My Animals (and Other Family)

by Phyllida Barstow

  Though Daddy had taken over the big fourth-floor flat in Seymour Place which Grandfather had rented from the Prudential, and lived there during the week, commuting to his office in New Square, Lincoln’s Inn, and Gerry and I were at boarding school in term-time, during the holidays Fforest Farm was extremely crowded. Gerry’s bedroom – known as ‘Arctic’ – was right at the top of the house, and any helper, au pair, or temporary cook would be billeted in ‘Antarctic,’ just across the landing, next to the ever-gurgling water-tank.

  A steep flight of stairs led down to George’s tiny nursery, The Slot, next door to the room Miranda and I shared, with Olivia just through the wall in another narrow bedroom. A half-landing and more stairs separated us from the only bathroom and a loo so small that although one entire wall was papered with a map of England, you became familiar only with the counties at your own eye level whether seated or standing, since it was impossible to step back far enough to examine anything higher up. I got to know the geography of mid-Wales, Gloucestershire and the Home Counties, and points east as far as Norfolk pretty intimately, but anything north of Yorkshire was terra incognita.

  A new bedroom had been added for our parents, icy cold because it lacked the thick stone walls of the farmhouse proper, but although they must have been very conscious of bathroom and loo doors constantly banging, at least they were out of earshot of the rest of us, who could all hear one another through the thin internal walls.

  On the ground floor, three small rooms had been knocked into one to give a big, if oddly shaped, open-plan hall, living-room and dining area, with a small appendix just big enough to take an upright piano. Behind the little Victorian grate lurked an open fireplace, whose massive cut stones had probably been salvaged from the original castle by thrifty Welsh builders. The chimney was so wide you could see the sky from the bottom, and it took a great deal of tinkering with hoods and draughtholes to make it draw satisfactorily. The first year we were regularly kippered and smoke filtered up through the bedroom floor in a choking fog, but when at last the proper balance was established the fire looked very handsome and threw out a good heat – in that room, at least.

  The rest of the house was unbelievably chilly, especially since the hot-water arrangements were both erratic and inadequate. A gas-fired geyser over the bath blew out clouds of steam as it released a thin trickle of tepid water, so you were usually colder after bathing than before, and had then to face the freezing dash back down one flight of steps and up another to regain your bedroom, lit only in those early, pre-electricity days by a smoky lamp or a couple of candles.

  Filling the lamps was a chore nobody enjoyed, and we took it in turns. The paraffin was stored, along with anthracite nuts for the Aga, in a small hut adjoining the cow-shed. Dark, dirty, and smelling of oil, it was just tolerable in the daylight, but since all too often I forgot it was my turn until dusk had fallen, I would have to struggle with funnels and fueltins in the half-dark, inevitably slopping paraffin over and sometimes into my gumboots, as well as getting my hands filthy from the soot adhering to the lamp. Downstairs we used gently-hissing Tilley pressure-lamps, whose light was adequate to read by, but finishing a book in bed was out of the question.

  The solid-fuel Aga was a capricious brute, too. You stoked it by lugging in a hod of anthracite which you set on the stone flags in order to use both hands to hook a kind of poker into the handle of the little solid round stopper in the middle of the hotplate, and lever it up. Then, holding your breath against the smoky fumes, you had to pour the anthracite into the open hole (which sent a cloud of black grit over every nearby surface), judge precisely how much fuel would keep the beast fed overnight without choking it, and quickly clap the stopper back in place before your lungs collapsed.

  Finally, you had to riddle, for riddling was the key to successful Aga management. There was a little lever hidden by a door at floor level, and by pulling this from side to side you shook fine grey ash from the bottom of the fire-basket into the shovel-shaped tray below. When glowing cinders began to fall into the ash-tray, you had to pull it out and, again holding your breath, carry it outside and having checked the direction of the wind, fling it in a wide arc over the bank of the moat. It was a gritty, nail-breaking business, best done in gloves, and left you with a throat full of fumes.

  Even with the greatest care, it was all too easy to let the Aga go out, and come down next morning to a bleak cold kitchen smelling of grease and soot. I don’t know how Mummy managed to keep us all fed in such unpromising surroundings, nor can I remember the food we ate at a single meal. She was a dashing, inventive cook, but became bored by the relentless round of breakfast, lunch, tea and supper, and hurried through them as quickly as possible. Children who dawdled over their food tested her patience.

