My Animals (and Other Family)

by Phyllida Barstow

  There, even her iron nerve broke. She flung up her head and gave a wild whinny that brought the grown-ups out of their bedrooms, then swung round and slipped stumbling down the stairs, skidded across the polished boards of the hall, and disappeared through the front door. She might easily have broken her leg, and I was severely scolded.

  ‘You just don’t think, do you,’ said Polly.

  Even worse was the shameful occasion when, for some reason I can’t recall, I lost my temper with Tessa, wrestled her to the floor of my bedroom and, seizing her by her thick fair plaits, began banging her head against the carpet. The more she screamed at me to stop, the harder I thumped in a berserker display of violence that I could not control. The memory makes me feel quite sick.

  Polly happened to be away, but Miss Smith came to Tessa’s rescue, pulled me away, and told me to stay in my room until she had decided what to do with me. I remember sobbing until the spit in my mouth was thick enough to blow into bubbles, and wondering miserably what Polly would say. In fact, she took it very calmly – partly, no doubt, because she hadn’t actually seen the attack – but kind Miss Smith left on my pillow that night an envelope marked Read, Mark, Learn and Inwardly Digest, containing a two-page letter of sensible, measured, valuable advice on what would now be called Anger Management.

  In the summer term we had the great pride and pleasure of seeing Magic and Mariner, the harum-scarum hound puppies we had ‘walked’ the year before – walking being a purely technical description of galloping frantically after them every time they disappeared after rabbits into the wide blue yonder – win their respective classes at the Quorn Puppy Show but, as the end of term drew near, I blotted my copybook yet again.

  It sounds absolutely absurd, but I persuaded Jo to hide with me under the chintz flounces of the long window-seat in Hubert’s study, where he and Polly used to sit in the evening, in the hope of seeing them make mad passionate love there after supper. We had a long, long wait in dire discomfort, lying cramped on our sides with knees doubled up, listening to the clink of glass and murmur of voices from the dining-room, and serious doubts about the enterprise were already in our minds when at last we heard footsteps approach the study door.

  By then it was too late to abort the operation. We lay doggo, holding our breath. Was the romantic scene about to unfold?

  There was a long silence, broken only by the rustle of paper. Peeking out, I could see Hubert’s polished shoes but not a sign of Polly. The silence went on and on until, predictably, I began to want to pee. In vain I tried all my lasting strategies, but it was no good. My bladder was about to burst.

  ‘Come on!’ I hissed at Jo, rolled out from under the valance and staggered to my feet, hardly able to move from cramp.

  Polly and Hubert were reading newspapers on either side of the fire, and looked up in mild astonishment.

  ‘What are you doing? It’s high time you were in bed,’ she remarked as, feeling unutterably foolish, as we slunk out of the room. The episode was never referred to again, but can’t have enhanced my reputation.

  Near the end of term a few weeks later, Jo and I were in the big square tackroom, cleaning our saddles and bridles before Sandford took the ponies to the station for the journey home. We were talking idly about the holidays, and she happened to mention that next term she was going to share my room with Tessa.

  ‘Then where’ll I sleep?’ I asked, and she looked surprised.

  ‘Oh, but you won’t be here. You’re going to boarding school. Didn’t you know?’

  I hadn’t, and the calm certainty with which she broke the news hit me amidships.

  ‘But – but why?’

  ‘Surely you know?’

  ‘No. Do you?’

  She thought about it, head bent as she polished her curb-chain so I could see nothing of her expression, only her centre-parted red-gold pigtails flicking back and forth as she rubbed.

  ‘Well, yes,’ she said at last. ‘But if you don’t, I can’t tell you.’

  ‘But I want to know. Please, Jo.’

  ‘No.’

  I went on nagging, and eventually she gave an exasperated sigh. ‘Well, OK, but I warn you, you won’t like it.’

  ‘I don’t care. Please tell me.’

  ‘Well…’ She hesitated, then said in a rush, ‘Cilla told Polly she can’t stand you any longer.’

