by Dirk Bogarde
A bit later on, just before we went to bed, we were allowed to go and see our mother in her room, which was all shadowy and very nice looking, only she seemed a bit miserable and hadn’t got any make-up on, which looked sad too. But she said she was really quite all right, and that she would just have to stay in bed for a few days so we’d have to take over all her responsibilities and look after Cousin Flora and make her feel doubly at home. So we promised we would, and was it all right about going to the cottage for Christmas, and she said yes it was and that we’d go down with Lally on the Green-Line bus, which was terrifically exciting, and she and our father would drive down later on in time for Christmas Eve anyway. Then she seemed a bit weary, and kissed us, and said to be good and help Lally and above all make Cousin Flora feel that she was really and truly wanted.
‘How can we do that?’ said my sister. ‘Make her feel we really want her?’
‘I don’t know. Tell her, I suppose,’ I said.
‘But then she might think that if we kept on telling her we did, that we didn’t, mightn’t she?’
‘Well . . . you could give her something of yours that you really liked. I mean that would prove it.’
‘What sort of thing?’
‘Well . . . that doll of yours, Annabel Lee with the long legs. That.’
My sister gave a terrible screech. ‘I love Miss Annabel Lee! She’s my very favourite, Aunt Freda gave her to me! I couldn’t.’
‘It would show Flora that you wanted to make her welcome.’
‘But how would she know it was my very favourite thing?’
‘You’d say it was. She’d know.’
‘And what would you give her then? You’d have to give her something too, your most favourite thing.’
‘I’m a boy. She wouldn’t like my things. Girls don’t, you know that. You don’t.’
‘Well . . . I quite like your Jesus and his Mother. Everyone likes them. You give her them, why not?’
‘But they’re sacred! I couldn’t give them away!’
‘Give her your Jesus and Mary, and just see how happy she’ll be. That’ll make her feel very welcome and wanted. And holy too.’
It gave me a bit of a fright when she said that, so I just finished my Ovaltine and didn’t say anything.
‘A silence?’ said Lally, coming into the morning room where we were having our supper. ‘Something’s up, out with it. What are you two up to?’ She had two fat rubber hot water bottles in her arms, but I knew they were not for us. They were to air Flora’s bed. She was sharing my sister’s room, which used to be our nursery until I was given my own room because Lally said I was growing up and it wasn’t suitable. That’s why I had to have my bath separately too, which wasn’t as much fun at all, but quite decent really.
‘I was just telling him that if he wanted to make Flora feel really happy, and that we were longing for her to come and stay with us, he ought to give her his Jesus and Mary off his silly old altar,’ said my sister and slid out of her chair pretty quickly so I couldn’t hit her.
‘Well, there’s a thing!’ said Lally in pretend surprise. ‘And what, pray, do you think your cousin will want his Jesus and Mary for I’d very much like to know? I’m not sure if they really go in for that sort of thing in Scotland. Come on now, off to bed, I’ve got a lot before me one way and another.’
‘Anyway,’ said my sister, ‘she probably wouldn’t because he’s made Jesus all muddly. He painted him with a black beard and fair hair – that’s silly. And he’s given Mary terrible pink cheeks and feet, she looks awful – ’
‘You just shut up! And M.Y.O.B.,’ I said, because I was suddenly feeling pretty cross and a bit fed up with this Flora.
‘Now then!’ said Lally, hitting me on the head with one of the hot water bottles which was a bit hot. ‘No more of that or I’ll have that Mr Hitler up to see you off, the pair of you. All you have to give your cousin is good manners and a nice smile and that’ll do.’
‘I don’t think I’ll give her anything at all,’ I said. ‘Well, not at first, not until we know if she’s brought us anything for Christmas.’
‘What a horrible-minded child!’ said Lally, and started clearing up our supper tray. ‘Be off with you, I shan’t tell you again.’
‘If she does bring us a present,’ said my sister, tying her dressing-gown cord tightly round her waist, ‘bet it’ll be flat. They always are from Scotland. Flat.’
‘This minute, Maddemoselle, if you please!’ said Lally crossly and dropped one of the Ovaltine beakers, and it broke.