  ‘Salt-pepper-mustard down my end!’ she would say briskly as she sat down after serving us all. Then, clearing her plate while we were still munching, she would pick up the telephone and make a series of quick calls to fill the time before the second course. Having done all the cooking, she reckoned that someone else could deal with the aftermath, and would filter away to do something more important the moment she left the table.

  Washing-up, however, was an enjoyable ritual, particularly after supper, when Daddy or Gerry would bag pole position at the sink, and kick off a singsong in which everyone joined.

  I’m Nausea Bagwashio, Soapsuds I sloshio! Daddy’s voice would boom to the tune of La Donna e mobile as he swished up a mountain of foam.

  Give me your vestio, I’ll do the restio.

  Why grow so weary, when for ten lire

  I’ll be your wife and a mother as well to you

  Be your wife, dear, be your wife, dear,

  And a mother as well to you!

  Then, mournfully:

  Niente mangario, niente bovario,

  O, niente vino! Niente ice-creamo!

  Niente cigaretti, niente spaghetti,

  ‘Cos the old Tedeschi have taken ’em all away!

  And we would all chorus:

  The Tedeschi, the Tedeschi, have taken ’em all away!

  I’m Nausea Bagwashio, I hate the Boschio,

  Their passions I freezes, by giving them diseases…

  Belatedly he would remember the younger children’s innocent ears. ‘Come on, someone else choose a song.’

  Off we would go: sea shanties, Elizabethan love-songs, folk, soul, Negro spirituals, rounds, and London music-hall and French café songs would rock the house until the last of the crockery was dried and put away, but I never did learn the more indelicate words of Nausea Bagwashio.

  Freshly home from our expensive schools, where there was central heating, servants to do the cleaning, and meals appeared like magic, Gerry and I found it difficult to adjust to the home routine of constant hard labour and sometimes rebelled. My strategy was to mutter something about seeing to the ponies and disappear to seek out the book I kept in the stable. Gerry, who was at the tired, floppy stage of adolescence, habitually overslept, missed breakfast, and would then be in Mummy’s bad books for the rest of the day.

  ‘Why can’t you be like Phylla, and do something useful?’ she would demand. (Little did she know just how useful I was being, but in Mummy’s eyes any outdoor activity was OK, while children sitting about indoors drove her into a frenzy.) Naturally enough, this did not endear me to Gerry, and I drew into a closer alliance with Olivia, who shared my taste for covert reading of pony books by Joanna Cannan and the Pullein-Thompson sisters, and Enid Blyton’s Adventure series.

  Dragging himself downstairs one Sunday, Gerry found all the breakfast crockery had been left on the table as the rest of the family hurried off to church, and was gloomily anticipating the rocket he would get when Mummy returned when he hit on a brilliant way to rehabilitate himself.

  At last my thoughts begin to turn from contemplation hopeless,

  I think again of water hot, think of detergents soapless, he wrote of this Eureka moment.

  When Mu
mmy came home, grimly prepared for a session with cold encrusted scrambled egg and be-ringed coffee cups, the kitchen was sparkling, the china washed and put away… and Gerry instantly gained Favourite Child status.

  Being large and strong but lacking an eye for a ball, he had opted to become a Wet Bob at Eton, and his administrative skill earned him the job of Ninth Man in the Monarch, one of whose duties was organising the heats for the Bumping Races on the Thames and recording the results for the magazine.

  I had been given an Olivetti portable typewriter for my birthday, and he bribed, bullied and blackmailed me into making fair copies of the fiendishly complicated charts of the heats, all arrows and crossings-out and illegibly scrawled names. The originals looked like page-proofs corrected by Balzac, so sorting them out cost me much time and effort, but when they were done Gerry was so pleased that he promised to take me on a three-day camping trip into the wild mountainous hinterland where Twm Shôn Katti – the Robin Hood-ish Welsh outlaw and brigand – once had his hideout.

  All holidays Gerry had been longing to explore this area, and I was hugely flattered to be asked along, especially since on picnics past he had been inclined to mock my fire-making and foraging skills. It was to be a Survival exercise. We would take the smallest of bivvi tents and the lightest of equipment, snares and a tiny trout-rod. We would live on what we could trap or catch, and feast on mushrooms and blackberries plus iron rations consisting of 4oz oatmeal per person per day, half a bar of chocolate, 2oz raisins… and that was it.

