Fair Girls and Grey Horses

by Christine Pullein-Thompson

  The most delightful and amusing visitor of all time was Allen Lane, the enterprising publisher who published High Table and No Walls of Jasper in his new Penguin paperbacks, which were to change the market for ever. Young, lively and rather, I think, in love with Mamma, Allen counted the scars on our knees to see how many we had and how much they had multiplied since he last came. He carried us shrieking to the old bath, which served as a water trough for the Kews’ cows and pretended he was about to drop us in; he chased us merrily round the orchard. Once he rang to ask whether he could bring over another young man who was contemplating suicide after being jilted by his girl friend. They came; our parents took them to look over a house which was for sale. Afterwards the tall young man, whom (perhaps wrongly) I think was Allen’s brother Richard, regained his spirits and ate vast quantities of lardy cake. Had his state of mind been exaggerated by Allen as an excuse to come? Or was The Grove such a tonic to a worn Londoner that life seemed worth living again? Allen was, he told me many years later, very fond of Mamma, and she was one of the first to hear that he had done a deal with Woolworths, so bringing quality novels at sixpence a copy within the reach of everyone. But, despite her outward cynicism, she was shocked when he complained to her that his mistress spent too much money on butter.

  Opposite us in a large red brick turn-of-the-century house lived the Platts, whom Mamma later put in her novel They Rang Up The Police: three unmarried sisters, who, like the Miss Coopers, still lived with a revered white-haired mother. Marjorie, the eldest, was the boss; Geraldine, the second one, painted, and Peggy, the youngest, was the underdog. There was another daughter, rarely seen, who had married, moved away and produced pale, well-behaved children, who found us barbaric. The Platts wanted to be friends and good neighbours, but our parents only really liked amusing people. Unpunctual, sensitive Geraldine, the most feminine and the most intelligent, painted in a room above the garage and was frequently summoned to meals by Marjorie’s high-pitched voice with always the same prelude, ‘Darling, are you in your studio?’ with a special emphasis on dio – a cry which all of us, including Bowley, imitated from time to time. The poor Platts, despised as three spinsters – although Marjorie was said to have lost a potential husband in the Great War – later became a warning to us of what could happen to three sisters who remained with a beloved mother; an example which was a small persistent irritant at the back of my teenage mind and later an increasing worry to Christine.

  We learnt to project our own voices, when we were sent upstairs to shout from a window to the others in the top meadow that lunch was ready, and, also, when we drag-hunted on foot with the spaniels, with many calls of ‘For’ard away’, ‘’ware rabbit’, and other cries familiar to those who hunt. For a while, before the puppies found homes, we had a pack of three and a half couple. We had no horn, but carried hunting whips and tried to dress the part, with the huntsman – we took it in turns to play each role – wearing an old blue blazer left over from Denis’s Emscote Lawn Preparatory School days. The quarry set off, with a fifteen-minute start, dragging a chunk of meat on a string, while, locked in a stable, the dogs waited impatiently. The chase always took us through Spring Wood and over the fields beyond, and the quarry dodged and zig-zagged and doubled back to put the spaniels off the scent. I remember hanging the meat on a gate and crouching panting behind a clump of gorse bushes, while my sisters’ cries rang across the landscape. The dogs, noses down, ran silently, and we later found they didn’t need the meat because our own scent was strong enough for them to follow. We trespassed, of course, but we knew not to run on young cereals or through hay fields, and roads were out of bounds. Later, when the puppies had gone, our pack shrank to Dinah, Barney and Pippin, the only puppy we kept.

  Barney travelled with us on two caravanning holidays, when Bowley and his curly-headed children stayed at The Grove to look after the other animals. We didn’t like leaving the ponies, but Cappy seemed in his element when he parked the caravan in a field above a cove near Parr Sands, Truro. He dug a latrine and with Denis’s help erected a lean-to tent where the males slept. It was cold and wet both holidays. If the rain was torrential, we played cards in the caravan and after supper when everyone was in bed we told stories to the parents. On the second holiday I started on a long novel I was writing about Edwin, an upstanding man, blinded eventually by cataract (like old Mrs Kew), who was destined to walk by mistake into the river at the end. I had been slow to begin this story, because earlier in the year our parents had discussed a libel case during lunch, which had cost an author a great deal of money. As a result I thought my hero’s surname had to be unique. So every time one came to mind I went through Cappy’s London telephone directories. Each name I chose was there, so what was I to do? Eventually I hit upon Pisspot, which to my intense relief wasn’t to be found anywhere. And not for a moment did I associate the name with pee-ing, because Nana called potties articles, and piss was a word never used in our family.

