By contrast the treasure-hunts were enormous fun. Polly would produce a list of perhaps a dozen highly specific objects for us to collect: a curl from Mrs Williams’ poodle; the smallest horse-shoe in Mr Page’s forge, an envelope with a tuppeny-ha’penny stamp and so on, and send us off on ponies or bicycles in teams of two to scour the neighbourhood, with a promise of a treat for whoever got back first. In this way she could secure herself an afternoon’s freedom, and no matter how humdrum the treats turned out to be, we competed for them keenly.
Judging from photographs, it must have been the summer holiday after my first term at Old Dalby that a freakish accident altered my appearance for the worse. Though the nose I was born with had never looked likely to rival Cleopatra’s, up till then it had been the standard type and size from Mummy’s side of the family – what one might call the Elephant’s Trunk model, rather long and slightly retroussé – sported by my brothers and sisters.
Visiting the Wye Valley that summer was John, our first cousin once removed, being the son of Granny’s brother Geoffrey Lawrence, who had recently presided over the international court for the trial of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg.
Since his uncle – and our great-uncle – Trevor Trevethin was at the time Chief Scout for Wales and never (as we have already noted) fully at ease with children, he had summoned John to help him entertain several troops of Scouts who were holding their annual camp in the Abernant meadow. Naturally enough, John soon gravitated towards Chapel House. Though hardly taller than me, he was in his teens, and as the former owner of Mincepie he was a glamorous figure in my eyes, so I keenly undertook to show him the garden and all our favourite haunts.
He was bouncing a golf ball off walls and paving-stones as we wandered here and there, and presently began throwing and catching it against the big wooden doors of the garage.
‘Can I have a go?’ I nagged.
‘Catch!’ He threw the ball to bounce off the door at an angle. I grabbed at it, missed, and it struck me sharply on the nose.
‘Butter-fingers,’ he laughed. ‘Are you all right?’
My eyes were watering, but I attempted a devil-may-care grin. ‘I’m fine,’ I said and we wandered on to look at the tennis court.
As the week went on, though, my nose felt increasingly sore, as if a boil was brewing in its tip. We spent the Scouts’ last evening eating charred sausages round the campfire, finishing with a rousing singsong, and it was when I squeezed through a wire fence on the way home, just touching the end of my nose against the top strand, that I felt a sickening pain.
Mummy rushed me to the doctor, and then down to Cardiff for an operation, but the damage was done. The golf ball had broken my nose and the bone was so badly infected that the surgeon had no option but to remove the end of it, leaving the kind of squashy blob one associates with prizefighters. Antibiotics were still at the cutting edge of medicine in those days, seldom used on children, but I was lucky to have a go-ahead surgeon who boldly blitzed the infected bone with penicillin, thereby saving the bone above the break.
‘That’s all we can do until she’s stopped growing,’ he told my parents. ‘We’ll have another go at it when she’s eighteen.’
Although that seemed immeasurably far away, it was comforting to have a plan to repair the damage, so that I could say, when people asked curiously what had happened to my nose, that it was going to be properly mended when I was eighteen. During the intervening years I don’t remember feeling much embarrassed by its odd appearance, and Daddy made me laugh by quoting the young man of Redcar, Who had a most terrible scar. ‘My face I don’t mind it, For I am behind it. It’s folks out in front gets the jar!’
Back at Old Dalby for the autumn term, we found great changes as the whole household geared up for the hunting season. Being a mere seven miles from Melton Mowbray, fons et origo of the smartest pack in the Shires, most meets in the Quorn’s Monday country were within easy hacking distance for our ponies and, being keen to encourage the young entry as the sport got back into its stride in those early post-war years, from highest to lowest the hunting hierarchy gave us children every help and kindness.