  To say I was flabbergasted is an understatement. I could hardly believe that gentle, slow Cilla, who had so often been the target of my taunts and teasing, should have the power to banish me from this Garden of Eden just by telling Polly she didn’t like me. Couldn’t stand me. It just shows how successful Polly had been in treating us all alike that it was only now fully brought home to me that she was Cilla’s mother, and no mother is going to stand by and see her daughter made unhappy by the cuckoo she has welcomed into her nest.

  So the decision had been taken, my parents contacted, the usual euphemism trotted out. Phyllida had outgrown Miss Smith’s teaching. It was time she moved on.

  And for the past month while I in blissful ignorance had been galloping about on Taffy, bossing the others as usual, thinking myself the cat’s whiskers, Mummy had been frantically writing and telephoning headmistresses of boarding schools, trying to persuade them to take me at short notice by offering to send them Olivia and Miranda as well in due course. She had delayed telling me until she had secured a place at one of them, but thanks to Jo I now knew the real reason behind my banishment.

  It was a shock that changed me profoundly. For the first time I began to worry what other people thought of me, and what they said behind my back. How could one possibly tell? Though I remained au fond the same bossy little know-all I had always been, I adopted a humbler alter ego, and tried to be less contrary and curb my critical tongue. It wasn’t quite a Damascene conversion, and sometimes the mask slipped, but although my improved behaviour must have come as a relief to my parents and siblings, I was too ashamed ever to let on what had goaded the leopard into changing her spots.

  That summer we had a much better organised camp, with big Army belltents pitched among the trees of the spinney flanking the drive, very close to the farm buildings and house where the alterations were now well advanced.

  Since most of the family still spent term-time at Much Hadham, only bringing the younger children and ponies for the holidays, Mr and Mrs Watts were in charge of the Fforest most of the year, and I got the impression that she, at least, resented being superseded when the boss-lady swooped in with orders and new plans.

  It is quite possible that her husband did, too, but the permanently melancholy, downtrodden expression on his sallow face made his state of mind difficult to read. He looked thoroughly costive, and no wonder for – as Mrs Watts revealed in an unguarded moment, and Mummy instantly passed the fascinating information on to me – his bowels moved only once every ten days. Ever after, I could never look at him without wondering if this had been the day or one of the other nine.

  He had been a farmhand working for her father on the splendidly named Pen-ys-yr-plwydd, (which apparently meant nothing more exciting than The Top End of the Arable Land) and was seventeen years younger than his domineering wife. She had inherited the farm and definitely wore the trousers: a strapping, florid woman with a quick tongue and an air of barely suppressed indignation.

  Between them they had produced a single daughter Eunice, a dark, delicate child of about seven. She had her father’s sly, treacly eyes and a wistful expression, and reminded me of an Arthur Rackham fairy.

  Some months earlier, Olivia and I had both been given golden hamsters, which we called Hannibal and Hamelcar. Hannibal soon succumbed, but Mr Ham – as mine became generally known – was a most engaging and enterprising little chap, very tame and with a strong homing instinct. I carried him wherever I went, and so long as I wore my shirt tucked well into my shorts he was perfectly secure, though going to the loo in a hurry was dangerous because it was easy to forget about him. More than once I foun
d him clinging desperately to my shirt, with his feet hooked in the holes of the Aertex, when the elastic snake-belt that supported him was suddenly undone.

  His closest brush with the Grim Reaper, however, occurred one evening at camp, when Mummy had gone to the station to fetch Daddy from the London train, and the rest of us had been chivvied into tidying up for his return.

  It was my turn to empty the bucket of the Elsan, a portable loo which was a great improvement on the Army-style latrine, a stinking trench surmounted by two bars, which we had used (not without a good deal of protest) the year before. A dark brown tarry liquid called Elsanol was sloshed liberally into the bucket to keep the smell within bearable limits, and about twice a week some child was detailed to take a deep breath, pull out the bucket by its wire handle, carry it at arm’s length across the farmyard and empty it on the muck-heap.

  I had lifted the lid and was leaning forward to catch the handle when Mr Ham, with lamentable timing, climbed up to the V of my open-neck shirt and peered out. A second later, to my horror, he plummeted straight into the noxious contents of the bucket, balanced for an instant on the morass of paper and excrement, then vanished below the surface.

