There were several things about Wychwood which remain indelible on my mind: getting up early to play tennis with Diana, sitting on the swings taunting our classmates who were attending a singing lesson in the Hut. (We were excluded from such lessons for previous bad behaviour.) Being called before the senior girls for the way we left the bathrooms after we had used them; looking down before muttering that we should have used a swab, sensing the hidden laughter in their eyes. I can never forget the hollow feeling inside when I looked at a geometry exam paper and realised that I couldn’t answer a single question. Nor the joy I felt when I gained an A for an essay entitled ‘Rain’. The longing for Friday, which never left me, and eating cress I had grown for tea. And the thick green knickers we wore with white linings inside. I remember making a green snood to wear in my hair and waiting for admiration in vain. I recall asking Josephine’s friend Tony Craker what she thought of me, and her reply, ‘You’re bumptious’, which left me flummoxed. I cannot forget devotedly making Mamma a pyjama case in sewing class, laboriously blanket-stitching the edges, then embroidering JMP-T on the front. I gave it to her and waited for a rapturous response. It was not forthcoming. Did she hate it? Or was she already worried by such unswerving devotion, or thinking of what the materials had cost her, or simply tired at that moment? I shall never know.
When we were not visiting Mr Bruce on the way home, we had tea with Nana who now lived in rooms in Summertown. Granny had given her furniture and I remember a large Victorian wardrobe too big for her small bedroom and a Heal’s bed with a caned headpiece. But before we had tea we would visit the little antique shop on the corner. We hunted for bargains there and Diana bought a little hunting crop, as they were called before they became hunting whips. We bought a picture there too which now hangs in Josephine’s house.
In winter Nana toasted bread for us on a long fork in front of her fire, and boiled a kettle on it. There were always cakes from Oliver and Gurdens’ for tea and with a roaring coal fire one was never cold.
Sadly I feel my short stay at Wychwood only increased my feelings of inadequacy as an individual, though not as part of the Pullein-Thompson clan. Perhaps if Diana and I had not stayed at home so often, we might have done better, but I doubt it. I think a one-to-one approach and a great deal of encouragement might have helped me, but it was not available and besides Mamma did not think education really mattered. As it was, when I left Wychwood for good I can recall nothing but joy in my heart.
Chapter Six
Christine
One of the happiest moments of my youth was when Mamma called us to her bedroom and said, ‘I have something to tell you which will please Christine most of all – we’re going to Scotland for a whole month.’
Though Scotland had been part of me for so long, I had never been there and I still cannot recall my feelings at that moment. I had pretended to be Cluny and Macduff and fought their battles against my sister’s heroes. I had loathed the dirty Campbells and admired the Macdonalds so cruelly massacred by them at Glencoe. I had learnt Scottish poetry and sung Scottish songs, and now at last I was going to Scotland. The news was overwhelming. Even so, I do not remember saying much. We were brought up not to be effusive, which Cappy considered behaving like a foreigner. (It took me a long time to discover how wrong he was and that a simple thank-you is hardly ever enough.) So probably I just looked happy and cried, ‘Hurray’. But whatever I said my heart must have been pounding with excitement, while my mind was already reciting Scottish poetry. We were going for the whole of September 1938.
Once again Bowley and his family were to look after the house and animals, and this time the dogs were staying behind. There were four of them by now, and Darkie the wolfhound would take up the whole back seat of the car. We were not hiring a caravan; a cottage had been rented near Arisaig. The fact that we were all to miss nearly three weeks of school didn’t deter any of us, least of all our parents. War was brewing, but I did not know it then, nor did I know that six long years would pass before I had another holiday.
