Fair Girls and Grey Horses

by Christine Pullein-Thompson

  The twins and I were left, for what seemed like an age, presumably again in the care of Beatrice. When at last they returned, with Denis’s arm in wooden splints and sling and the bad news that it was broken in two places at the elbow, they found us in floods of tears. It transpired that we thought we would have an armless brother for ever. When dolls’ arms broke they were thrown away; it hadn’t occurred to us that human arms could be mended.

  Godparents visited us. Gerald Hankin – who later married Mary Field of the Children’s Film Foundation – had put on so much weight that one of the new dining room chairs collapsed under him. Carola Oman sat on the lawn and made clothes for our toys. We had given up dolls, or rather Barney had turned out to be a serial killer and chewed up all our best ones, but Carola obligingly made clothes for teddies and shapeless garments for rabbits. Georgette Heyer came and was plainly horrified by a nursery lunch; faced with jelly, she announced that she never ate it and demanded cheese.

  We were lunched separately when a young publisher came to discuss a book. The menu was roast chicken – a treat in those days – but Barney, an incurable thief, stole the uncooked bird from the kitchen table. It was dragged from his jaws too mauled for roasting and hastily washed, jointed and turned into a stew. Mamma reported that the young publisher had pronounced it delicious, he had recognised a Spanish recipe, and passed his plate for a second helping.

  Barney, as accident-prone as ever, had begun country life by putting his nose into a wasps’ nest. Covered in stings, his whole head swelled to a gigantic size and, though after a week of misery it went down, his muzzle bore grey, hairless scars for the rest of his life.

  Diana has described the awful incompetence of our parents when confronted by a bridle, and Carola Oman kindly sent Mamma a book on stable management for her birthday. Titled To Whom The Goddess it was illustrated with photographs of ladies – mostly titled – riding to hounds, sidesaddle in Leicestershire. Bursting with good advice it insisted that a horse should be groomed for forty minutes a day, by a groom who knew his job and always took his coat off. It also explained how to check that the bridle was properly adjusted when the groom had put it on, but not how to get it there.

  Jack Bowles, the jobbing gardener, became a central figure in our lives. His wife suffered horribly from bouts of rheumatic fever and with their three children – two girls and a boy – they lived in a council house near the church. Bowley didn’t seem to resent Cappy’s authoritative manner or his early morning roars of ‘Bowles’, when he wanted to give orders before leaving for London. Assuming a military stance – he had served in the army at the end of the war – Bowley would reply with a equally loud shout of ‘Sir?’

  With Mamma he had a very different relationship. They exchanged philosophic observations, gossip and later confidences, while to us he was friend and mentor on everything except horses, of which he insisted, he had little experience.

  That autumn Denis went off to Eton, with, he later told me, only half the clothes list and not nearly enough pocket money. Considering the state of the parents’ finances, it seemed madness to send him, but it had been our Cannan grandfather’s dearest wish. In his days as a don he had come to the conclusion that the tutorial system made Etonians the best-educated of all public school boys, and Cyril Alington, the reigning headmaster, had been his pupil and his friend. However, Grandfather did nothing about providing school fees and when he died unexpectedly at the age of sixty-one, the greater part of his estate went to Granny.

  Always vaguely dissatisfied – in England she hankered for foreign parts, abroad she missed England – Granny tried life in an elegant Kensington house. Then she went round the world twice – in opposite directions – before living next to us at Wimbledon and near us at Peppard. Finally she decided to settle in the south of France; but she offered no help with school fees.

  Granny

  The parents contemplated other public schools for Denis, but at that time most of them placed great emphasis on games and the artistic or eccentric boy was despised. At Eton art was respectable and he could row. Mamma consoled herself that there would be no train fares – it was only twenty miles away – and with her belief that it had fewer extras than other schools.

  We found ourselves more modestly at Highlands. In common with Diana and Christine I remember being taught by Miss Vine, who was even more horse-faced than Mrs Francis. In Auntie Christine’s class I sat below a shield depicting an ascending skylark with the PNEU motto ‘I am – I can – I ought – I will’, inscribed round it. I quite approved, at least it was better than being mild and obedient.