‘Oh, bless my sister’s cats!’ she cried. ‘Now see what you’ve made me do! I’m at the end of my patience. Off! Hop skip it upstairs, and not a sound when you pass your mother’s door or you’ll wish you’d been born next year!’
Flora had fair hair, quite short, in a fringe, and laughed a lot. She wore a kilt on best occasions, with a huge great safety pin stuck in it and a hairy purse on a chain round her waist called a sporran. But all she had in it, that I ever saw, was one little glass black cat for luck and three pennies. When we met her at Euston Station, she was wearing her ordinary school clothes, so she was just like anybody else. She just looked a bit peculiar in her best, in the kilt and the sporran and all her frills, if you weren’t used to it . . . and quite a lot of people in the streets weren’t and once a man called out something rude about bagpipes and she stuck out her tongue. Which was pretty terrible, but no one said anything. I mean Lally didn’t, because she said she’d been ‘insulted’.
Her rather grumpy brother Alec wore a kilt too. We saw him in it once when he came to stay with us on his own. He was a bit older than me, and bigger, and we all had to go to a terrible children’s party in fancy dress where you had to walk hand in hand, if you were two, or just alone, in a long wobbly line with a band playing something potty like ‘In a Persian Market’, and people gave you marks for the Most Original Fancy Dress, or the Most Beautiful or something. It was really awful, I can tell you. Except to our mother, who simply loved it. I think that the children’s parties at the Lodge were her very favourite thing. I suppose it was because she had once been an actress, so she could do a bit of showing off because she made all our own clothes, and designed them herself, although Lally said she didn’t really know a needle from a bodkin.
Anyway, that time my sister went covered in bunches of glass grapes wearing a silly pair of string sandals with a wreath of vine leaves in her hair which prickled like anything. And she was called ‘Bacchanti’. And I had to wear a really quite stinky old fur rug tied round me, and the same kind of sandals, and carry a wooden sort of flute thing which was all pretend really, because our father had made it for me with some wire and a broken bit of fishing rod. I mean, it didn’t play or anything, it was just for carrying. And I was told I was a Greek shepherd. It was really terrible. And what made it more sickening than anything was that boring Alec just went in his ‘best’, I mean his kilt and a velvet jacket and a lot of silver buttons. I was pretty fed up because I smelt so rotten. It was quite an old goatskin thing my mother had found in our father’s studio, and it tickled as well, and I was all tied up in it like a parcel, with bits of thick string. And what made it worst of all was that Alec won. Of course.
I mean, honestly! Getting first prize for wearing your own clothes!
But it was a bit funny later because they made him have a ride on the pantomime horse, all round the ballroom. It wasn’t really a horse, you know, it was only two men in a sort of spotted suit with a huge hee-haw head and a funny tail, and Alec went red in the face, and wouldn’t. Everyone laughed and pulled him, so he had to get on, but you could see he was pretty fed up and had to hold on terrifically tightly because actually what they were trying to do was to bump him off and make him look silly. And then they did a stupid sort of pantomime dance all round the room, and everyone cheered and clapped, and Alec was looking sort of white and pretty upset because he was afraid that with all the bumping he was getting his kilt would blow up
and everyone would see his tartan knickers.
It did. And everyone roared with laughter and waved their arms in the air, which only goes to show that grown-ups can be pretty silly sometimes. I felt quite sorry for him, but I was very glad then that I didn’t win a prize in my goatskin, and I told our mother that if we had to do it again next year I would go as something quite good and exciting. Like a deep-sea diver.
Chapter 4
The night before we had to catch the Green Line bus from Victoria, the packing began. It was all right for Flora because she was already packed on account of coming from Scotland to visit us, so she had an advantage. But she sort of hung about watching us pack our things, which was a bit irritating because she would keep on asking why we were taking this and that just for a short journey and a short holiday. So I just told her to M.Y.O.B., which she didn’t understand until I said, quite loudly so that she did, ‘It means Mind Your Own Business. That’s what it means!’ and she just shrugged and told me not to be so huffy and I nearly hit her with my box of Venus pencils, but they might have got broken so I didn’t.
