Fair Girls and Grey Horses

by Christine Pullein-Thompson

  If clearing the air is, as some counsellors suggest, a sensible way of keeping human relationships happy, I was handicapped from the first. Disdaining rages and often incapable of saying what was wrong, I sulked when offended. I sulked so badly once that Mamma, shouting ‘I’m tired of your beastly, gloomy face!’, threw all the table mats at me one by one and, she said laughingly afterwards, I just stood there without making any attempt to protect myself. Sometimes, filled with remorse, I left a note on Mamma’s writing table – never Cappy’s – saying Dear Mummy, I’m sorry I was cross today, and, although she never mentioned them, I felt an apology had wiped the slate clean.

  The dogs were a great emotional stand-by. When overtaken by the nobody loves me syndrome, you turned to Barney. You stroked his lovely, dark fur and he licked your hands and offered his paws until you felt better.

  In 1935 or thereabouts Mamma began writing A Pony for Jean, which was to start a new genre in children’s books. Up to now pony stories had been written with the pony as the central figure. But this story is told by Jean, who cares for horses more than anything else in the world, and turns the thin, discarded pony Cavalier into a winner.

  Every Sunday evening Gappy read to us the latest chapter in the book in typescript and, although the character of Jean is mainly based on Mamma herself, we claimed it also contained the nicest part of each one of us. Many of our animals are there with different names: Barney and Dinah as Shadow and Sally, Freddy, our second gander, now called Harold and our dear goose, who hatched her eggs every year amongst the violets, as Edith. And there was Bluey, too, Christine’s alarm clock, not working very well after being dropped over the banisters. And Jean, like us, had come to the country after her father lost money in business. Mamma dedicated the book partly to us as follows:

  For all children who ride; all children who would ride if they could; but especially for those intrepid though unorthodox horsewomen, Josephine, Diana and Christine.

  A Pony for Jean is beautifully written – ‘A little piece of literature’, commented one reviewer – and its style and story captivated us, for now, as we contributed to The Grove Magazine, we were beginning to see ourselves as budding authors. Words had become important. And Cappy read well, passing round butterballs when his throat got dry, so that we looked forward to the evening and the next instalment. Soon after A Pony for Jean was finished he started on the next one, We Met Our Cousins, which is set at Roshven in the Scottish Highlands and was more about Mamma’s childhood – she had unsympathetic cousins – than ours. ‘Cannan can write the heads off almost all her rivals,’ enthused a critic. ‘Here is a book that neither child nor adult can set down, bubbling with humour, packed with adventure, marked by the keenest observation.’

  Another Pony for Jean followed the next year. In this story Milky appears as a bucking grey mare called Charity, and Jean tries to make a henhouse, which collapses – a minor disaster which happened to Mamma herself in Wimbledon when, like her eponymous heroine, she burst into tears. Only Mamma was grown up and watched by her small son, Denis.

  We loved Sundays, because of the readings and in summer the ice cream man, Eldorado or Walls, who pedalled to our gate ringing his bell. Usually we had the cheapest, a penny water ice in paper, no wafers, and occasionally a twopenny, creamy vanilla ice cream.

  We were never taken to church, except on Armistice Day, when Cappy wore his medals and prayed, I suppose, for his comrades who had died in the First World War. Once, I remember, Mamma and I were next to a refined lady who sang ‘O God Our Help in Ages Past’ in such a high trilling voice, laced with gentility, that we got the giggles. It was awful. The vicar, a handsome man in early middle age, was known in the village as Gentle Ernest, because of his quiet and tranquil nature. When he bought himself a small car, the villagers took advantage of his kindliness, and, although he had lost an arm in the war, constantly asked him to drive them here, there and everywhere. No doubt they thought their requests were reasonable, but in the end they became too much for Gentle Ernest, who, unable to say no, sold his car in self-defence.

  Sometimes when the sound of the church bells travelled across the fields and Spring Wood into our garden, I wondered whether we ought to be there, but Mamma advised us to be ‘Blue Domers’ – a term which I thought was widely accepted, but I believe now was invented by her. ‘It means,’ she said, ‘that you worship under the blue dome of the sky rather than in church.’ This suited me well, since I had chosen ‘There is a Green Hill Far Away’ as my favourite hymn, because of the hill rather than the crucifixion.