  I think my chief interest was in the other children. There was Peter, a fat little boy bursting out of his brown corduroy shorts who, always in trouble, would foolishly confess when his mother came to fetch him. Her invariable ‘I should be ashamed, Peter,’ became a family joke.

  Then there was Patricia who tiresomely demanded a share of the biscuits you brought to eat in break, especially if they were chocolate. Bored and rather embarrassed, we told Denis and, wise in the ways of prep schools, he provided us with a bar of Ex-Lax – the fashionable chocolate laxative. We could barely control our giggles as we watched Patricia wolf it down. It worked; she never reproached us, but she never bothered us again.

  A few of the children were boarders, remittance children, with parents working in India or some other outpost of the Empire. I remember feeling pity for those we left behind on Fridays; when school ended at lunchtime, there was an orphaned air about them as they hovered in the shrubbery or stood on the lower bar of the gate watching the rest of us collected by parents.

  Chapter Three

  Christine

  The next years were decisive ones. Not only did our mother acquire her own car, not only did we become the proud owners of Milkmaid, but we changed schools. I cannot remember worrying about this, or even talking about it, but I am sure we did. Our new school was very different from Highlands. No one was called Auntie at Miss Fryer’s, no one misbehaved. Miss Fryer was a rare person in those days. A female graduate of Cambridge. Small and indomitable with a small curly piece of fair beard sprouting from her chin, she had just opened a school where the better-off would pay and the poor would attend for nothing.

  It must have been September when my mother drove us for our first morning at Miss Fryer’s in her baby Austin which she had called Bouncing Bertha. No uniforms were necessary which must have pleased Mamma, who hated buying them.

  Miss Fryer’s school was in a shed attached to a small thatched cottage standing at the end of a lane. The cottage is no doubt gentrified by now; but in those days it was low-ceilinged and small-roomed and I suspect without bathroom or flush loo. Miss Fryer’s companion, Bossy, reigned inside, taller than Miss Fryer, with a pinched face, dark drawn-back hair and glasses. I don’t think I ever saw her as a real person; for me she was just there, Miss Fryer’s companion, another oddity. Other people saw them differently, even as kind little ladies, so perhaps I was prejudiced from the start, for I must admit that I felt not an ounce of affection for either of them.

  There was not much room in the shed, and in winter the heat was not allowed to rise above fifty Fahrenheit, so that soon we were wearing a great many clothes to school – zip-up felt bootees, vests, monkey vests, Fair-Isle jerseys, thick skirts, and our woofies. We had small blankets cut out of a Scottish plaid to put over our knees, and, as winter progressed, mittens to put on our hands. But, well wrapped by Nana in infancy, I was still cold.

  Miss Fryer was an authoritarian; no one argued with her. There were certain things she disliked intensely; fingers were to be kept flat when writing, elbows off your desks at all times. It was not obstinacy which made me forget these rules so often, rather a certain vagueness which Miss Fryer seemed to relish. A crooked finger gained a sudden and painful rap with a ruler which soon flattened it. An elbow resting on a desk was grabbed from behind, raised and slammed down again. There was no warning. But in spite of sore elbows and a repeat
edly bruised first finger I never gave up these habits and to this day I still crook my first finger of my right hand while writing and rest an elbow on the table while paused in thought; so, like my father’s lines, Miss Fryer’s punishment had no effect whatsoever. I think the simple truth is that at that time only Mamma could have changed me. A word from her meant more than a hundred other words from someone else. She always gave a sensible reason for any criticism which to me was more persuasive than a sudden blow. I soon decided that Miss Fryer’s punishment was caused by bad temper, and a bruised elbow and battered finger were just things to be endured.

  We made some friends at Miss Fryer’s – the Brownlows and the Laidlaws we saw quite often – and we feuded with a family who came later, ambushing them on their way home.

