Fair Girls and Grey Horses

by Christine Pullein-Thompson

  In later years Diana’s chickens and donkeys became a less important part of her farmyard, and my dairy herd diminished. Captain Alec Horseshoe and the other two started a riding school and ran horse shows. But strangely in all the years that we played with our farms, none of the three main characters ever married or had a girl friend.

  I don’t think I read much until I was twelve or thirteen. Children’s books of the time were not very exciting. Besides I found it difficult to sit still for long, unlike Josephine who always seemed to have her head in a book and refused to play anything but farm animals, and whom Diana and I were soon calling ‘Bookworm’, for we enjoyed playing on the lawn, jumping on imaginary horses over a course we set up, for hours on end. One day we followed this by running into Henley and back, a distance of eight miles, just to prove that we could do it. We were incredibly healthy at this time; but I don’t remember thinking of anything beyond Scotland and horses. I don’t even remember education being discussed, but I do recall Mamma saying, ‘If anyone asks you what you are going to do when you are grown up, say, marry a rich husband.’ We all knew a lot of poetry, and when we had less help in the house and sometimes washed up in the evenings, we would talk in rhyme all the time.

  Diana and Christine with their first horses

  When we were younger we had run round and round the nursery table singing hymns at the top of our voices. Now we recited poetry instead, (something I still do for comfort in moments of stress). Diana learnt the whole of ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’, and Scottish ballads were a great favourite with Diana and me. Mamma believed fervently that ‘One crowded hour of glorious life is worth an age without a name’ and also that ‘They are not long the days of wine and roses’.

  As Diana has written earlier, Mamma had been reading poetry to us since infancy: ‘Drake’s Drum’, ‘He Fell Among Thieves’ and ‘The Fighting Téméraire’ by Henry Newbolt were great favourites. Personally I was much inspired by the lines in ‘Horatius’ by Lord Macaulay which run:

  And how can man die better

  Than facing fearful odds,

  For the ashes of his fathers,

  and the temples of his Gods.

  But Mamma did not only read warlike poems; there was ‘Fidele’s Grassy Tomb’ and ‘The Lady of Shallot’ which seemed to last for ever. And G.K. Chesterton’s marvellous poem about a donkey, which ends with the evocative lines:

  Fools! For I also had my hour,

  One far fierce hour and sweet:

  There was a shout about my ears

  And palms before my feet.

  One called ‘The Canadian Boat Song’ by an unknown poet, which begins: ‘From the lone sheiling on the misty island, mountains divide us and a waste of sea …’ And so many more.

  She would tell us the parable of Martha and Mary when she thought we were working too hard, or recite ‘Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.’ Mamma was witty too and I remember when someone said to her, ‘I never have time to read because of the mending,’ she replied, ‘I never have time to mend because of the reading.’

  As we grew older we had poetry readings when we chose what we would read. I remember Diana reading poems by Emily Brontë and Josephine reading those haunting lines from ‘Oleanders’ by Humbert Wolfe: ‘Rosebay, rosebay where are your roses now?’ (In later years her eventer, whom we bred ourselves, was to be called Rosebay.)

  Often I chose to read Yeats. ‘When you are Old’, and ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ were two of my favourites. I remember Mamma saying that Cappy had read poetry when they were engaged but stopped once they were married. Certainly he preferred playing cards with us to reading poetry. But like Mamma, and perhaps because he was a vicar’s son, he could quote long passages from the Bible. Sadly, as the years passed I saw Cappy more as an ogre than a friend, which was unjust for he was the first to leap to our defence in any dispute. I remember when I must have been in my early teens Cappy saying, ‘I want “He was a bloody fool, but he did his best” inscribed on my tombstone.’ I’m sure he longed for someone to say then, ‘Darling, you are not a bloody fool,’ but no one did.

  Once he related that after lunching with a business acquaintance at the Metropole Hotel at Brighton, he called for a taxi and the taxi door was opened for him by his estranged brother Edgar dressed in the uniform of a commissionaire. In a fleeting second he decided that Edgar would not wish to be recognised in such a lowly situation and so he ignored him and passed by without a word, but forever after he wondered whether he had done the right thing. I do not think any of us offered an opinion for, though Edgar was Diana’s godfather, we hardly knew him, though we were aware that he had lost all his money in the crash in the ’twenties.

  Although we had a small but charming spare bedroom which looked out on the stables, we did not have many people to stay. Aunt Dot’s son Charles came. Older than us by a few years, he impressed me by learning to ride Countess in a few days. When Cappy paid us to collect round pebbles for the steps he was building into the ha-ha, Charles always made the most money – it was the same with blackberries. Josephine says that Denis and Charles once carried her around the garden in a sack and that she was infuriated and deeply humiliated by the experience. I can only recall her red face when they tipped her out at Mamma’s feet as she sat on the lawn.

  John Gardner, the well known musician and composer, another cousin, this time on the Pullein-Thompson side – sometimes stayed when Denis was at home. The house seemed full of laughter then. Once John and Denis walked through the streets of Reading pretending that one of them was blind. I don’t think anyone was taken in; maybe they laughed too much.