It had been decided that while we were in Scotland Mamma would finish her novel and Cappy would do the cooking. Mrs Macdonald, a lady of great charm whom we later persuaded to teach us a smattering of Gaelic, would do the housework. So without Denis, who was holidaying elsewhere, we set off in high spirits. We spent our first night at the Lockerbie House Hotel. Cappy, forever worried about money, had booked us rooms in the basement which were cheaper. It was the first time I had ever stayed in a hotel – on previous holidays we had always stayed in boarding houses or a caravan – and it seemed very grand to me. The next morning we had a large breakfast in an impressive dining room before setting off for the Highlands. I cannot remember where we stopped for lunch but I recall being tremendously impressed by the desolation and grandeur of Glencoe. I had read so much about Scotland and gazed so often at the watercolour painting of Eigg and Rhum by Granny, which hung in the nursery, that I felt as though I were returning home. By evening we had reached Achateilasaig, the grey, clean, spartan cottage which was to be our home for the next four weeks. It looked out on to a grey, green Highland sea. A black and white cow was wandering slowly across white sand, while birds wheeled calling in an empty sky. The only other house was the farmhouse nearby.
It was to be an unforgettable holiday. As agreed, Mamma worked on her novel in the mornings, while Cappy did the cooking and the shopping. Loving rice puddings, he made one every day, and there were trips to Mallaig to buy the kippers there which he insisted were the best in the world. We shopped in Arisaig as well where Diana and I were shocked at the price of apples, to which we were addicted, and which now took all our pocket money.
After a week, our parents sent a premeditated telegram to Wychwood which read: ‘CANNOT RETURN HOME. CAR’S BIG END GONE’. (The big end was an important part of a car in those days.) On returning to school we were asked why there were no garages in Scotland – a difficult question to answer!
We had brought our folbot canoe with us and spent many happy hours paddling between rocky islands in a quiet sea. Of course it rained, but it was warm Highland rain and we swam with it falling on our backs. Sometimes Josephine and I caught cuddy fish for breakfast which Josephine, intending to be a vet and not being squeamish, gutted. One morning Mamma and I left the canoe beached on the grass above the sea. Next morning it had disappeared and though we searched and searched we never found it.
When questioned, the locals laughed at us, saying that a hater of foreigners had thrown it into the sea or that it had blown away and was now ‘awa’ to the Isle of Skye.’ Either way it was gone for ever.
In the afternoons we went on expeditions. We stared into the deep, dark waters of Loch Morar and ran across the white sands of Arisaig. We climbed the hills hoping for a glimpse of Roshven, the place where Mamma had spent perhaps the happiest days of her childhood. Situated in Moidart, one of the wildest parts of the Highlands, Roshven had belonged to Mamma’s great-uncle, Hugh Blackburn, a retired professor of mathematics, and to his wife Jemima Blackburn, a well-known painter. But it was their daughter, Lady, whom the Cannan girls loved. She let them run wild amidst the heather and taught them to row and all the other things town children never learn, like how to tie a reef knot and use a penknife. They rode the Highland ponies, and the donkey Rosie, whom they soon considered theirs. The post came by pony. There were thatched cottages with earth floors, and picnics on Goat Island. And they must have climbed the mountain after which the house was named.
In Aunt May’s autobiography Grey Ghosts and Voices, published posthumously, she wrote: ‘The Roshven boat with four men in red shirts, blue coats and tarn o’shanters with red bobbles came up to the head of the loch to meet us. The Railway stopped at Fort William then, and we drove in a wagonette from there to Inverlott.’ She was four years old at the time. Later she wrote: ‘If it was too stormy for the boat, the ponies came over the hill and, clutching a bag with your night things, you rode.’ She called life at Roshven ‘heave
n’.
Mamma had talked often of Roshven, telling us how the piper there had played to them on their arrival and again on the night before their departure, ‘Lochaber no more,’ and, ‘Will ye no’ come back again’, beneath their bedroom window. To us, addicted to the old days, a house which you could only reach on foot or by horse or boat, without electricity or telephone, sounded like the house of our dreams. So soon we were climbing higher and higher into the hills hoping for a glimpse of Roshven, while Cappy, unable to keep up with us because of his hip wound, stayed by the car smoking his pipe.
But to no avail. Every hill seemed to lead only to a higher one. While I climbed I looked also for Cluny’s Caves, in particular for the one called, ‘the cage’ where he was reputed to have hidden Prince Charlie and which is so vividly described in Robert Louis Stevenson’s book Kidnapped.