My sister was putting all her treasures, as she called them, into a little attaché case which our father had given her because the handle had broken. She was a bit silly about calling them ‘treasures’ because they weren’t at all valuable and treasure is. Her things were potty, really a set of cigarette cards of’ Famous Cricketers’ for example, and a mussel shell from the Cuckmere, and a whole set of Tiny Tots transfers which she had never even used because she said it would spoil them if you stuck them on things. Honestly! It was a bit annoying because I had used mine all up, and she had ‘Christian Names’ (and their meaning), ‘Pantomimes’ and ‘Methods of Transport’, and she kept them in a book, but what good they were to her I never could understand because they were all back-to-front. Girls are a bit soppy sometimes.
I just had a rather decent penknife with R.M.S. Majestic painted on it, and my Venus pencils in a cardboard box, quite long, and smelling of cedarwood, a drawing-block I quite liked because it fitted in a jacket pocket and you could do ‘quick sketches’ in the field, our father said – he used one in his war and he was doing serious drawings of fighting in the Great War for The Times, so he should know what he was talking about – and then, of course, top of the list, there were Sat and Sun, my mice, in their neat wooden cage. It had a glass front you could slide out for cleaning, and a wheel, for running, and a little house in the corner where they made their nest. Flora wanted to know why they were called Sat and Sun and I said they just were, and everyone in the family knew them just as the Weekend. She looked very thoughtful. But it shut her up.
They had to live in their cage in the morning room. I wasn’t allowed to have them in my bedroom, worse luck, on account of the smell, which I didn’t mind but Lally and our mother did. When Lally saw me putting newspaper all over the dining-table, as I had to every time I cleaned them out, she made a heavy sighing sound and dumped a big pile of folded shirts and things on the wickerwork chair by the Ideal boiler.
‘For mercy’s sake! What will we do supposing the conductor on the bus says no mice allowed? What then, I would like to know? How are you going to get yourself, and the Weekend, all the way back to Hampstead from Victoria with not a penny in your pocket? Tell me that or forever hold your tongue.’
Well, I knew she didn’t mean it because she knew the Weekend was coming with us and I was going to have to hold it on my knee all the way to Seaford, but she was just being pretend angry and she knew very well that the conductor would be jolly interested in Sat and Sun because one was black and one was white. And if he wasn’t I’d make him, by telling him that he could have one of their babies if he liked, a black or a white, and Lally said, when I told her, that she hoped the Miracle wouldn’t happen on the bus or at the rest-stop because she would have nothing to do with a litter of pink white mice all blind and naked. It was a bit upsetting really, and I was worried that she might be right, and then what would I do? No one to help, and it might be a terrible shock to them. So I didn’t say anything, but just found the Jeyes Fluid and a brush and got ready to do a bit of cleaning before the long journey.
It was pretty exciting sitting in the Green Line bus – we weren’t usually allowed to do this on account of germs and things. But Lally said that in the very cold weather, like December, and with a sharp frost, it would not be so dangerous, the germs would be killed off. So we felt quite safe as we left Victoria Coach Station and went across the river heading to Sussex.
I had to sit beside Flora, which was all right because she didn’t seem to mind about the Weekend on my knees, and Lally and my sister sat together behind us with the attaché case and a little wicker basket in which we knew were the sandwiches, Thermos flask and some fruit which we would have when we got to Felbridge in an hour’s time. About.
It was quite a decent omnibus. It had an orange and brown ziggy-zaggy carpet, so as not to show the dirt, Lally said, and curtains at the windows to keep out the sun if you had to. The people travelling with us seemed to me to be quite all right. I mean, what you could see of them, because they were all wrapped up with woollen scarves, travelling-rugs and tweedy coats. Some of the men wore caps which they didn’t take off even when the omnibus had started on the journey. Quite rude really. But when I looked round at them all, sitting in their seats like brown paper parcels, they all smiled back and nodded at me, which made it all feel rather comfortable. After all, we were all going on a journey, and it’s better to have pleasant people with you on that sort of a thing than grumpy ones. What was especially good was that no one seemed to be interested in the Weekend. I mean, I didn’t show anyone, but no one even looked curious, like most grown-up people do. They were quite busy unwrapping their mufflers and looking for the return half of their tickets, and unbuttoning coats, and that sort of thing. So I just said nothing, only smiled, in case they might decide that there was a funny smell. Or something. You can’t ever be sure. Anyway, there wasn’t. Just the jeyes Fluid.