  Nevertheless our conversation was littered with proverbs and biblical quotes and there still lurked in the back of my mind the thought that God sees all and would punish me for my misdeeds.

  But high spirits and giggles were endemic at The Grove. ‘Beware of the female nude,’ Mamma cried, stealing across the grass on the nights we slept outdoors. And then we hid our faces, but she wasn’t naked, only flimsily clad. Her words were a joke, which became a ritual. The villagers claimed that summer had only truly arrived when the Pullein-Thompsons moved their beds out onto the lawn. Mamma and Cappy had camp beds, but we children shoved our horsehair mattresses out of the windows and made them up with sheets and blankets as though we were indoors. The dogs and their baskets came out, too. We chattered for a bit. Then, snug and warm, we lay counting the stars until sleep came and sometimes we heard the hooting of the owls and the birds’ first songs and felt the dew on our cheeks. One of my most abiding memories is the smell and texture of damp Witney blankets under my chin. They were very thin, because we had picked off most of the wool for those little fluffy balls Christine has described, and they had tapes on them saying First Housemaid or Parlour Maid or Cook, because they had been bought originally for the Magdalen Gate House servants some thirty-five years earlier. Later Rupert Brooke’s ‘and the rough male kiss of blankets’, in his poem ‘The Great Lover’ struck a chord, for although I in no way shared his sensuality, he was right; the feel of the blankets was male rather than female.

  Sometimes the weather broke in the middle of the night: someone shouted ‘It’s raining,’ and we pulled ourselves out of bed and dragged our mattresses – now damp, for there were no groundsheets underneath – up the stairs, remade our beds indoors and fell asleep almost at once. Other times we woke when the dogs barked at the postman, who politely averted his eyes, and then the puritan work ethic which had somehow taken root in our beings would make me feel guilty. Why were we not up, too? How awful to be caught sleeping so late.

  When it was very hot Mamma packed a picnic and Cappy drove us to Shiplake church and parked where it said NO PARKING and opened a gate which said PRIVATE and we walked down to the towpath to swim in the Thames, along with the spaniels.

  We always picnicked in the same spot in a thistle-ridden field, close to where the cows stood, keeping cool, in a shallow inlet. By now we could swim breast-stroke and on our backs and we could tread water. The river was narrow enough here for us to swim to the far bank, rest awhile and swim back. When Denis came he sometimes chased and caught us among the thistles, and then dropped us into the river, and he taught us all the honeypot jumpins Josephine has mentioned.

  It was lovely to be cool, but sadly, stuffed in the car with three dogs, we always grew hot again during the four-mile drive home and then I longed for a river at the bottom of our garden and saw myself padding barefoot into the house still cool in my deliciously wet swimsuit.

  When Christine and I were eleven, we came, with Josephine, to an arrangement with Mr Sworder out of mutual need. We needed ponies to ride: he needed riders to show off and school the ponies he bought to sell. If we could get more than the asking price for them we kept the change.

  Mr Sworder was a greengrocer by trade irredeemably drawn to horses, although we never saw him on one. He especially loved carriages of all sorts and sizes, which he bought in large numbers in the thirties – probably Milky’s phaeton was among them. He kept these beautiful reli
cs in his yard at Crowthorne, Berkshire, because, I believe, he could not bear to see them broken up; an admirable sentiment which made him rich when war came and people turned back to horse-drawn vehicles.

  His appearance did not suggest such good taste. A short, rotund figure, usually in a checked suit complete with watch chain, brown-moustached and pallid, Mr Sworder, who was nobody’s idea of a horse dealer and indeed knew little about horses, came to play an increasingly important part in our lives.

  ‘Going to gay Paree?’ he would ask Mamma before ‘gay’ became a euphemism for homosexuality, when we met him by chance at Reading’s monthly horse sale, which we visited sometimes with horror and fascination. Knowing that Mamma stayed sometimes with Granny in France, he would buy her a revolting ‘cup of real French coffee’, and we children ice creams.

