Fair Girls and Grey Horses

by Christine Pullein-Thompson

  Though Denis was making model theatres – a new and improved one appeared every holidays – he still played with us. On wet days we fortified the bottle-neck passage with a mattress, propped up by his prep school tuck box, and built it into a wall with blankets and eiderdowns. Two of us would defend the bathroom end of the passage, two attack from the landing and when the attackers managed to scale the fortification, we changed places and the battle began again. Our weapons were blackjacks made, on Denis’s instructions, by putting a tight ball of rolled-up socks inside a large one, which could then be wielded as a bludgeon.

  Mamma began to make regular visits to Granny, who had settled in the south of France, and Denis, now a teenager, was invited too. Nana would move into the spare room to look after us and Cappy would spend the weekday nights at his club in London and appear at weekends. This arrangement enabled Mamma to make up for Denis’s banishment to school and gave Cappy a taste of bachelor high life: Dover soles and fillet steak at his club and the occasional night at the theatre. It pleased Nana too, giving her the opportunity for endless warfare with the maids, her ammunition varying from implications of waste to the discovery of dust. We became wicked, ignoring her constant threat, ‘I’ll put on my hat and go straight home.’ At tea I had only to look at the twins in a certain way for them to do the ‘elephant trick’ and at bedtime we would disappear into the orchard and climb into a distant apple tree, aware that poor Nana, loath to walk through the wet grass in her ‘night slippers’, would only call plaintively from the garden gate.

  I missed Mamma and, before one of her departures, I took my available wealth – sixpence – and searched Woolworth’s for a parting present. I chose a large china sabot of unbelievably bad taste: it was a mottled dun colour and scattered with horrid little flowers and figures in Dutch national costume. She recognised it as a love offering and carted it in her suitcase to France. For years afterwards she kept it in a prominent position on her dressing table and I was well into my twenties when I at last persuaded her to throw it out. Our other love offerings were little posies carefully picked and put in water on her dressing table for her return.

  Cappy measured us all at regular intervals against the white wall of the dairy – a book over your head and then your name and the date against the pencilled line – and it became apparent that I wasn’t growing. Mamma fixed her hopes on the new dentist’s calcium tablets, which had to be taken in conjunction with a delicious malt extract. She also provided me with packets of raisins on the grounds that mountaineers carried them as iron rations.

  Cappy, convinced that beer would do the trick, betted me sixpence that I couldn’t drink half a pint. I did, but I hated it and, as no more sixpences were offered, my beer-drinking ended.

  We lived in cherry country. Wild cherries grew on the edges of beech woods and, flowering early, made their ghostly presence known before the woods leafed. Then the cherry orchards of Kingwood and Stoke Row, Highmoor and Checkendon became bridal with blossom and, in fine springs, the car owners of Reading drove out to view them. Mamma quoted Housman, ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now,’ as we walked or rode by.

  One of the many joys of The Grove was the whiteheart cherry tree. Whoever planted our ancient orchard had put in a wild cherry, taller even than the Blenheim apple, with a great silver-grey girth that exuded blops of fascinating gum. Intended for the birds, the wild cherry was left unprotected, while the whiteheart had various frighteners attached, including a bell that previous owners had been able to ring from the bathroom window. Bowley would pick a basket of cherries for the house and then tie the ladder in to make it safe for us. I spent perfect half hours eating the sweet, sun-warmed cherries and contemplating life from among the leafy boughs, while Bowley, who had confessed a lifetime ambition to drive along in a car spitting cherry stones out of the window, was provided with a licence, Bertha and the cherries by Mamma and sent off to realize it.

  I don’t think that either of our parents had read Rousseau, but some of his theories – the dignity of labour and the feeling that there should be no drones (whatever your class you must learn to produce something) were fed to us. It was confusing, for though we were to be feminists, free, educated, in possession of the vote, and to avoid household drudgery, we were to embrace the nobility of labour when it concerned gardening, the mucking out of stables and the care of chickens.

  I suspect that abandoning our education to Miss Fryer was part of this confused thinking. They heard she was a good educationalist and that her pupils came from all walks of life. There was no afternoon school, no uniform and it only cost five shillings per week per child; milking goats and caning chairs were included in the curriculum. The parents thought it sounded ideal, but one look at Miss Fryer should have made them think again.

  Like the twins, I found her very unattractive. Her shapeless figure was dressed in drooping fustian, her whiskered face had never known make-up, and her greasy hair was cut once a year – in a pudding basin style, by Bossy her female companion. In those days two women could live together without any suggestion of lesbianism, since the post-war problem of surplus women had made all-female households a fact of life, but the tensions and quarrels that drifted into the schoolroom suggested a highly emotional relationship, if not a sexual one.

  Our school fellows were interesting: Catherine and Christopher Kennington – children of Eric Kennington, the painter and sculptor; the Brownlow boys, whose father, a wartime major, was now trying to make a living from a smallholding and chickens; the Laidlaw girls, whose father, a wartime naval commander, was trying to make a living from sheep; Jean the daughter of the local postmaster and Bernice whose father was a blacksmith. Other children came and went, but these and the two boarders, Edwina and Tom, are the ones I remember. We learnt maths, Latin and geography, which seemed to consist of reciting the counties of England – not Britain – with their principal towns and rivers. ‘Berkshire, Reading on the Kennet,’ we chanted in unison. Miss Fryer read extracts from Euclid aloud to the assembled class. She taught French grammar, but explained to our parents that her accent wasn’t good enough to teach conversation, so we were left to invent our own pronunciation as we mouthed the unsaid words to ourselves.

  We wrote essays, witnessed Christopher’s asthmatic attacks. Milking the goats and caning the chairs were outside activities and not demanded of us in winter. Botany was another summer pursuit. We despised it and my father would roar with rage when he found his trouser press full of half-pressed wild flowers; but though my memory rejected most of the Latin names, many of the country ones remained with me and have been a source of pleasure.

  Mamma formed what she described in a novel as ‘the slipshod intimacies of women’ with some of the other mothers at Miss Fryer’s and this led to invitations. We went to tea with the Laidlaws: their father – the retired naval commander – was a small silent man, their mother large and talkative. Afterwards we argued as to whether we liked Anne or Jean best. A Laidlaw relation had commanded my father’s regiment, but I don’t think it occurred to our parents to invite the adult Laidlaws to dinner.

  The Brownlows asked us to lunch. Their house and farm were less elegant than the Laidlaws’, and Mrs Brownlow, careworn and gaunt, boasted that she found the potatoes we were eating discarded on her neighbour’s bonfire. (She had, she assured us as we eyed them suspiciously, cut off all the green bits.) After lunch we had to rest on beds in different rooms; we didn’t approve – resting was feeble – but I read my first Dr Dolittle book.

  The Brownlow pony, Pat, brown with a wild mane and tail, was loaned to us when they were on holiday. Her saddle, apparently designed for non-riders, had a metal bar, arched over the pommel, for the beginner to clutch. A bay pony called Rockie also came on loan; he was broken-winded and so straight-shouldered that his saddle had to be held in position by a crupper, but it was wonderful to have an extra pony to ride.

  Christine on a bay pony

  Mamma made vague attempts to steer our horsemansh
ip into more orthodox channels. There were very few riding schools, but the Pony Club had been founded in 1930, to provide children with instruction in riding and stable management, and she took us to a stable management rally at Stonor Park. I remember glimpses of the clipped horses and ponies resplendent in their elegant rugs, but the stables were Victorian, and the loose boxes had high wooden walls and doors, topped with iron bars. Unless the door was open, there was no way a small child could see into the box, and during the lecture the older children filled the doorway; at the back, I saw and heard nothing.

  Then we attended a mounted rally at Bix. It wasn’t my turn to ride so I was a spectator until the groom from a livery stable – sent with a couple of ponies to tout for custom – decided that I was a likely client. I found myself on a clipped, stabled and corn-fed pony over which I had absolutely no control. He took off round the large field and everyone shouted instructions. I think I was dazed rather than frightened, and clung on until eventually the pony slowed down and we rejoined his stable companions.