The conductor was very nice indeed too. I mean, he didn’t say anything, hardly looked at me really, so he couldn’t have seen the cage on my knees, and just asked Lally for the tickets and told her we’d have to change at Lewes.
So that was all right, and when she said that she hoped very much indeed that we could catch our connection from there to Seaford, he said that he hoped we’d get there himself. He hadn’t actually got a connection to catch there but he did have a ‘connection’, if we knew what he meant (which we didn’t), because his sister would be waiting at the bus station for the package he was bringing her on account of not trusting the Royal Mail at Christmas.
‘Oh my word!’ said Lally kindly. ‘You would be vexed should we be late, just as we shall be vexed if we don’t get to Seaford. I only hope you are not conveying anything perishable, like fish or something, that would be very alarming.’
And he just laughed and said, ‘Fish to Seaford is as coals to Newcastle, upon my word!’ and then he said no, he was taking her some special wool for a rug she was hooking to go beside her bed. She’d run out of orange and could only get the true colour she needed in Selfridge’s.
‘Fancy!’ said Lally, not much caring really.
‘Making a sunset effect,’ said the conductor and went away whistling. So that was quite all right, and he never so much as glanced at the Weekend on my knees.
In a while we started off. A terrific swerving, clouds of black smoke, and rows of pale faces staring up as we set off on the journey.
Outside the bus everything was frosty and grey-coloured with wispy drifts of misty-fog floating over the hedges and through the branches of the trees. It looked quite as if someone was cooking a huge cabbage in a steamer, or else boiling up all the household sheets in the copper. Outside looked exactly like our scullery. Only not as warm. There were dribbles of water running down the windows, and the inside of the bus felt really quite cold suddenly, which it would do of course, because we had now left the
city and were out in the countryside. Well, almost countryside. There were rows of houses with sheds leaning against them, or old bicycles, or rabbit hutches, and there were lace curtains at all the windows and pointy gables and titchy little gardens with sundials in the middle or tin baths hanging on the walls. And then, quite suddenly, they began to trail off. The lamp-posts ended, the road got narrower, and all at once we were out in the real country. You could see that easily through the dribbles down the window and the steam bits. I wiped them away with my sleeve, and outside it was all white, drifting mists, black trees and, now and again, a miserable horse standing with bowed head close to the hedges. Sometimes, in a quite wide field, there would be a herd of cows standing together, switching their tails, breathing out snorts of cloud, and then they would all begin to break away and clomp across the frozen grass because a man was coming towards them with a horse and cart full of bales of hay. It was very interesting. If you liked that kind of thing.
Then we got to the rest-stop at Felbridge and that was almost half the journey over. The café was by the side of the road with a big car park for the bus. It was surrounded by sad-looking birch trees and drooping rhododendrons and dead bracken, and everywhere the grass was spiked with ice, or frost. When the bus stopped everyone scrambled off and hurried across the car park to the lavs, and when we got into the actual café it was much better and smelled of varnish and wood and HP Sauce and fried eggs, so that you really felt quite hungry.
It was very warm, and the huge tea urn was hissing away just like a railway engine at a station, but Lally gave me a shove and told me not to dawdle, which I wasn’t anyway, and bagged a table and dumped her wicker basket on the top. She told us all to sit round and make it look full up. Which it was with four of us and the Weekend beside my chair. I was a bit worried that the heat might draw out the smell, but it didn’t seem to, and I had covered the whole of the cage in what Lally called ‘stout brown paper’, so that no one would guess what it had inside. People would think that it was just a plain, ordinary, old brown paper parcel and not get the wind up. You can’t tell with grown-ups.