  This monthly sale of horses was presided over by a terrible red-faced, beer-bellied man called Wilkins, who held a stockman’s whip in his coarse right hand and lashed any hesitant, frightened or stubborn horses with it as they were trotted up and down to show their paces to prospective buyers. Wilkins took no account of the animals’ age or condition, indeed the lash fell hardest on the starved, old or lame, and each blow seemed to lacerate my own heart. I hated him, but did nothing. It was a grown-up world, which did not in those days listen to children. Outside the great shed in which the horses waited to change hands were the cattle pens, where farmers moved calves from place to place by hitting them on their noses with sticks.

  Mr Sworder, however, was of a different ilk. He sometimes made growling or shooing noises to persuade a horse to sharpen-up his paces or walk up a trailer’s ramp, but I never saw him carry a whip or stick.

  The first pony he brought us was Rainbow, a sweet, unbroken mare under twelve hands, whose colour was hard to specify, for she was a mixture of chestnut, bay, brown and dun. We consulted what books we had on breaking-in ponies, backed her carefully without mishap and, because she was small, we schooled her meticulously as a beginner’s pony, teaching her not to jump or run away when we dropped sheets of corrugated iron behind her or let newspapers blow around her feet.

  One cold morning we were surprised to find the hair on Rainbow’s legs and fetlocks lightly singed and realised that she had ingeniously and endearingly slept on the ashes of a bonfire to keep warm. After two months we sold her reluctantly for five pounds more than Mr Sworder’s asking price, and opened our first bank account. Mamma, who now described us as ‘horse copers’, put some of the people who came to see Rainbow into her book They Bought Her A Pony, and the remark by one that riding was a ‘social asset’, became another quote to be giggled over. Other ponies in need of schooling followed one at a time.

  Of course, sadly, all the Sworder ponies had eventually to be sold. Parting with Rainbow was fairly easy, because she was too small for us, but it was harder with the others. Later when we started the Grove Riding School we were able to buy those we liked by instalments, but in the meantime we had to cope with the heartache of frequent partings. Worst of all, Mr Sworder sometimes sold his ponies to unsuitable people and afterwards we lay in bed at night worrying about their future.

  In 1937 Josephine moved into Winnie’s room and a new influence entered our lives when Joan Harris, who was seventeen, came to work in the house. Joan was the plump brown-eyed daughter of a handsome gamekeeper and a loving mother. She lived in Shiplake Bottom, and her aunt, pretty, aristocratic-looking Phoebe Harris whose face was like porcelain, lived in a cream-painted cottage opposite the Kews and took in our washing. Joan’s only sister had died when eleven in 1934 from diphtheria. Her elder brother, Jim, a plumber, had developed lead poisoning, which turned to TB and killed him in January 1937 at the age of twenty-three, leaving just one brother, Pete (who became a gamekeeper). But, despite these tragedies, Joan had an unquenchable, earthy and often ironic sense of humour. She was calm, with a slow, unconsciously seductive smile. Mamma liked her immediately and, after a happy and pleasant job interview, Joan left gaily, only – she laughingly relates now – to be bitten on the back of her leg by Pippin as she went through the gate. She didn’t complain. She had fallen in love with The Grove. Dogs were dogs. And she had taken to Mamma, whom she was to hold in deep affection for the rest of Mamma’s life.

  Cheerfully, Joan arrived on foot every morning at seven-thirty and left at six. She cooked breakfast and lunch, put tea on the dining-room table and prepared dinner before she headed homewards. An avid reader, who particularly liked Mamma’s novels, she quickly became a friend who joined in our joys and sorrows.

  Soon the kitchen became a place where we could all meet together for elevenses, consuming slices of the Kews’ delicious warm lardy or dough cakes, the like of which I have never found elsewhere. Here Joan later opened our eyes to another world, as we listened to stories of doctors who dallied drinking sherry with rich patients while those who paid fourpence a week into a panel to secure health care anxiously waited for a visit; we learnt of men who beat their wives after having ‘one over the eight’ on a Saturday night, and of frightened women who went to a chemist in Reading to buy a bottle of purgative to abort their unwanted babies, and much else. And when home from school Denis would sometimes sit in the kitchen talking to her as she cooked.

  Joan had a way with men, too, which, combined with her habit of politely answering criticism back, ensured she managed Cappy – a bonus for us all.