  Confidently I began my story in the lamplit caravan. ‘One day Edwin Pisspot …’ Tactfully my parents listened to the end of the first instalment, before Cappy called from the lean-to. ‘Why Pisspot?’ I was silent. If they, of all people, didn’t know, I must have totally misunderstood the libel laws. And I didn’t want to lose face by admitting my mistake. ‘I should change it,’ Mamma said. Then, thinking I was keen on the letter ‘P’, Cappy suggested Pespit. This, which was surely in the London telephone directory, seemed far too low-key to follow a fine name like Edwin, but … it was no good arguing with grown-ups. So Pespit it was, but somehow the change spoilt the story and I never reached blind Edwin’s terrible death by drowning.

  Early on the first caravan holiday we were walking along the cliffs above our cove when Barney suddenly vanished and we realised with sudden misery that he had fallen over the edge. We called his name again and again, shouting above the sound of the sea breaking on the rocks below and the heartless cry of the gulls. We ran down a winding cliff path with Denis and Mamma leading the way, and, when we reached the bottom, we heard a distant barking. Looking desperately across a blue-black stretch of rocks, touched here and there with lichen, we wondered how anyone could fall on them without breaking every bone in his body? Would we find a battered, dying dog? Then suddenly we saw a small black hump lying on the only patch of sand below the cliffs big enough to take a dog’s body.

  Cappy was too lame to clamber over rocks, so Denis and Mamma went and, to our intense relief, returned carrying Barney between them. Miraculously he was alive, and a boy appeared as if from nowhere and said ‘’E fluttered down like a bit of paper.’ A sad and anxious little procession, we carried Barney, limp but breathing, back to the car. We took him to a vet in Truro, who pronounced him shocked and very badly bruised, but without any broken bones. The holiday’s happiness was saved. For several nights Barney slept on Mamma’s bed and she squeezed in the double one with Christine and me.

  I suspect that, unknown to our parents, Barney’s sight was beginning to fail – a fact disguised by his very sensitive spaniel nose – because on the second caravan holiday he fell into a rectangular reservoir of water when we toured a china clay factory, and Denis dashed down steps and dragged him out, covered in clay. These incidents were, among others, grist to the mill that helped eventually to turn us into writers.

  While in Cornwall we went to tea with Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch at the Haven in Fowey, where his kind and loyal daughter, Foy, lent us a rowing boat. Somehow we repaid this generosity inexcusably by breaking an oar. I don’t remember whether we or our parents were to blame, only that Mamma was very upset and a sense of guilt spoiled my visit. Q, whose name was for us a household word, had been our grandfather’s student and close friend and, when up at Trinity and later, while working on the Oxford anthologies of English and Victorian verse, he was often at Magdalen Gate House. Q’s son, Bevil, had been engaged to marry Aunt May when he tragically died in the great ’flu epidemic in 1919. Mamma had read us Q’s poem, ‘Upon E
ckington Bridge, River Avon’, which begins ‘O pastoral heart of England! like a psalm’, and one day we were to read ‘Dead Man’s Rock’, so he was one of our heroes. But at the Haven we found an old man, who was to our young eyes very white, spider-thin and unsteady on his legs. Worse still for us, he was no longer interested in children. The grown-ups ate their tea in the drawing room; we, according to Josephine, were segregated on a balcony – although I only remember the three of us sitting rather forlornly on steps facing the picturesque harbour with the cry of seagulls in my ears.