Soon Mamma’s novel was almost finished and we were growing weary of Cappy’s daily rice pudding. We had almost given up hope of ever seeing Roshven when we had an unexpected stroke of luck. One evening as the shadows lengthened and September was about to give way to October, a caravan arrived and was parked in a nearby field. At first it seemed like an intrusion, for its owners were obviously English, while we throughout our stay had become steadily more Scottish.
‘Tourists, interfering foreigners,’ we muttered scornfully. But Cappy had better ideas. The owner of the caravan was a Mr Carr. ‘Carr’s biscuits,’ suggested Cappy hopefully, and hastily made friends. Then, ingenious as ever, he persuaded Mr and Mrs Carr to share the cost of a motorboat to take us all to Roshven. I don’t know what he said, maybe he simply suggested that they might enjoy a trip around the loch. Anyway, a few days later we set off in a hired motorboat with its owner to see the house of our dreams.
The sea was choppy, the boat’s engine stuttered and spluttered and gave out a terrible smell. I was beginning to feel distinctly sick when at last we saw Roshven, the mountain, the house and behind it the wild hills. The boat stopped. We jumped out and ran up a shingly beach. It was a moment I will never forget. It was so wild and beautiful, without road or electricity – the olden days suddenly in front of my very eyes. Mamma had not been back to Roshven since the death of Hugh and Jemima Blackburn, when the house was bequeathed to a cousin who had grown up in Canada. Their daughter Margaret (Lady) went to live in her house in Edinburgh. Peter Blackburn and his wife had been left the estate but no means for maintaining it, so Peter, who I believe had farmed when in Canada, needed to make Roshven pay. He bought tractors and tried modern methods – which meant that there was no work for many of the people who had laboured there all their lives, and they had to go. Hating changes, Mamma and her sisters had never been back to Roshven. Not until now.
We found the house empty, blind behind its shutters. The square, a yard with stables and a cow byre which Mamma had remembered with such affection because the Highland ponies and Rosie had lived there, was now overgrown and empty. The peaches and the arum lilies, which Mamma said had flourished because there was no frost, had gone too.
‘It’s all so much smaller than I remembered it,’ cried Mamma in anguish.
The Carrs picnicked. Wandering around, we met a few elderly inhabitants, who remembered Mamma and embraced her. At some time we ate our lunch. We could see Goat Island and, in the distance, Eigg and Rhum, and Loch Ailort where it reached the sea. It was Prince Charles Edward country, and it was there in 1883, while being rowed on Loch Ailort by Roshven boatmen and listening to their sea shanties, that Harold Boulton conceived the words for the ‘Skye Boat Song’.
Was Mamma disappointed by the visit? I think she must have been. Over the years it has strengthened my feeling that one should never return to a place beloved in childhood. The time came to go back. I don’t think the Carrs made any comment as we climbed back into the boat and set off across the water for Achateilasaig. Someone must have talked to the owner of the boat, but I can no longer recall what was said. Mamma was pensive. Roshven must have been full of ghosts for her; but at least the quest was over.
Soon after our visit to Roshven, it was time to return to England. I do not remember much of the journey home. I think by this time we were ready to pick up the strands of our ordinary lives again.
Nothing had changed when we reached The Grove – no animals had died, no disaster had struck. The Bowles’s friendly faces were there to greet us. Our beds were made up. I do not think I was perturbed at being nearly three weeks late for school. Whatever our parents decided I still considered right, however inconvenient; besides I hated school, so any time away was to be celebrated. And if nothing else, our Scottish holiday must have proved to our parents that we could exist for a whole month without a single ride, so might never become the horsey bores they so feared.
We were soon back in the saddle and by the next summer we were riding further and further to horse shows. On one memorable occasion we rode many miles to a training stable near Chaddleworth in Berkshire, which belonged to the parents of Josephine’s schoolfriend Eleanor Dawson. To us the stables there appeared immensely smart, with rows of superior loose boxes, grooms and thoroughbreds. Our ponies Penny Wise, Milky and Rum were soon turned out and they did look like poor relations compared to the many well-bred horses looking at them so keenly over their loosebox doors.