  Since the age of six we three had covered pages of lined paper in our sixpenny Woolworths’ exercise books, with everything which caught our imagination or infuriated us. When in 1933 Mamma decided that the best of our work should be included in a Grove Magazine, she was following a family tradition; for in 1911 and 1912 two of the Cannan girls, with Carola and Dulcie Oman and several school friends, had produced a magazine, called Inter Multos. This lively handwritten enterprise ran to ten numbers and was eventually bound in two volumes by the Oxford University Press. Mamma, who contributed many drawings, was at first Sporting and Literary Editor, and later Editor-in-Chief, and Carola Oman, who clearly had a penchant for painting in watercolours, was Artistic Editor. Along with May, a future poet, they also wrote prose and poetry for the magazine and Dorothea, Mamma’s eldest sister, contributed a play, but appears to have dropped out in 1912, probably because she had by then become a boarder at Downe House School. All the contributors were dons’ daughters, so it is perhaps not surprising that the writing in Inter Multos is of a high standard for girls in their teens. Nor is it surprising that the three most enthusiastic contributors, Carola Oman and May and Joanna Cannan, were all to become authors.

  Gilbert Cannan had cut his authorial teeth several years earlier with stories in his own family’s magazine, The Star, which his indolent father Henry (our Cannan grandfather’s first cousin) had started, so carrying on a family tradition. I suspect that, although the prime reason for encouraging these magazines was probably educational, the grown-ups also enjoyed having a forum for their own work.

  Christine

  It was not difficult for us to find material for The Grove Magazine. Since we were six years old we had been attempting to write books. This is borne out by a letter written describing Mamma’s life to someone called APC – I do not know the purpose of the letter or who signed it. I quote the relevant lines: ‘Incidentally her smaller children spend their time in writing novels, which seem to deal mostly with “the cat is on the mat” and “the cat has caught a rat.” When they have filled an exercise book they insist the manuscript must be typed just like mother’s. And there is always a scene of tearful disappointment when they find how small their book is.’ The letter is dated February 1932, and could have been to Doubleday in the USA.

  As Diana writes, The Grove Magazine was Mamma’s idea. Now, more than fifty years on, reading the three volumes published between 1933 and 1940, I am impressed by our grasp of words at such an early age, how opinionated we were, and how little our views changed between those years. Mamma typed all the magazines but did
n’t correct our grammar. Denis supplied illustrations for the first two.

  Josephine edited the first Grove Magazine. She contributed more to this than to the two later ones. In her article ‘What Children should be fed on’ she begins, ‘I am sure no children like rice pudding,’ and later adds, ‘pancakes are very good for children,’ and more in the same vein. She also writes on ‘Poultry Management’, which is full of sensible advice. Diana contributed ‘The Brave Old Days of Old’ which begins:

  In the brave old days of old,

  Everyone was bold.

  Now everybody runs away even this day.

  My piece called ‘Modern Houses’ states, ‘Modern houses are very nasty inside, don’t you think so?’

  Then there is Josephine’s philosophical ‘Today’s Great Thought’. ‘If machinery had not been invented, it would be the brave days of old, so in the future there will be a curse on engineers.’

  Diana’s ‘In Olden Days’ was probably her first complete story. Because of this I include its first lines:

  IN OLDEN DAYS By Diana Aged 7 or 8.

  I was born in a country called Scotland. I was named Joanna and I was a dog and my master was James and his son was called Christopher and had a pony.

  We lived in a thatched cottage, and in that time people smuggled. One night some smugglers came and stole me and took me on a ship. I had never been on a ship before, but James had told me what it was like so I knew that I was on a ship, and that they were smugglers.

  After a bit I was taken to the Captain. He was a very stern man. He had a good look at me and smiled and then said, “That’s a good dog.” I was a puppy and not used to this.

  Diana also wrote an article called ‘Animals’ which appears mainly concerned with which ones are useful – it seems we were very keen on practicalities at that time. I contributed a short piece on school: ‘School is beastly especially Miss Coopers. You learn nothing. They are very sloppy indeed. Children ought to be taught well, else not at all. Schools would be better if they were kept warm in winter.’ Miss Coopers was of course Highlands School and it was not surprising that we learnt ‘nothing’ since Diana and I spent most of our time in disgrace reading in the cloakroom. The best of our poems in this volume is I think Josephine’s ‘Captain Ren’, which I include in full: