My Animals (and Other Family)

by Phyllida Barstow

  Perhaps this was the answer. If the method produced delicious-smelling dry mountain hay in Austria, why not in Wales? Always ready to jump in the deep end, Mummy measured and sketched the tripods and, on her return to Wales, commissioned Mr Morson the carpenter to make a large stack of them from unbarked larch poles. I watched the process with interest, wondering how I could recycle them later into jumps, but alas they were both too high and too flimsy to use for anything but their stated purpose.

  Halfway through August, word zipped round the Wye valley: high pressure was building. A fine week was on its way. Out came the cutters, round and round drove the little grey Fergie 20, and by dusk that evening two fields lay in flat swathes waiting for the predicted hot weather to ‘cure’ the grass.

  For three whole days the high held steady. Not a drop of rain tainted the thick greeny-silver rows as they were turned once, turned twice, thrown up in the air by a curious triple set of spiked wheels known as a Whiffler, and raked into long sausages by Darkie the cart-mare pulling the tedder, but the hay still wasn’t quite dry enough to bale, and the presence of midges and an ominous heaviness in the air warned of approaching thunderstorms.

  It was time to try the Austrian method. The big larch triangles were driven to the hayfield on a trailer, and we were set to work to prop them together into tripods which would act as drying-racks. As the rock-bottom job for children, this left stone-pucking standing. For a start, it was very difficult to get the brutes to stand up. Time and again we would have two propped correctly with the apexes touching, only for the third to collapse them all. In retrospect I think they ought to have been notched at the top, or even lashed together, but in their natural unwieldy state it was practically impossible to set them firmly on a sloping field. The rough bark tore our hands – no sissy gardening gloves in those days – and it was deeply disheartening to look back along the rows you had just erected and see how many had already fallen down.

  More difficult still was the second stage when we tried to hang hay on them because it simply refused to lie in place. Either it fell between the widely spaced slats, leaving you with a damp little haycock surrounded by larch poles, or it blew off the tripod at the first puff of wind. I guess that the Austrian peasant farmer would have cut his hay with a scythe and didn’t toss it about so much before putting it on the racks, but although her exciting new method was clearly not going to plan, Mummy (who could be a slave-driver at times) kept us toiling away at it until darkness put an end to our misery.

  We woke rather late, tired and stiff, to a morning of brooding clouds and the threat of rain, and found a note from Mummy. Come to the hayfield as soon as you’ve had breakfast.

  Oh, not again! I thought, and if I’d had the nerve, I would have refused to go because I had a very clear idea of what we’d find there. When we finished washing-up and had no further excuse for delay, we all straggled up to the Upper Committee, as the hayfield was grandly known – Gerry, David, me, Clarissa and Olivia, a puny workforce by any standards – and sure enough, of the thirty-odd hayracks we had left standing, at least twenty had collapsed overnight.

  I hardly dared look at Mummy for fear of being ordered to start reerecting them, but when I did steal a glance I was surprised to see her smiling. ‘Well, obviously that hasn’t worked,’ she said cheerfully, ‘but after you went to bed last night I saw an article in Farmers’ Weekly about in-barn dryers. It sounds a marvellous idea. You bale the hay still green and stack it in tunnels, and this big huffer blows in warm air… There’s a place in Leominster where you can hire them.’

  Oh, the relief! Our spirits rose like gas balloons. Mr Watts, who was no keener on manual toil than the rest of us, embraced the huffer proposal with enthusiasm. He had seen at a glance the drawbacks of the Austrian hayracks, and distanced himself from helping put them up, but a tractor-powered in-barn dryer sounded like the kind of technology he approved. Better still, as soon as he had baled the green hay, he persuaded a cheerful bunch of neighbours to help us load it onto the farm waggon – the ‘gambo’ – since the wet bales were too heavy for children to lift.

  By Friday night, when Daddy returned from London, all was safely gathered into the big asbestos barn at the Committee Dump, where once Radnorshire’s snowploughs and other municipal machinery had been stored, with the tractor engine thundering night and day to drive the last of the moisture from the bales. It didn’t make the hay any cheaper, but in every other way in-barn drying was a complete success. The bales retained their colour and delicious smell throughout the winter and, proof of the pudding, the animals hoovered up every scrap.

  Towards the end of the long summer holidays, my new school uniform arrived from Debenhams in a large cardboard box, and since there were no full-length mirrors in the tents, we went over to Chapel House for a ceremonial trying-on of white flannelette shirt, brown-and-gold tie, pleated tunic and Sunday dress in a hideous milk chocolate shade – deeply unflattering to one of my sallow complexion – gold sash, brown cardigan, and handsome pinkish-beige overcoat, beautifully cut and seamed, a miniature version of the Army officer’s famous British Warm.

  ‘Now the hat!’ crowed eight year old Olivia, secure in the knowledge that there were three years to go before the shades of the prison house closed on her.

  The brown felt hat depressed my spirits still further. It might have been designed to make me look ridiculous. But if the outer garments were strange and constricting, those underneath were truly weird. White knicker linings with thick dark brown pants to go over them. (For gym explained the Clothing List.) A suspender-belt from which hung little bobbles to which you secured brown lisle stockings, two fore, two aft. Petticoats, pyjamas, hockey boots, gym shoes… the list seemed endless, and I crammed myself in and out of them as instructed in a daze of unhappiness, not so much because I was being sent away to school, but because of a scene I had unwillingly witnessed earlier that week.

  Mummy had been in the dairy, washing the endless little metal cones of the separator before putting the cream to set in a big shallow crock, when Mrs Watts bustled up to her with flaming cheeks and blazing eyes, in a high state of indignation.

  ‘Where’s my butter, then, Mrs Barstow? That’s what I want to know,’ she began aggressively.

  This put Mummy on the spot. Churning butter was a long, heavy job which she and Mrs Watts undertook on alternate weeks. Since there were always seven and often more in our household, we kept two thirds of the home made butter, with the remaining third going to Mrs Watts, who was in the habit of selling part of her share, something Mummy had learnt by chance and which was, she considered, against the spirit of the agreement.

  We had had visitors to stay that weekend, and when we ran out of butter, Mummy had told me to fetch the last two pats from the dairy – pats which technically belonged to Mrs Watts.

  ‘I’m afraid we’ve eaten it all,’ she said with a conciliatory smile, ‘but I’ll make some more tomorrow. Perhaps you could make do with margarine till then.’

  If she had suggested that the Watts family spread yellow phosphorus on their bread she could hardly have had a more explosive response. Mrs Watts seemed to swell like an enraged turkey.

  ‘So it’s margarine now, is it? You’ve eaten all my butter and you want me to make do with margarine? Let me tell you, Mrs Barstow, I’ve never in my life eaten that stuff and I’m not starting now, whatever you may say.’

  ‘Not even during the war?’

  ‘Never!’

  ‘That was very unpatriotic of you, Mrs Watts,’ said Mummy, recklessly burning her boats. ‘We all have to make sacrifices at times, and I think it’s disgraceful that you should make such a silly fuss just because there’s no butter.’

  ‘Patriotism, is it? You can keep your old patriotism, Mrs Barstow,’ said Mrs Watts in a fine fury, ‘and as for calling me silly, I tell you now I won’t stand here to be insulted by you or anyone else. I’m giving you my notice this minute, and taking my family where I won’t have to beg and scrape f
or every morsel I put on my ’usband’s plate.’

  ‘Well, if that’s how you feel, Mrs Watts, I won’t stand in your way,’ said Mummy, and my world rocked. A sudden cold chill enveloped me as I realised the implications. I didn’t care two hoots whether Mrs Watts stayed or went, but if Watts left the Fforest he’d take Scot with him, and I might never see him again.

  I spent the next few days in an agony of worry, and at the weekend, after Daddy had talked to Watts, my fears were confirmed. The Watts family were leaving and we were to have a new bailiff.

  ‘What about Scot?’ I asked fearfully. ‘Will he go with them?’