Quorn, Sherby Crossroads, Taffy, the entry in my hunting journal for December 3rd, 1948 is headed. Meet held in brilliant sunshine. Moved off to draw Ragdale Wood… very soon there was a view holloa from the other side. However, I saw the fox and tally ho backed him and we waited for ages. Then with no warning the fox broke cover and soon the whole pack was after him. A nice well-laid fence was the first jump and Taffy and Arctic took it abreast. Hounds checked after a wild 15 minutes and worked slowly towards Hoby, when Hubert holloaed him and we galloped on. Tessa and I were together going down a field when we suddenly plunged into a vast and muddy ditch. Tessa got out quickly and helped me for I was deeper in, though she lost a shoe and I didn’t. We hopped over a small gate and hedge before the fox went to ground in Curits (sic) Gorse. It was one of the runs of the season.
Famous coverts: Ragdale, Hoby, Curate’s Gorse… the crème de la crème of British foxhunting, and all on our back doorstep. Glamorous ladies riding sidesaddle in full war-paint, veil, topper, and beautifully cut habit would call, ‘I know a way round!’ when they saw a fence too big for our ponies to jump. Major Aldridge the Hon. Secretary would solemnly collect the half-crowns which was all we were charged as a ‘cap’ and tell us we were the ‘best people in the hunt to give them in.’ It was kind Major Aldridge, too, who sometimes deliberately made a hole in a hedge so the ponies could hop through after him.
One way and another, I can see now that we were grossly overindulged – for Polly and Hubert’s sake, no doubt – and it is no wonder that a somewhat complaining note pervades my hunting-diary recording the days Taffy and I had with the Puckeridge Hunt during the Christmas holidays. The country was flat, the plough heavy, the wind bitterly cold, the only obstacles blind ditches and, far from being an amusing novelty, pushy little girls on hairy ponies were regarded by regular subscribers as, frankly, rather a nuisance. Come January and the start of the Spring term, I was only too glad to return to Old Dalby and the Quorn’s charmed circle.
I was also vaguely conscious of stresses and strains within our own family that winter. With four children to school and rear, money was fairly tight, and the family budget wholly reliant on Daddy’s salary as a partner in Trower, Still, and Keeling, the firm of London solicitors for whom he worked. Being a friendly, gregarious person – ‘Colonel Barstow is so jovile,’ a small friend of Olivia’s once wrote in a thank-you letter – he had settled very happily into Much Hadham life. There was cricket in summer, with his former batman, Cope, the star of the team, and shooting parties in the winter. There were concerts, and amateur dramatics, and a year-round carousel of birthday, anniversary, dinner and cocktail parties.
Now he was back in harness with an easy daily commute to his handsome ground-floor office looking out on the green lawn of New Square, Lincoln’s Inn, with interesting work and agreeable clients as well as colleagues, he was perfectly happy to stay put. We didn’t own Gaytons, so the rent was effectively money down the drain, but one day in the dim and distant future he would inherit Chapel House, and that would be time enough to start thinking of moving back to Wales.
He had also discovered many kindred spirits both among Much Hadham’s Old Guard who had lived there for years – Normans, Beddingtons, De la Mares, Kemp Welches – as well as all the younger, less Hertfordshire-rooted families with commuting fathers and children of school age. Although the village was deep in the country, communications were good, and it was easy enough to pop up to London for the theatre or dinner at the Garrick Club. One way and another, he felt he had fallen on his feet.
Mummy’s viewpoint was rather different. She was tired of cosy, gossipy, cheek-by-jowl village life.
A longstanding joke among villagers concerned the supposed rivalry between the owners of the four grandest houses:
In the villages you know and I know,
Someone is
always the Squire,
(began the opening song of a fund-raising revue put on by the self-styled ‘Hadham Follies’ in 1949)
His house is much bigger,
His face and his figure
Proclaim that his status is higher.
But that isn’t the case in Much Hadham.
It doesn’t apply here at all
We have lots of large places
And eminent faces
At The Lordship, Moor Place, The Palace, The Hall.
The skit went on to poke fairly affectionate fun at quirks of the four pseudo-squires, but it was the final verse that really hit the spot:
Oh, fortunate folk of Much Hadham,
With four of a kind you’re supplied.
Our vices divided, our faults coincided,
Our virtues by four multiplied.
Give thanks for the blessings we bring you
Our foibles, though comic, are small,
If you’re ever in trouble
Just come, at the double,
To The Lordship, Moor Place, The Palace, The Hall!