  After that there were no more pony club rallies and Denis assumed control. Armed with pitchforks, we shaped the hedge trimmings from the newly clipped hawthorn hedges into miniature steeplechase fences round the top meadow. Then, acting as starter and using the crack of a hunting whip instead of a pistol, he would send his sisters racing round the field. This caused such a dramatic rise in the falling-off rate that even the twins lost count of their tallies.

  Mamma had never been allowed in the kitchen at Magdalen Gate House, and on her wartime honeymoon in a houseboat at Clifton Hampden, she had made her first attempt to cook. Completely baffled by the instruction ‘stew the apples’ she was forced to consult the lock keeper’s wife and this made her determined that her children should not grow up incompetent. So, to her demand that a civilized person should be equally at home in London, Paris and St Petersburg, she added the virtue of ‘being good on a desert island’, which entailed the possession of basic cooking skills.

  On the maid’s nights out the twins and I had already begun to assume the characters of James the butler and his two female underlings Edith and Gladys, in which we served and cleared away the parents’ dinner. When Denis was at home he had dinner, but helped with the washing-up. There were four roles: Washer-up, Dryer, Helper Dry and Putter Away, but Helper Dry, who also assisted Putter Away, was dropped when there were only three of us. Putter Away ran from the scullery, through the kitchen to the dining room, and to encourage ourselves we all gave loud cries of ‘Express!’ Meanwhile the parents drank their coffee and smoked their cigarettes and, though there might be the odd complaint afterwards, left us unsupervised.

  Our cooking was equally unsupervised. On Winnie’s afternoon off Mamma shut us in the kitchen with instructions to cook. At first we made biscuit meal puddings, stirring them up with gravy made from Oxo cubes, and the dogs, being spaniels, ate them with apparent relish. Then we became more ambitious, all poring over the pages of a tattered copy of Mrs Beeton’s Cookery Book, and because the only control on the ancient coal burning range was a damper, and three cooks were using the oven at once, problems soon arose. Diana took years to forgive me for opening the oven to insert my cakes and causing the collapse of her bread rolls, and Cappy caused further offence by referring to them as ‘the bullets’ when he sampled our efforts at a picnic at Mapledurham. I also remember some appallingly hard rock cakes, but I forget who made them.

  There was an active branch of the Oxford Group – later Moral Rearmament – in the neighbourhood and the parents were invited to a meeting. They went a little apprehensively and afterwards told us how the members had risen in turn to explain the ways in which God had changed them. A local Lord told of how he had been too embarrassed to give to beggars until he ‘changed’, but could now do so easily. Most of the ‘changes’ seemed mildly absurd and Mamma used it, as she used everything, in a book. The Culme Seymours were leading lights and the twins and I were invited to lunch at Well Place, Ipsden to meet their children. We played in a loft and were rather surprised when Primrose and John retired for their ‘Quiet Times’ after lunch.

  Later they gave a children’s fancy dress party, to which we went as pirates. We wore yellow bell-bottom trousers – made by Miss Willis – aertex shirts, red spotted handkerchiefs tied round our heads, and exotic sashes round our waists. We brandished cutlasses made from three-ply by Denis and painted with silver blades and black hilts. It turned out to be a dance and was one of the highlights of my childhood. I was unaware that I didn’t dance well, that the other girls were portraying female characters and wearing dresses. I fell in love with John Culme Seymour, who was attired as an eighteenth-century gentleman in black velvet and a powdered wig, and in my recollection we danced every dance. Mamma had, as usual, told us that we must converse at all costs. ‘If you can’t think of anything else to say, ask “Do you like string?”’ she insisted. I can’t remember what I talked about, but Diana was reported to have asked her partner, ‘Have you read Treasure Island?’

  We weren’t asked again. Perhaps I ruined my reputation by monopolising the host, or it may be that we never asked the Culme Seymours back, or possibly our parents’ flight from the embarrassment of Group meetings made us unsuitable friends.

  Rashly, I announced my intention of being a poultry farmer when I was grown up – I even wrote an earnest article for The Grove Magazine on the subject, in which a line – ‘This is called profit’ – was immortalized by family mockery. The twins and I went into prize bantams. There were our post office accounts – so carefully built up by Nana – waiting to be raided and I imagine we had made a little money selling eggs and young cockerels to Nana and Granny, though I doubt that my observations on profit took into account the fact that Mamma provided all chicken food and that Bowley killed, plucked, drew and trussed the cockerels in our parents’ time.