  Paulla, Charles’s younger sister, often stayed with us in the war; but as her visits grew longer she lodged with Joan, because Cappy could not tolerate a guest in the house for more than a few days. Paulla soon became a talented rider and later jumped Tarragona at local shows with great success.

  When bombs were falling on London, Georgette Heyer sent her son Richard, now an eminent judge, to us for the summer.

  Richard had wonderful manners but I think was always hungry. He did not like riding and must have found us the most terrible bores. I recall that once he ate the best sandwiches at a Horse Show before we had a chance even to look at them, but having been brought up with the laws of hospitality ringing in our ears, we said nothing. Granny stayed sometimes, too. Mamma, nervous that she would tell Cappy that he was not keeping his wife in the way in which she had been accustomed – something she had said to Uncle Percival – would rise early on these occasions and make exotic dishes which she would then claim had been made by our daily help of the moment. Granny adored Mamma; all the same I found her visits fraught. She seemed distant and I don’t think she had any inclination to get to know us. She was not a cuddly granny and I cannot remember ever talking to her or her to me.

  By this time Granny had ceased to rent Highclere, and Nana had retired as her housekeeper which she had been more or less ever since we left Wimbledon, though with Granny in the south of France much of the year, she had sometimes spent more time at The Grove than at Highclere.

  Granny had provided a pension, as was the custom then, but it must have been a dreadful moment for Nana. We and the Cannan girls had been ‘her babies’ ever since she was twenty-four. She was now seventy and destined to live for more than twenty years. Until now she had never needed nor wanted friends; her charges had been her life. She was given the choice of living in Oxford or near to us in Peppard. She chose Oxford which was closer to her relations and a place where she had spent so many happy years with the Cannans at Magdalen Gate House. Highclere was cleared. But first Nana had her pick of the things there, or maybe certain items had been allotted to her. Either way, she took Granny’s cane-headed bed which had originally come from Heal’s in London and been one of a pair. She took chairs, one with the arms of Trinity
College underneath its cover, and a chest of drawers and a fine wardrobe, and a pretty sofa and much else besides. They were a little big for the two small rooms she rented in Summertown, Oxford, but no doubt they made them feel more like home.

  We all hoped that Nana would make friends at Oxford, but she soon fell out with her relations. Jim’s old Nanny, probably encouraged by Aunt May, tried to make friends with her, but Nana did not wish to be befriended, least of all by a Nanny whom she had always despised for holding opposite views to hers on the upbringing of children.

  As well as the two rooms Nana rented, she had use of a kitchen and a bathroom, never an ideal arrangement and one which soon caused difficulties, resulting in her doing little cooking for herself.

  Aunt Dot had Nana to lunch on most Sundays and also visited her in Summertown. Whenever we were in Oxford we visited her too. Later during the war years when at last we had money in our pockets from giving riding lessons, we took it in turns to spend several hours with her each week, often accompanying her to the cinema and theatre. Sometimes we had to queue endlessly for buses to return home: I would read the tiny pocket dictionary I took everywhere with me. And at least once a year Nana spent time at The Grove with us. All the same she did complain that she was lonely and that sometimes she did not see a soul for days. In later years she confessed to going to Christ Church cathedral – ‘Not for the service,’ she would add hastily, ‘but for the singing.’ Sometimes we would walk round the colleges with her and while she told us how it had been in our grandfather’s day, and about the famous people who had lived there, a crowd would collect around us, delighted to have a free guide.

  One summer at The Grove when one of us was hosing a swollen hock which belonged to a temperamental thoroughbred mare called Bittersweet, she came out of the house in her slippers and said, “Ere, let me do that, you’ve got better things to do.’ Reluctantly the rope and hose were handed over to her; but there was no need to worry, horses saw Nana as firm and trustworthy, and Bittersweet was not at all perturbed by the sudden change of handler.

  Sometimes I hear Nana’s voice echoing down the years, shouting, ‘I might as well speak to that there wall as speak to you.’ But as a mother does, she forgave us all our misdemeanours and left everything she had to us in the end. Her bed went to Josephine because, in Nana’s words, ‘She had never had a decent bed to sleep on.’ (For years Josephine had been obliged to sleep on the last cook-general’s bed, which had a dip in the middle.) We all had some of her jewellery and a share in the few Government securities which remained from those bought with the thousand pounds Granny had left to Nana in her Will. Her funeral seemed like the end of a chapter in our lives, a very long one going back as far as I could remember.

  I like to think that we all owe something to Nana. It’s true that she was cruel to insects, unlike Mamma who called earwigs her brothers and gave a name to a beetle which crawled across the drawing room carpet at the same time each evening – Emily. Nana taught us not to whine, to eat what we were given, to read and write, to sew, to climb stiles and walk for miles without complaining. She was always the same, her views on life unalterable. Of course she over-dressed us in our early years and over-fed us too, except for Josephine who resisted. With Nana around I, for one, always felt secure, and unlike modern nannies she demanded little, neither car nor television set nor their equivalent then. Legend has it that when our parents were particularly hard-up, Nana worked without wages for weeks without complaining, a thing impossible to imagine happening today.

