs to a spot behind the outside loo, where he hoped he would not be seen. Lurking, horribly curious, you saw him break its neck and the way its legs went on kicking afterwards. Upset, I tried to explain death in the many stories I wrote about wild animals by saying each time, ‘It was nature,’ a phrase which was half-mockingly repeated on appropriate occasions by us all, especially Mamma, for many years.

  By now formal education had begun for Christine and I, after a school inspector accosted Josephine and Nana walking along the road and wanted to know why the ‘little girl’ was not at school. ‘You must speak to the mother,’ Nana said, and, to Josephine’s surprise and relief, Mamma told the inspector that we would all be attending Highlands in the autumn.

  Highlands, a Parents’ National Educational Union (PNEU) school, was run by two genteel sisters, the Miss Coopers, whom we were instructed to call Auntie Christine and Auntie Mary. They lived with and revered their white-haired mother, and there was a strange smooth-faced brother in the background, who didn’t work. They were assisted by a more down-to-earth teacher, Miss Vine. The atmosphere was kind, the other children well brought up; but, although we longed to join in, Christine and I felt misfits.

  Our inadequate vocabulary, laced with Nana’s Victorianisms, was an embarrassment to us both, and being twins who were still uncannily alike, we were noticeably different from the other children. Often unable to tell us apart, our teachers usually addressed us as the twins, rather than Christine and Diana, prolonging the identity crisis for us as for so many others, with this short cut.

  At first, unused to other children, we enjoyed being chased round the table by an elder girl, crying ‘You goose!’ and the drama when a child called Kitty was accused of stealing pennies from coat pockets in the cloakroom. We loved shouting at the tops of our voices when Miss Vine asked us to name in French objects and features in the class room – la fenêtre, la porte, and so on – perhaps because Mamma loved and romanticised France. But her distrust of teachers and her determination that they should not mould our characters were catching. Her gentle mocking of the Aunties, who were too refined and sentimental for her taste, only confirmed eventually our own feelings about them. Although, thanks to Nana, we could read to ourselves, write in sentences and recite our tables, we were depressed by our backwardness. Our poor speech and inexperience of other children handicapped us. We were gauche and, because our English was still mixed with twin language, Josephine was sometimes called in to interpret, a humiliation we found hard to bear.

  Disheartened, we grew naughty, always backing each other up, and when we realised sitting in the cloakroom was the only punishment, we left home with books in our overcoat pockets, preferring to read in disgrace, rather than make fools of ourselves again in front of the class. Christine remembers being sent upstairs alone to an empty room as a punishment, so perhaps the Aunties realised that sending us together to the cloakroom was an easy way out for us both.

  Despite our backwardness, Mamma, who believed children should enjoy their childhood, insisted our school days should end at lunchtime. Then all three of us left, with Christine or I carrying a small red book in which the English words we must learn to say before next morning had been neatly written; a book which was forgotten as soon as our feet touched the gravel of The Grove’s back drive.

  We left Highlands after two terms, but our parents didn’t tell us why. Josephine thinks they never intended us to stay because they never bought us uniforms. It could be that the school fees were too high for them or that the Aunties were fed-up with us only going mornings. I distinctly remember an Aunty suggesting that Christine and I were educationally sub-normal and should, therefore, go to a special school, which in the ’thirties might have branded us idiots in our own minds for life. Yet it’s possible I imagined this explanation, simply because I felt unacceptable and expected rejection. On the other hand, our parents could well have found an establishment they preferred, for our next school, which belongs to the following chapter, was certainly much cheaper. No uniforms were needed and lessons were in the mornings only, so suiting Mamma’s philosophy.

  Today’s children would, of course, have asked, ‘Why?’ But, reared on ‘Curiosity killed the cat,’ to which I only learnt the answer ‘Satisfaction brought it back,’ many years later, we remained silent. We were also taught not to whine and to bear set-backs with fortitude. Exhortations, quotes from the Bible and Shakespeare and Latin tags were part of every day life. When we wanted to stop fighting we shouted ‘Pax!’. And when Cappy offered something which could not be shared, he called ‘Quis?’ and whoever answered ‘Ego!’ first got it.

  ‘Never say die’, ‘There’s no such word as can’t’ and ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again,’ were other favourites. �
��Don’t be feeble,’ was a constant cry and, also, if you ventured an unwelcome suggestion, ‘Don’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs.’ When told to do anything, you were expected to leap into action, and ‘Do it now,’ was Cappy’s frequent order. Hesitation or delay could be countered with several quotes: ‘Procrastination is the thief of time,’ or ‘He who hesitates is lost, but he who sitteth upon a pin shall rise again,’ or, later, more threateningly, ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions.’ As we grew older we buoyed ourselves up with quotes we had found for ourselves, some, fittingly, from Whyte Melville or Adam Lindsay Gordon. Poetry was simply part of life. Daisy Kew and her mother Ellen wrote verses in our autograph books, and my mother wrote in mine ‘Love many, trust a few, learn to paddle your own canoe,’ and drew a lovely picture of me paddling down a river.

  Doing good deeds was supposed to be part of life, too. Mamma and her sisters had been brought up to visit sick cottagers at Roshven and to perform plays to amuse the staff, and just down the road was the perfect candidate for us – poor Mr Shea, a middle-aged man, who had lost both legs and one arm when two trains ran over him in India. His creeper-clad cottage was the other side of a gate to Spring Wood and only a few yards from Granny’s house, but whereas Highclere was light and charming with pretty furniture and lots of white paint, poor Mr Shea’s cottage was dark, damp and cheerless.

  His legs had been amputated near the top and he came to the door on stumps about four inches in length. Once a big man, his head and torso were large and strong and his face, distressingly, on a level with mine.