  ‘I’m afraid so, darling,’ said Mummy. I turned and rushed into my tent, flung myself on the bed, and burst into a storm of weeping.

  Along with short sight and a long memory, Grandfather had passed on to me his embarrassing tendency to greet any moment of high emotion with tears. The emotion wasn’t necessarily sorrow. Noble deeds, evocative sounds, even excessive happiness brought on the waterworks in just the same way, choking speech and reddening the nose. I could feel the tell-tale symptoms coming over me well in advance, and would try desperately to deflect my thoughts, but in vain. Once the first tears welled up and began to slide down my nose, I was done for.

  ‘You’re so lucky to be able to cry,’ a sympathetic vicar once told me as I gulped and blubbed in a way quite unsuited to my age and station. ‘It does much less harm than bottling up your emotions.’ Be that as it may, I have usually found this inability to control my tears a great drawback, and only very rarely has it worked to my advantage.

  This, however, was one of those occasions. After a whole weekend of torrential blubbing, Daddy – before he left for London – had another talk with Watts and next morning I found an envelope on the breakfast table by my place.

  Inside was a postcard which I still treasure. It said:

  To darling Phyllida, 1 sheepdog named Scot, on condition:

  a) He remains a sheepdog and helps Weale when needed

  b) He doesn’t come into the house beyond the porch

  c) He doesn’t bite Miss Barrows

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Lawnside

  MISS WINIFRED BARROWS, whom Scot was pledged not to attack, was my new headmistress. She was generally – and generally affectionately – known as ‘Brag,’ because she was a name-dropper par excellence and – perhaps on the Can’t Beat ’Em, Join ’Em principle – appeared to revel in the nickname and do her best to live up to it.

  No-one loved a lord, an ambassador, a five-star general more than Brag, and among her parents she had collected an impressive assortment of Establishment figures. Not that she treated their children in any way differently from the offspring of lesser mortals. It wasn’t because of social snobbery that Mummy had difficulty getting her to accept me as a pupil at short notice – simply that Lawnside was booked solid that year, and it would require juggling of beds and classes to squeeze an extra girl in.

  She was short, stocky, and dynamic, with a fine rosy complexion and long ski-jump nose; a benevolent autocratic who had never taken an exam in her life but more than made up for her lack of qualifications by her energy and imagination. She was brilliant at bringing out the best in girls, worked extremely hard, and took great pride in the school which she owned and ran without reference to a board of governors or educational inspectors or any interfering body from outside.

  Photographs of her in the Lawnside hockey team circa 1920 showed a rather beautiful oval-faced teenager with waist-length plaits and large, dreamy eyes. By the time I met her in 1949, most of the dreaminess had been submerged by the practical demands of running her school, but she retained the big blue eyes and long hair, now greying and wound into a complicated arrangement on top of her head to give her much-needed height. She also retained a strong romantic streak, becoming misty-eyed and assuming a quite different tone of voice when talking of poetry – (she pronounced it ‘poyetry’) or literature, music, painting, theatre.

  Drama was her major passion, and every summer she produced ambitious outdoor plays involving every girl in the school – no mean achievement, particularly since a run of wet Julys meant that they had sometimes to be transferred at short notice to the stage at the Winter Gardens.

  Great Malvern was then a hotbed of private educational establishments. There was the Boys’ College, the Girls’ College, St James’s and The Abbey, and lots of boys’ prep schools. Lawnside consisted of five or six separate houses, some with adjoining gardens, others loosely grouped across a T-junction in quiet residential streets which only came to rowdy life at closing time on Saturday nights, when revellers poured out of the pubs down near the station, and staggered up the road with linked arms, bawling ‘Goodnight, Ireen’ in painful disharmony.

  The garden of the main house, Lawnside itself, made a fine setting for plays, the long lawn in question being flanked by mature Wellingtonias and other specimen trees which formed wings from which the actors could make their entrances, and a natural grandstand was provided by a pronounced ledge, almost a ha-ha, at the top. A croquet lawn acted as the main stage, and the long lawn then sloped gently down to the shrubbery which concealed props and make-up paraphernalia.