  Josephine

  Mamma’s next two novels, North Wall and Underproof – published in 1933 and 1934 – both expressed disillusion with the modern world. The death of the old order, the war and depression had produced a less principled generation and perhaps this, she suggested, was to be expected, for peaches do not grow on north walls. Though the south of France and a less romanticised view of English country life had added to her backgrounds, I don’t think either of these rather gloomy books did well.

  The parents’ rows about money grew in intensity. When Denis was at home I always assumed that he was in charge, but when he was at school I felt that it was my duty to listen. As soon as the row began downstairs in the parlour I would creep out of my room and station myself on the top stair. Denis tells me that he sat there too, and once, hearing divorce mentioned, he rushed down shouting ‘No, no, no.’ Another time, when older, he intervened. My role was always passive. I found it hard to grasp exactly what the rows were about, but the voices, unfamiliar in their anger, proved that the parents were not to be trusted and I felt that my presence on the stairs might avert some unimaginable catastrophe.

  As well as the family rescues that Diana has written about, Mamma’s diamond necklace, which, she told us, was to pay for any operations we might need, vanished without comment and her letter from Rudyard Kipling was sold shortly after his death.

  I suspect that it was this constant need for money which caused her to embark on her first thriller. The hero, James Raeburn, educated at Eton and Oxford, was a mountaineer of some repute. Mamma had climbed with her father, his friends and her sisters on holidays in the Lake District and in Switzerland. She loved mountains and used her experience in a number of books, giving exciting and very detailed accounts of climbs. The romance of mountaineering was passed on to us. In the hall, among the umbrellas and walking sticks, were two ice-axes and she had also kept a climbing rope. I would gaze reverently at the magical red thread which ran through it, giving, she explained, the strength that held the roped party together when a climber lost his or her footing.

  The Hills Sleep On, set in the Himalayas, was the first of her books in which I took an interest. Every day at lunch-time I would dash into the parlour and read the latest instalment right up to the piece on the typewriter. ‘James’ did make money, the agent sold an option on the film rights for a thousand pounds, and the publishers produced three impressions in a year. Mamma reduced the overdraft, paid the bills, bought a motor mower for my father, a large refrigerator for the family, and spent twenty-five pounds on Rum, a sixteen-yearold mare, for herself and Denis to ride.

  The second ‘James’, set in Brittany and published in 1936, was dedicated To Josephine Pullein-Thompson. A Candid Critic. So I suspect that my interest must have become tiresomely carping. A Hand To Burn did not have the success of The Hills Sleep On, but from the research trip to Brittany which Mamma and Denis had made with Granny, they bought the red trousers worn by the fishermen of Concarneau, and a length of the same cloth to make shorts for the twins and me. So for the next year or two we were all dressed in the romantically fading red of Brittany sailcloth.

  Although I made no protest, I felt that Mamma’s ‘Jean’ books, which Cappy read aloud to us, were too young for me; after all we had had Jean’s adventures and moved on – I preferred to read about James. And there was a feeling of discomfort when Mamma, protesting that hearing her work read aloud set her teeth on edge, fled the parlour.

  According to Mamma, the ownership of a refrigerator ended our childhood bilious attacks, but it was Rum who changed my life. She was fourteen hands, two inches in height, a red roan with black points and on her forehead a small, white crescent moon instead of the usual star.

  Josephine on Rum

  Nothing to look at – she had an imposing front but was hollow-backed and her body trailed away to weak quarters, topped with a ‘jumper’s bump’ – but she was possessed of great character. She could give kisses, by stiffening her rather bristly upper lip, but when we became too demanding and she tired of a row of upturned faces all calling ‘Kiss me, Rummy,’ the kisses would become increasingly rough and perfunctory. She also used her ‘twitch lip’, as we called it, for opening doors and gates and for investigating likely-looking sacks. She was a thief and, if the granary door was open, would seize bags and sacks in her teeth. Once she cantered across the orchard spilling nails from a purloined paper bag. She loved jumping, adored hunting, but was bored by hackin
g. When slipping and stumbling along the road in a geriatric manner, the appearance of a horseman in a scarlet coat would transform her, instantly, into a prancing steed with shining eyes.

  All the spaniel puppies but Pippin had found homes. I don’t know why he was rejected, perhaps it was his lack of a white waistcoat, but the parents decided to keep him. This turned out to be a mistake, because the inevitable jealousy between father and son soon developed from growls and snarls into dogfights. We became experts at separating them, but once they fought in the back of the car and Diana’s hand was badly bitten. Barney had always been the most genial of characters – it was assumed that he would greet burglars with a wagging tail – but Dinah, belying her meek appearance, would slink up on the postman and deliver a sharp nip, and Pippin seemed to have inherited her aggression.

  Mamma acquired an Irish wolfhound. Darkie had been a champion show dog who, on retiring from the ring, had failed to breed and the owner of the kennels wanted a good home for her. She was a very inconvenient dog but Mamma became deeply devoted to her and, writing a short story about a wolfhound for one of the women’s magazines, announced that she was endowed for life.