  Though we only attended Miss Fryer’s in the mornings, there was still time to learn how to cane chairs, and to take part in a never-ending search for the lesser spotted orchid in the open, sweet-smelling land behind Miss Fryer’s cottage. Did we ever find it? If we did I cannot recall that triumphant moment. We did however pick flowers and take them home to press in my father’s trouser press in his dressing room. I never saw the point of it, preferring to see them wild and free. Miss Fryer would also take us to a pond where she would stand calling, ‘Froggies, froggies’. Whether frogs ever surfaced I cannot remember, but it caused much mockery from my brother. Josephine learnt to milk one of Miss Fryer’s many goats – Miss Fryer was a goaty person – but Diana and I never gained that privilege, never rising above chair caning, not even when Josephine left to attend boarding school. Obviously we were not considered reliable enough to be trusted with a beloved goat.

  Tom lived with Miss Fryer and Bossy. I never discovered what the relationship was between them. He was well into his teens when he was arrested for stealing and an enlightened judge gave him the choice of the Merchant Navy or prison; not surprisingly he chose the Merchant Navy. He was replaced by Edwina who came from London and was occasionally beaten by either Miss Fryer or Bossy in the cottage in the mornings, usually with a hair brush or a slipper, I suspect. I think it was for the sin of vanity, for her long, beautiful, red hair must have made Bossy and Miss Fryer feel like the ugly sisters. I remember how silence fell among us when Edwina screamed. People have asked me since why we did not intervene rather than remain frozen to our chairs. But times were different then and one accepted brutality in a way one wouldn’t today. Dogs were beaten, kittens drowned, chickens’ necks wrung; these were every-day occurrences, I did not complain about my bruised elbows either; for, picking off the scabs, I knew I would only be told not to grumble or Mamma would say that it was ‘another injustice to Ireland’, a favourite phrase of hers, which somehow settled the matter, as even then one knew that the Irish and their problems would always be with us.

  While at Miss Fryer’s, we must have talked a great deal about The Grove, because one freezing night, there was a knock on the front door and we found Edwina outside. To say we were amazed is of course an understatement. Edwina insisted that she had found her way by our descriptions of The Grove. But I suspect she followed the signposts to Peppard, intent on walking the five miles to find us. Apparently Miss Fryer for some reason had turned Edwina out of her cottage and told her to find shelter in a shed. So, very sensibly, Edwina had decided to run away. Of course we rushed her inside the house, gave her tea, persuaded her to have a bath and change into some dry clothes of ours. Then and only then did Mamma tell her to write a letter home explaining what had happened. Meanwhile she contacted either the Laidlaws or the Brownlows and asked them to tell Miss Fryer that Edwina was safe with us. Then she wrote a letter to Edwina’s family herself saying that Miss Fryer was not a suitable person to look after such a young girl. I cannot recall Edwina saying much to us. I suspect she was very tired and went straight to bed in the spare room.

  The next morning Edwina travelled back to Miss Fryer’s with us, only stopping to post the two letters on the way. I’m not sure what Mamma said to Miss Fryer, but predictably Miss Fryer was very annoyed that Edwina had been allowed to write a letter home. A few days later a shabby car arrived at Miss Fryer’s driven by a man in a grey homburg hat the worse for wear, and a tired-looking woman, and Edwina left for ever. After that things seemed to become easier at Miss Fryer’s. I do not think she and Bossy ever had another child lodger. I hope not.

  Looking back, maybe the beating or beatings were not as bad as they sounded. It’s possible that Edwina was the sort of child who screams as soon as she is touched. She may have been an habitual liar as well. Certainly I never saw any bruises on Edwina. But whatever else she was, she must have been a very disturbed child, and what happened to her in that small old-fashioned thatched cottage would never be allowed today.

  Armistice Day was still observed at that time, and we would assemble in Miss Fryer’s cottage to listen to the service at the Cenotaph on her ancient wireless. At eleven o’clock exactly, even if it was a weekday, everything stopped – including us – to observe the two minutes’ silence, followed by the Last Post. None of us moved a muscle as we stood straight and silent in the little thatched cottage nor giggled, for the results of the war were still all around us in the lame and the mad, the blind and the gassed.