  Much later when I was grown-up, I learnt that, although Q was at one time an enthusiastic chairman of the local Cornish education committee, he disapproved of the education of women; consequently Foy never went to school and taught herself to read and write. It was an odd as well as a horribly chauvinistic view in a prolific author who needed large sales to support his life-style – so perhaps we three girls did not miss as much as I imagined.

  One afternoon when I was eight or nine I found Mamma crying as she knelt dusting books in the parlour. Afraid to ask why, I fetched a cloth and, without a word, started to pull out books too, banging them together before dusting them and returning them to their places. Neither of us spoke, but gradually Mamma stopped crying and when, after about an hour, all the books were back, she handed me from a shelf, a copy, as a thank you, of Wild Animals I Have Known by Ernest Thompson Seton, who soon became, despite the sadness of his stories, one of my favourite authors. Christine, who had no idea Mamma was crying – a matter too private for me to mention to anyone – remembers wishing she had helped, too, and been rewarded with a book.

  Emotional problems and deeper feelings were never discussed in our family and ‘Don’t be personal’, was a reprimand we took seriously. Unlike children today, who may ask why their parents are quarrelling, I listened in anxious silence to the rows on the stairs, which woke me sometimes, as a furious and frustrated Cappy shouted that he was leaving home.

  ‘Oh Nicky, don’t be silly. Give me back those car keys! And do be quiet. The servants will hear.’ I’ve never forgotten Mamma’s pleading, slightly irritated voice on one occasion, but I can’t remember what my father shouted in reply – perhaps his words were beyond my comprehension. Mamma’s distress was signified more by her inaccuracy – there was only one servant in the house – than by her tone of voice. But she was the youngest in a strong family, and Sir Walter Raleigh, an eminent Oxford don, watching her with her sisters at their beloved father’s graveside had noted for posterity, ‘… the girls are splendid metal and don’t flinch.’ And this was the tradition we were expected to follow. But I was always on Mamma’s side, because I loved her unreservedly and she was little and delicate, while Cappy was big, and loud in anger. Denis, older, and more worldly, believed the arguments were over money. He remembers Nana’s earlier outraged announcement, at Wimbledon, ‘Now he has lost all your mother’s money too!’ But Nana knew nothing about the financial market in the ’twenties, when wiser men than Cappy lost fortunes on the stock exchange. Anyway, Mamma went to Granny in Wimbledon at the end of that decade and borrowed £2000 from the Cannan Estate. A depressing experience one might think, but she always said worrying about money was bourgeois, and when, following Cappy’s death, the Pullein-Thompson overdraft was at last paid off, she declared that she felt for the first time middle-class.

  Clearly another financial crisis stared our parents in the face soon after moving to Peppard, because great-uncle Teddy (Edwin Cannan) came to the rescue and advanced them £1500, against his will; a sum only three hundred pounds less than The Grove had cost. Wise and clever financially, Uncle Teddy, aged fifteen and still at Clifton College, had insisted on managing his half of a small fortune inherited by Charles and himself – an inheritance which came originally from the Claude relations, who owned coal mines in Chile. Our family was therefore saved twice from bankruptcy, not by our Scottish or by our largely improvident English relations, but by our Huguenot forebears.

  Uncle Teddy believed that if you look after the pennies the pounds look after themselves. He insisted his wife kept household accounts and found it easier to write a cheque for hundreds of pounds than to part with a penny. His arrival at The Grove to discuss the loan is immortalised for me in a small snapshot taken on a Brownie camera. Impossibly old, white-bearded, small, like many Scots of his generation, he arrived with his shrewish wife, Rita, in a Baby Austin called Lucy. Serious and soft-spoken, both these Cannans paid us scant attention, perhaps because the matter was so important or because their everlasting grief at losing their only son David through measles made it hard for them to relate to other people’s children. For years we chiefly remembered this distinguished professor for the way he cut oranges, not in cubes, but sliced round and then divided into squares – and for his habit of killing wasps by cutting them in half with scissors as they flew.

  Mamma’s nightmares, another nocturnal disturbance, which I do not think ended as quickly as Josephine suggests, sometimes wrenched me from my dreams; her anguished cries against a tormentor tore at my heart, until Cappy’s shouts of ‘Wake up Janner, wake up’ ended her misery. Cappy claimed these nightmares were due to a persecution mania caused by Nana’s unkindness to her as a child, a fact not corroborated by our aunts.