That was the problem in a nutshell, as far as Mummy was concerned. Between them, these families ran the village. They sat on the Bench, organised fetes and fund-raising, read lessons in Church, chaired the PCC and, crucially, they owned the land, which they had no intention of selling off in dribs and drabs. It wasn’t as if they didn’t welcome newcomers and make use of what talents they had, but until someone had lived in the village a long time and thoroughly understood its dynamics, there was no way he or she could exert much influence.
After seven years of frustrating scratching around to find grazing for her ponies, and without a single field she could use as she pleased, Mummy longed for broad acres of her own. She had taken a correspondence course in agriculture, and become fascinated by the new breed of farming specialists and entrepreneurs, clever, educated men, scientifically literate, unfettered by tradition, who were changing the face of farming. Monoculture, intensive rearing of livestock, high-tech nutrition, economies of scale were the new buzzwords. Always an enthusiast, she longed to be part of this farming revolution, which promised fortunes to be made by those quick and clever enough to get in on the ground floor.
Money was the problem. Even if the land had been available, buying a few hundred acres in Hertfordshire simply wasn’t an option. Casting around for something more affordable, she heard of two farms for sale in Radnorshire, and persuaded Daddy to look at them. One was on good red soil and in pretty sound nick, but with only eighty acres. The other was called Fforest Farm – well named, too, since Fforest in Radnorshire does not mean woods, but a place where nothing much grows, and in 1948 its four hundred acres of sour, boggy land were in the last stages of neglect and unproductive decrepitude.
However, it had possibilities. The farmhouse was substantial, and it had a romantic history which greatly appealed to my parents, having been built on the site of Colwyn Castle, from which the Norman baron William de Breos had subjugated William the Conqueror’s rebellious new subjects on the Welsh Marches. His wife, Maude de Ste Valerie is still remembered in local legend, and a large rock near Painscastle, another de Breos stronghold, is known as ‘Moll Wollby’s Stone,’ having allegedly been removed from her shoe and tossed from one castle to the other.
At Fforest Farm, some of the ancient square-cut stones from Colwyn Castle had been incorporated into the house, and it was still surrounded by the remains of a dry moat. The farm had grazing rights on the hill and was, besides, only nine miles from Chapel House
Back and forth swung the debate. The Brunant was a compact, credible working farm which might even, given good luck and good management, be run at a profit. The Fforest looked like a black hole of effort and expense but, no matter what follies and mistakes the apprentice farmers made while learning their craft, whatever they did there must be an improvement on its present condition. In the Spring of 1948, my parents decided to rent it for two years with an option to buy if they managed to raise a mortgage, and on the first day of the summer holidays Mummy and I forded the Wye on Micky and Taffy, and rode over the hill from Chapel House to inspect our new domain.
CHAPTER FOUR
Fforest Farm
‘THERE IT IS – look!’ said Mummy, pointing from the top of the hill.
I was short-sighted though no-one had yet suggested that I needed specs, and stared vaguely round for something resembling a farm. ‘Where?’
‘Straight below the wood. The house is to the right.’
Viewed from above, the Fforest looked more like an extension of bleak, barren moorland than a farm, not at all what I had expected from her enthusiastic descriptions, and my heart sank.
Only one field was fenced or even recognisable as pasture. The rest was a greyish khaki patched with gold-tipped rushes and great swathes of dull green bracken. Overgrown hawthorns and brambles showed where there had once been hedges. Black pools of stagnant water spilled out on either side of the stream that bisected the land laterally, and the presence of a second brook was suggested by a line of alders on the far side of the road that ran past the short drive up to the tall grey house. Coming straight from flourishing well-maintained Leicestershire farmland to this bleak example of the Welsh Marches at their most impoverished was quite a shock.
Radnorsheer, poor Radnorsheer,
Never a park, and never a deer,
Never a squire of five hundred a year
But Richard Fowler of Abbeycwmhir
Grandfather used to tease his friends across the river from the relative affluence of the Breconshire bank. Never had the lines seemed more appropriate.