  I plunged both hands in, fished around for what seemed an age until I felt something wriggle, and pulled him out, stinking and bedraggled but still alive.

  The car’s headlights were coming up the drive as I rushed with him cupped in my hands into the kitchen tent, which was lit by a Tilly lamp, and started to clean him with a wet handkerchief, but the tarry chemical clung to his fur and I was afraid it would blind him.

  ‘Put him on the table,’ said Mummy, jumping out of the car and instantly grasping the gravity of the situation. ‘Bring me your toothbrush.’

  She sloshed gin into a glass, and very gently sponged poor shivering Mr Ham all over with it, then brushed the resulting sludge off him with the toothbrush, while I stood uselessly by, grizzling that he was going to die.

  After what seemed an age, however, he perked up and opened his bright buttons of eyes. Mummy suspended her cleaning operation and to our astonishment he sat up and began to lick fussily at his fur, possibly enjoying his first-ever taste of the hard stuff. We put him in a nest of dusters, observing him closely all evening, then returned him to his cage overnight. Next day he spent curled in his sleeping-quarters, but by evening was quite himself again, stuffing his pouches with nuts and storing them in his larder as if nothing untoward had befallen him.

  The only long term result of his near-fatal immersion was the loss of his fur, and that was only temporary. A naked adult hamster is a rather revolting sight, but before I went away to school, leaving him in Olivia’s care, he had begun to grow a fine silky coat once more. I hardly need add that never again did I risk taking him to the loo with me.

  That summer I fell in love again, this time with a black, rough-coated Border collie called Scot, with thin legs and a foxy profile, a white bib and one white paw, whom I thought the most beautiful and beguiling dog in all the world. He followed me everywhere, and lay on my campbed at night. He seemed to know what I wanted him to do before I even asked him to do it, whether it was blocking a gateway to stop sheep escaping, or pointing out where the ponies had taken themselves to hide from the flies. If I went where he could not follow – in a car, for instance – he would lie down at the top of the drive, put his nose on his paws, and wait for my return. The only fly in the ointment of this perfect idyll was that he belonged to our bailiff, Mr Watts.

  In retrospect, I can see that it must have been extremely annoying for Watts to have such a vital tool as his working sheepdog shanghaied in this way for the whole of the summer holidays, but at the time I thought him a cruel slave-driver to call Scot away and make him drive sheep here and there when he would rather be with me. No sheepdog can serve two masters, and given the choice between hard work on a diet of flaked maize and milk with Watts, and tins of Chappie and an idle life with me, Scot voted with his feet and began to take his professional duties ever more casually.

  He was only three when I first knew him, but had already adopted the old dog’s trick of using his voice to save his legs. He was far too canny to be blindly obedient, and instead of racing off like a bolt from the blue when ordered to, ‘Get out round!’ a bunch of ewes, he would run halfway then glance over his shoulder for confirmation of the command, and only frenzied whistling and shouting would impel him to keep going in the right direction. Nor did he favour the well-trained sheepdog’s classic technique of snaking back and forth behind the flock, hustling them if they tried to stop and lying flat if they looked like bolting.

  Scot’s method was to bark until they went the way he wanted, and if one ewe split off from the bunch nothing on earth would make him go back for her. ‘Good riddance,’ he seemed to be saying as he trotted bossily behind the ewes he had managed to round up. ‘That one’s nothing but trouble – better left behind.’

  But if his shepherding work was less than perfect, he was a marvel at driving cows, anticipating every breakaway move they might make on their twice-daily trudge from milking-parlour to meadow, and bringing them back to the straight and narrow with a well-judged nip on the fetlock; and he would run tirelessly on the hill behind the ponies – silent, interested, and always there when you wanted him. From time to time as you walked, you would feel a nudge from his sharp nose. Here I am. What do you want me to do? He was the perfect companion.

  Compared to such a preux chevalier, my father’s dogs scored pretty low. Punch and Judy were springer spaniels, liver-and-white, obsessed with hunting, not much use shooting, smelly, disobedient, just the sort of animals that inspired that cruel old couplet:

  A woman, a spaniel, a walnut tree,

  The more you beat ‘em the better they be!