Mamma arrived in her car, bringing food and a tent as well as blankets. We erected the tent in a field in the shadow of the grand house and the stables. Watched by amused grooms, we cleaned our tack. I cannot remember what we ate that evening, but as darkness fell we discovered that Mamma had taken back home the blankets meant for us. So, wearing pullovers to keep warm, we lay down covered with our one blanket, a horse-rug which smelt deliciously of horse. Later we were woken by a raging thunderstorm. Josephine says that at some point a fraught governess appeared and persuaded us to sleep on a verandah. I can only remember the thunder and lightning and the rain lashing our tent.
Next morning we groomed our ponies, and in the early light they still looked very plain, with their hogged manes and pony features, compared to Eleanor’s and her brothers’ well-bred mounts. I suspect that our clothes were not up to scratch either. But I pushed all this to the back of my mind. I believe the grooms helped us groom our ponies, still with amused faces. I think the sun shone. I tried to feel hopeful, but the fences in the ring looked enormous and our rivals appeared unbeatable in their shiny boots and well-cut jackets.
But, as in the best pony books, we triumphed. Watched by Mamma, Josephine jumped off repeatedly against Eleanor’s brothers and won. Milky was given a medal for the Best Trained Pony. Penny Wise excelled in the gymkhana events. The expressions on the grooms’ faces changed; it was obvious that never in their wildest dreams had they expected long-backed Rum ridden by Josephine to beat the home horses. Loaded with congratulations and bedecked with rosettes, we rode home through an evening which became night before we saw the welcoming lights of home ahead of us. I suspect we walked on foot some of the way leading our mounts. I remember riding through Gate Hampton and Goring Heath and that the ponies were tireless. And although we had probably ridden more than forty miles in two days and competed in a show, they were none the worse for it. But perhaps most importantly we had proved something to ourselves, which was of lasting importance – that you don’t need expensive horses and grooms to win, that you can do it on a shoestring.
There were other triumphs. We became smarter. Milky and Rum wore rugs now with P-T on them. We wore riding coats which fitted. People started calling us the P-Ts and groaning when they saw us arriving at shows. Rum jumped better and better and we gradually became experts at the Handy Hunter class. Winning does not endear you to people, but at last we had found something at which we could succeed, and Diana and I needed success – me most of all, if I was ever to emerge from my personal feeling of inferiority. We did not know then that in future years we would be actually holding our own horse shows at which a very small Alan Oliver would compete, looking tiny on huge much-marti
ngaled horses, and Henry Wynmalen and R. S. Summerhays, the editor of Riding would judge.
But, long before this we held dog gymkhanas in the Top Meadow. The first one was rather disorganised. I believe either Miss Lawrence or Christina Edwards-Jones judged it. There was a jumping class for dogs under eighteen inches and one for those over, a flat race, and best-trained dog classes. Josephine says Cappy organised an owners’ race at one of them, which she won, to everyone’s surprise; but sadly, because she was family, the prize had to go to Claudia, an acquaintance, who always seemed so much tidier and self-contained than us. I remember there was much growling and snarling, and dogs who ran away and wouldn’t come back, but thankfully no dog fights. Mrs Mooring, who for some time had mended our socks for fourpence a time and who lived in a tiny cottage with a dour husband and a daughter who was our first pupil, sewed the rosettes. Any profit we made was intended for the RSPCA, but I’m not sure that we made any.
Diana
Reading my sisters’ recollections, I recognise again how selective my own memory is. I cannot, for instance, recall the blood in the foul-smelling farm drains on our caravanning holiday, nor emptying the latrine bucket, although I would have certainly taken my turn, nor the ganging-up against me mentioned by Josephine. What did I do when I was the odd one out? Often I must have wandered around playing my beloved mouth organ (no doubt to everyone’s irritation): ‘Loch Lomond’, ‘The Isle of Capri’, ‘Daisy’ and ‘Goodbye My Bluebell’.
Fair Girls and Grey Horses Page 21