It was a damp, sticky, muggy July afternoon. The sweating ponies fidgeted and tossed their heads, longing, as I did, to get somewhere cool and dark where the horseflies could not torment them but Mummy, surveying the view with pride and pleasure, seemed in no hurry to move.
‘Well? What do you think?’.
‘It’s lovely,’ I said wanly, forcing the words out through my bitter disappointment. I had hoped for – even expected – something completely different, a pony-mad child’s paradise with flat ground for schooling and long grassy gallops, plenty of stabling and above all, lots of obstacles for Taffy to jump. Building cross-country fences was my major obsession. I searched for and collected poles and cast-off tyres, and painted oil-drums in red and white stripes. Where once I had looked on wooden hurdles or stray bits of four-by-two as useful for making rabbit runs and hutches, now I saw them as potential jump-material and in imagination had already constructed a sort of mini-Badminton course at Fforest Farm.
Just a few months earlier, Mummy had fired this ambition by hiring a caravan and taking Gerry, Olivia and me to the first running of what is now the world’s most famous three-day horse trials. We had parked in the avenue leading to the kennels of the Duke of Beaufort’s hounds, who serenaded us with melodious baying, slept three in the caravan’s very small double bed, kicking and complaining all night long, and watched in awe as super-schooled, superfit horses galloped and jumped an amazing variety of obstacles. Mummy had even encountered the Queen and Princess Margaret in the archway leading to the Orangery and, despite her surprise and corduroy trousers, managed to drop a respectful curtsey. It had all been very relaxed and informal. Ever since I had dreamed of having my own cross-country course (a good deal smaller, naturally) and inviting Jo and Cilla and Tessa to come and stay, bringing their ponies– a dream that now evaporated like a puff of smoke.
In silence therefore, mouth tight shut against the flies, and I’m afraid in no very good temper, I dragged open the disgraceful hill gate and followed Mummy down to the farm.
Mr and Mrs Davies, and their daughter Eva, thin as a rail from doing all the work, outside and in, were waiting to welcome us with tea and Welshcakes. As Mummy went inside, I got a glimpse of a dark, gloomy parlour, with a stone-flagged floor.
‘Put the ponies in the shed,’ she called over her shoulder.
Whi
ch shed? The muddy farmyard, fringed with nettles, broken implements and bits of rusty metal, was surrounded by sheds and barns in a state of advanced decrepitude, and dominated by a vast, sprawling midden which steamed gently despite the muggy afternoon.
I pulled open one shed door after another, but either they were deep in muck or full of sacks and bales. At the far end of the yard, backing on to the moat, I found some depressed-looking cows chained to stanchions, and beyond them an empty pen with a broken hayrack, into which I managed to lead the suspiciously snorting ponies. The door had been much chewed and there was no bolt, but I found some twine and tied it shut. Micky greedily stuck his nose in the manger, whereupon a hen which had been nesting there suddenly erupted in a cloud of squawking feathers. He shot backwards in alarm, knocking over a stack of tins, put his foot through the reins which I had failed to knot up properly, and snapped them near the bit. It was all a far cry from Badminton.
Nor did it get any closer to that ideal when the Davies family moved out to their modern bungalow on Hundred House Common, a couple of miles away, and plans for altering and rebuilding were discussed and drawn up. With so much to do to the house, there could be no question of moving immediately from Much Hadham, so my parents decided to install a bailiff who would take over the day-to-day running of the farm in the more habitable rooms to the left of the staircase, and spend most of our school holidays camping by the Colwyn brook while building work started on the house’s righthand side.
Any thoughts I may have had about galloping Taffy about the hills from dawn to dusk that summer were swiftly dashed. In Radnorshire child labour had survived the Victorian era – schoolchildren of all the local farming families worked in the fields – and Mummy thoroughly approved of it. The trouble is that the jobs you can entrust to children are usually tedious, repetitive, mind-blowingly boring, and hard on the back, and stone-picking – or ‘pucking’ as it was known – fulfilled all these criteria.
My Animals (and Other Family) Page 10