  All the whole-school plays Brag produced while I was at Lawnside – among them The Vision of Piers Plowman, a very free adaptation of The Return of Odysseus, James Elroy Flecker’s Golden Road to Samarkand, and a splendid blood-and-thunder in rhyming couplets about the British freedom fighter Caractacus’s heroic struggle against the Roman legions – relied heavily on chorus-work, and here Brag was in her element. She would listen carefully to each girl’s speaking voice, grade it high, medium or low, and use the different pitches to dramatic effect as the chorus explained and moved forward what would otherwise have been most confusing narratives.

  She was a resourceful producer. It was traditional for the head girl to play the starring role, even when she was ill-fitted to take centre stage. Corrie, head girl when I arrived, was required to open The Vision of Piers Plowman with the heavily alliterative lines,

  On a May morning on Malvern Hill,

  A marvel befell me. Sure from faerie it came.

  I had wandered me weary, so weary…

  But being afflicted with a pronounced stammer, when she opened her mouth nothing came out but an agonised, ‘O-o-o…’

  Again and again she tried, but it was no use. It began to look as if tradition would have to be broken and her deputy play the part of Piers Plowman, but Brag still had a trick up her sleeve. At the signal of a dropped handkerchief, she made all the other actors, hidden among the trees, accompany Corrie through the opening two lines, then leave her to carry on alone, and to my astonishment, it worked. She recited the rest of the speech without a tremor.

  During the next few rehearsals, Corrie’s ‘jumping powder’ was gradually whittled away, until for the speech-day performance itself she needed no more than three words from the rest of the school to get her going, and the audience scarcely noticed the prompt.

  But these plays lay far in the future on the sunny September afternoon just short of my twelfth birthday when Mummy drove me over from Fforest Farm, giving me a cigarette to quell my habitual car-sickness as the Malvern hills rose up out of the lush, red-soiled Herefordshire farmland. I felt itchy and foolish in my brown tunic and blazer with a golden rose embroidered on the breast-pocket, but it didn’t seem so bad once I met all the other new girls similarly kitted out – unflattering as it was, the uniform gave me a comforting sensation of being one of the crowd.

  I was quite used to being dumped in strange places, and hardly noticed Mummy drive away. At the time I thought it a bit of a swizz that new girls should start the term a day earlier than the rest of the school, but after a friendly welcome and tea in the Small Dining-room, Brag kept us so busy that there wouldn’t have been time to be homesick even if one was that way inclined.

  First we had to unpack, carefully lining our chest of drawers with newspaper befor
e stacking in all the stiff new clothes – a first for me, because I usually dropped everything on the floor. My dormitory was the biggest in the house, an eighter, overlooking the drive, with flimsy cotton curtains on rails dividing it to give the big girls a bit of privacy. My new friend Mary Jane, a brisk little person with a turned-up nose, chose the bed nearest the window, and I hastily bagged the one next to her. Then the trunks were taken away by the school handymen, and the realisation hit me that the dark shadow of menace that had hung over me all the summer was now translated into reality, and I really was at boarding school. It was not at all what I had anticipated.

  These expectations were largely based on the adventures of Teddy Lester, hero of a number of rip-roaring Edwardian school stories by John Finnemore. His First Term, a battered copy of which had passed from hand to hand of the Barstow family until the spine had broken and half the first chapter was missing, opened with a pillow fight in the dorm, and the painful retribution inflicted on the offenders by a sadistic flogging prefect. In a perpetual game of Tom Tiddler’s Ground against bullies, sneaks, drunken gamekeepers and furious housemasters, the gallant Teddy and his chum Ito, a plucky little Jap who was a dab hand at ju-jitsu, came within a whisker of being unjustly expelled time and again, but right always triumphed in the nick of time. (The Japanese were in high regard when the books were written around 1905, though my generation, which naturally regarded them as demons incarnate after their atrocities in the Second World War, had to make a considerable mental adjustment to look approvingly on Teddy’s choice of chum.)