  It wasn’t in Daddy’s nature to beat a dog (or anything else, for that matter), and once they grew out of charming puppydom, they rapidly got out of control. My nightmare was to be told to take them for a walk, because nine times out of ten they would wait until one was well away from the farm, then exchange a glance full of meaning and simply vanish into the bracken. Distant yapping might give you a rough idea of their direction, but you could yell their names until your throat felt like splitting without a hope of getting them back.

  Daddy would say forgivingly that they were probably making too much noise to hear me calling them, but I knew the true cause for their deafness was sheer bloody-mindedness combined with the knowledge that they could run rings round me.

  They also knew they’d be in trouble when they came back. Sometimes a couple of days would pass before hunger drove them to slink back up the drive, their tucked-up tummies and long ears caked in mud, their expressions literally hangdog. They would be scolded if it was Daddy who saw them first, or beaten in a half-hearted way if they encountered Mummy, and put in the kennel to reflect on their sins, but it was never long before their pleading whines secured their release.

  When Punch began to show incestuous desires towards his sister, he was sold to a sporting neighbour, a keen shot but alas, not a good dogman. So habitually did he roar, ‘Damn-you-Punch,’ that the unfortunate animal must have supposed that was his name, and their short partnership ended abruptly when Punch, running-in after a winged pheasant, was shot dead by his owner.

  Judy, however, had a long and happy life. Once she no longer had her brother to egg her on, she stopped sneaking off to hunt in the Fforest wood, and steadied into a respectable matriarch after producing a first litter of puppies. She had a remarkable nose, and would go on diligently searching for a lost bird long after other dogs had given up, her plumed white tail wagging excitedly as she worked. We kept one dog puppy of hers and named him Flash, from the forked-lightning zigzag on his back. He was heavy and handsome, rather slow-witted, with a distressing propensity for releasing stealthy sulphurous farts as he lay on our campbeds while Daddy was reading aloud to us. Like Granny, he read beautifully and never skipped, and these evening sessions were a highl
ight of camp life, but sometimes even he would be stopped in mid-sentence by one of Flash’s silent-and-deadlies.

  ‘Achtung! Broadside!’ someone would hiss, and we would all vanish into the depths of our sleeping-bags until the foul miasma dissipated.

  Evenings in camp were idyllic that long sunny summer. We ate from wooden plates, sitting round a glowing campfire, and sang music-hall ballads like Abdullah Bubul Emir, and Pretty Little Polly Perkins of Paddington Green. Gerry had picked up a number of pseudo-political songs from a Scout camp: I remember him grinding through all the verses of Harry Pollit was a Bolshie while Mummy watched to see how much the smaller children could understand of the off-colour jokes.

  But if evenings were full of mirth and jollity, during the daytime the prolonged spell of good weather (for Wales) brought a new horror for natural layabouts like me – haymaking.

  This was always a major worry for the Welsh farmer. To make decent hay that would neither heat and ‘fowst’ – go musty in the middle – or turn black and inedible, you need at least five days and preferably a week of dry weather, and naturally as soon as a suitable high showed on the weather charts, everyone in the neighbourhood cut his hay-crop and worked flat out to turn, ted, row up, bale and finally carry it.

  Since the routine servicing and maintenance of machinery took a low priority at Fforest Farm at the time – there was always something more urgent to do – it was not unusual to find vital bits of implements worn out or missing when the moment came to use them, and since every agricultural engineer for miles around would be furiously busy during the dry spell, it was likely that when a mechanic did finally turn up to fix the machines, the weather would break that night and the haycrop be ruined.

  There must, my parents thought, be a better way.

  Earlier that summer, they had been invited to Austria, where the Caccias were now en poste, with Uncle Harold the British High Commissioner. In the course of wandering about the country in Aunt Nancy’s little car, they penetrated remote valleys where the sun shone only briefly between beetling mountain peaks and were interested to see how, in this difficult farming terrain, the sturdy mahogany-faced peasants hung their hay on wooden tripods in order to dry it in the shortest possible time.