  Sometimes when Granny was living at Highclere rather than in France, her chauffeur Silvio would drive us to school. Silvio, a handsome Italian man, was extremely good-natured. In Granny’s big car, unshaven and collarless, he would drive us at high speed through Gallows Tree Common and Cane End, mostly on the wrong side of the road, only slowing down to point out piglets to us, crying out, ‘Look at ze little piggies.’ Used to the Kews’ piglets we were not much impressed. Silvio’s erratic driving was soon observed by an interfering woman, who telephoned Mamma suggesting that she tell her ‘man friend’ to drive more carefully and on the correct side of the road in future, which made us all laugh, Mamma most of all.

  Mamma’s Bouncing Bertha was not very reliable. Sometimes even her starting handle failed to get her going and then it was all hands to push – Nana, being heavy, was a much valued pusher. Occasionally as we travelled the doors would fly open and then Mamma would shriek, ‘Look! Bouncing Bertha’s flying.’ I am quite sure that Bouncing Bertha would have failed the present MOT test. With Nana and my mother in front, there wasn’t much room for us inside and, when Bouncing Bertha was also loaded with shopping, she would sometimes stop altogether, notably up the Devil’s Elbow near Crowsley Park, which really is shaped like an elbow and very narrow. When this happened we would all leap out and push and push, piling in again as Bouncing Bertha reached the top. I don’t think Bouncing Bertha had a boot, just a luggage rack on the back. I don’t remember her ever stopping when Nana was not on board, so I suspect Nana was the proverbial last straw.

  In those days we often shopped in Henley-on-Thames. Mamma would call, ‘Anyone for Henley?’ Nine times out of ten we wanted to go and would leap into Bouncing Bertha without further ado. Once we realised too late that we were shoeless. It didn’t bother us because Henley was quiet and empty then, just a small town which was reputed to have the most pubs per person in the whole of Britain, and, of course, famous for its Regatta. It was easy to park in the market place; sometimes the only other vehicle there was Colonel Noble’s phaeton drawn by an imposing horse which interested us greatly, though we kept our distance, awed by the driver who wore some sort of livery.

  On one particular day, I remember we wandered barefoot into the almost empty and sparsely stocked Woolworths in Bell Street. Nothing cost more than sixpence in Woolworths in those days and the floor was made of wood and always dusty. Wandering round wondering how to spend the few coins we had in the pockets of our shorts, we forgot about our bare feet, until an elderly lady stopped to inspect us with an expression of pity on her face before slowly opening her bag and taking out her purse. Almost too late we realised that she was about to give us money and fled in confusion, not wishing to be considered needy and given money for s
hoes of which we had plenty at home. After that I don’t think we ever went barefoot in Henley again, though we were often without shoes at home and I can still recall the feeling in hot weather of melting tarmac and the tar which it left behind on my feet.

  There were not so many shops in Henley in those days. Hales the baker and Cross and Sons the corn merchants were two shops in the market place. Cross and Sons was full of things like chick food, flaked maize, biscuit meal and biscuits for dogs. There was grit, fed to hens to make their shells strong, and a host of other things which fascinated us. Occasionally in later years we ordered hay from there. It was always very expensive and was delivered by cart pulled by a beautiful shire horse bedecked with shining brasses, his driver walking beside him. There was Boots too in Henley; it had a lending library upstairs which my parents used, ordering books each week for the next, usually crime novels which they read on winter evenings sitting on each side of the fire in the drawing room. There was the Kenton Theatre in New Street and a cinema in Bell Street.

  We learnt to swim in Henley in the pool on the Thames along the Wargrave Road. Our parents would not let us go in a boat until we could swim to the boom in the middle of the river and back again. As ever, I was the slowest to learn and Cappy made it worse by swimming behind me and pinching my toes when he considered them too low in the water. Having a cross, six-foot-two man swimming behind me was terrifying enough, to have him pinching my toes made it far worse. I did eventually learn to swim, but to this day I remain a poor swimmer.

  Every year Mamma went to France to stay with Granny. I always felt bereaved then, we all did – my father once wrote a letter to her with a drawing of the house gutters crying for her. We all wrote letters. In one I mentioned that Cappy had paid us for the blackberries we had picked, in another that Miss Letchford had managed to make us ‘3 cootie and is sending them home next week.’ (Cootie was twin language for coats.) I signed myself ‘love Rosie Posie and love to Granny.’