  I bought a pair of Silkies, beautiful fluffy white birds with blue skins and feathered legs. The hen had an elegant blue face and a puff of soft white feathers on her head, the cock’s face was apoplectically purple and his crest composed of suffer feathers. I named them Hero and Star and loved them dearly. I wrote a very bad poem to them, beginning, ‘Oh Hero and Star, how lovely you are …’ which was not accepted for The Grove Magazine. Diana had bought Frizzles and Christine Japanese bantams. We set them up with houses; I painted mine yellow and bought yellow dishes to match. Christine’s house and dishes were blue, Diana’s green. The bantams wore rings in our colours, except for the Silkies whose legs were too feathered.

  Cappy began to take an interest and despising the collection of mongrel chickens which roamed the yard and orchard, he bought some pure-bred hens – White Wyandottes and Rhode Island Reds – from a golfing friend. As with all his schemes, financial expenditure was necessary: a new henhouse, with divided sleeping quarters and two runs, was set up against the orchard and top meadow hedge. I found myself in charge, which was quite demanding as they had to be fed and watered separately from all the other chickens.

  A later purchase was an incubator. This was housed in the spare bedroom, the one tidy room in the house; it never recovered. Fascinated by procreation, I cheerfully carried out the small chores of turning and damping the eggs and, like an intervening midwife, assisting the arrival of the chicks by picking at the outside of the shells once they were pipped from within. I would watch over the chicks as they dried off and then take them out to the brooder, where they spent their motherless infancy.

  My mother’s acquisition of guinea-fowl – in Oxfordshire they were known as gleanies – was as usual more romantic and less demanding of outlay. Wild and scorning chicken houses, the gleanies roosted in one of the taller apple trees. They laid their eggs, brown, pointed, and slightly smaller than hens’ eggs, in communal nests, generally in patches of stinging nettles; with shells so hard that they survived falling from a height, they were perfect for mounted egg-and-spoon races.

  We had become indifferent to nettle stings, rarely
needing the antidote of a dock leaf, and when eggs ran out we would be sent to search for the gleanie nest. Our largest find was eighty eggs, all reasonably fresh.

  The guinea-fowl hens were deplorable mothers. Frequently two of them would sit on one nest and appear with about twenty of the tiny chicks – grey and mouse-like with orange legs. Then they trailed them round in the tall, wet grass until they died from exhaustion. We tried shutting them in runs, but the hens, frantic at captivity, would dash themselves against the wire netting and trample on the chicks. Setting the eggs under bantams seemed the only solution and the grown chicks appeared to have no problems in recognising themselves as guinea-fowl; they would join the flock and roost in the apple tree as soon as they could fly.

  Mamma had grown out of her childhood sleepwalking and almost out of nightmares, but she often had amusing dreams. The one I remember was about a guinea-fowl who wrote, applying for the place of cook. Her sole qualification, offered in spiky handwriting: ‘I can pour hot water on the dinner.’

  When I moved into my own room I was only aware of my sleepwalking if I woke in the middle of a walk. This was frightening, because your sense of direction and ability to find your way in the dark abruptly deserted you and you spent several disoriented minutes crashing into the furniture as you searched for the light switch. Once I woke standing on the bed and clawing at the big sash window and after that I always slept with the lower half closed, however hot the weather. My plate, or brace, for my teeth, which obviously worried me, would turn up in odd places, once in Cappy’s sock drawer, but I had no memory of putting it there.

  Chapter Four

  Diana

  Most of the visitors to The Grove made little impression on me. Immune to fame, I was more intrigued by the Bride Hall chauffeur/butler, another Bowles, than by Carola Oman herself. The unapproachable Bowles looked so important behind the wheel of the huge black car he drove, in which Carola was a mere passenger. He walked with a dignity which seemed to belie the word ‘servant’, and it was difficult to imagine what he and Winnie said to each other when they lunched together in the kitchen.