  Then there was Barney’s dream, an eerie howl curdling the blood like the wail of a lost soul. Leaping out of bed we ran to shake him awake where he slept curled in his basket by the passage radiator. Josephine says he was reliving the terror of his fall over the Cornish cliffs, but I have sometimes wondered whether this howl was connected with the meningitis he suffered after his distemper.

  Bluebell’s end haunted me as well as Christine – her cries as the fox took her and the empty nest next morning among the periwinkles in the garden, those cold eggs. If only we had made her sit indoors … So we learnt early that our mistakes could lead to death. And that tragedy of all kinds could come at night. I think these experiences may have helped to set Christine and me apart from other children in an England less violent than now. Certainly, behind our slowness and apparent thick-headedness were minds struggling to come to terms with a cruel fate which struck the Mr Sheas and disabled Kews of our world, not to mention a gaunt woman with a huge goitre who stood at her gate most days, staring across the road with large unseeing grey-blue eyes in a face the colour of yellowed paper. In comparison with all this, Miss Fryer’s insistence on a straight writing finger was indeed both irritating and insignificant.

  By this time Cappy’s morning bath ritual was well established and we knew that the passage and the bottleneck, which led to the loo and bathroom, must be free of us by the time Cappy finished his early cup of tea. Our bedroom was unheated, so on cold mornings Christine and I dressed quickly in the bathroom, warming our clothes against the hot water pipes, which led directly from a large unlagged tank, before dragging them on. Absent-mindedly I sometimes then, as now, wore my sweaters inside out – a lucky omen, it was said, so long as you didn’t change them before midday – or back to front. Then, all too soon, Cappy’s voice bellowed, ‘Is it clear?’ And scurrying into our bedroom we replied, ‘Yes, all clear,’ and he limped along in his pyjamas and we waited for the roar of rage which would thunder through the house if we had mistakenly left any of our clothes in the bathroom – once he threw an offending garment out of the window. But we didn’t care because, it was only Cappy in a temper again, making a mountain out of a mole hill, something we were frequently urged not to do.

  Anyway, now that we knew for certain that he loved Josephine best, we twins had subconsciously started to distance ourselves emotionally from him. Sometimes after the clearing of the passage we would see, as we wandered in the garden, Cappy’s hot bath water gushing down the wall from the overflow pipe, for he loved deep baths. If, on the other hand, Winnie, or her successor, had failed in their job and the water was cold, breakfast became a very disagreeable meal. Mamma offered as usual to speak to the culprit again. The heap of bills in
brown envelopes seemed higher, the aggrieved silences longer. Then after Cappy had finished his shredded wheat, whose colour matched his moustache, the next crucial moment came as he picked up a spoon and chopped the top off the first of his two boiled eggs. At seven I, who had once longed for a hard-boiled one, held my breath. Would the egg be right with its white beautifully set and its yolk runny? Or wrong with a soft white or hard yolk? If it was right, silence followed while the important matter of eating continued. If wrong Cappy flung down his table napkin and shouted ‘She’s done it again,’ and Mamma reiterated a long-worn promise to speak to the cook. Cappy then made do with toast and at eight-fifteen donned a bowler hat and left for the London train on the first lap of his journey to a job he hated. I think in the end I came to despise Cappy for his rages, and he knew it, and sometimes they diminished his always fragile self-esteem. Once, at the height of a family quarrel, he shouted to Mamma, with a male’s natural inclination to blame the nearest woman in any argument, ‘Why don’t you manage me?’

  I am sorry now that Mamma never talked to us about Cappy’s arthritic pain and the after-effects of one of the cruellest wars the world has known. I believe that, since we were not hard-hearted, such an explanation could have entirely changed our attitude to Cappy and made his life happier. But I may be wrong because we might have sounded patronising and Cappy scorned pity and needed to feel the strongest of us all. Indeed, one of his frequent declarations in times of family discord was, ‘I will be master in my own house,’ an irony since The Grove could not have been bought without Cannan money.