  For several days we packed and re-packed our rucksacks, bickering over what we’d need. Gerry’s instinct was to take enough kit to cope with every possible setback, scenario, or vagary of weather. Mine was to carry as little as I could. I wasn’t a great map reader, but the closely-packed contour lines on the country we were to cross looked ominous. Even unburdened, I found it difficult to hoist my own weight up steep slopes.

  ‘Boots,’ said Gerry.

  ‘I’ll be all right in gym shoes.’

  ‘You’ll get soaked.’

  ‘I don’t care.’ The thought of climbing hills in clumping boots was far worse than three days of wet feet. In any case, Gerry made a practice of stamping in a puddle at the start of a walk, saying it was no use trying to keep dry, so what was the difference?

  I won my point with the gym shoes, but had to concede that we’d need sleeping bags, extra clothes, a frying pan, mugs, plates, towels, oilskins (no gossamer-thin waterproofs, then,) torches, matches, iron rations, knives, kettle, trout rod… The final heap of kit was a dismaying size, and that was before we had each added a paperback.

  Gerry had a big haversack on a frame, which took three-quarters of our equipment, and I stuffed the rest into Daddy’s old army knapsack, whose straps were too widely set and kept slipping off my shoulders. On a misty early September morning, Mummy drove us forty-odd miles into the wild mountains west of Tregaron, the roads getting narrower and the hills steeper as we left the last villages behind, and put us out on a wooded slope just below the line of low cloud that hung over the Pysgwda valley.

  ‘I’ll come back on Saturday and meet you by the Deuddau Pool,’ she promised. ‘Sure you’ve got everything?’

  Expecting a walk, Lucy, her yellow labrador, jumped out of the car and stood wagging her tail hopefully.

  ‘Why not take her with you?’ said Mummy on impulse.

  Gerry hesitated. ‘We haven’t brought any dog-food.’

  ‘Oh, it won’t hurt her to lose a few pounds. She might catch a rabbit.’

  Lucy was very much a one-woman dog, and as the car drove away, her ears drooped. She sat down by the roadside, evidently prepared to wait until Mummy came back. We set off up the hill, and when I looked back she hadn’t moved.

  ‘Come on,’ I called. ‘Walkies!’

  With unconcealed reluctance she got up and followed, looking the picture of misery. Something must have warned her this walk was going to be longer than she’d bargained for.

  When the mist burned off it became very hot carrying our packs, and the flies were terrible under the trees, but we struggled to the top and were rewarded with a breeze and a stunning view over ridge after rolling ridge of empty moorland, with orange-tipped rushes and deep cwms blanketed in the dull green of late-summer bracken. Never a farm, never a fence, never a tree in sight; just the occasional grey-white back of a grazing sheep, curlews calling, and pipits springing from the tough mountain grass.

  ‘Oh, look!’ I said. ‘Ponies!’ And there was a little group of mares flinging up their heads to stare at us before trotting purposefully away, their woolly-coated foals tittuping along as if welded to their sides.

  I longed to be galloping across that vast landscape on Taffy myself rather than humping a heavy load on Shank’s pony, but Gerry was in his element, consulting the map, showing me how to use the compass, telling stories and jokes, sometimes singing snatches of song and never for a moment complaining that he was carrying far more than I was. The only person who was truly unhappy was poor Lucy, trailing along fifty yards behind. We wished very much that we had resisted bringing her, but there was nothing for it now but to jolly her along as best we could.

  In the middle of the afternoon we chose an idyllic spot beside the Pysgwda, a charming little river with sun-dappled pebbly shallows and deep dark pools, and set up camp. It took a surprisingly long time to get the tents and stores arranged to Gerry’s satisfaction, build what I considered to be an unnecessarily perfect fireplace with unnecessarily large stones, dig a latrine (‘Why can’t we just go in the bushes?’) and find a really clear-running spot to wash and fill the kettle. Lucy watched our activities with an expression of deep misgiving, then went inside the tent and lay on my sleeping-bag.

  We gathered dry twigs and bigger branches and snapped them into usable lengths, and soon had a good fire going, though in the light, changeable wind smoke kept chasing me from one side to the other. I remained to stoke it and cook the sausages which Mummy had insisted we added to our ration while Gerry went upstream to try out the fishing. Presently he returned with two small trout and a face covered in red blotches.

  ‘The midges are terrible,’ he said.

  They went on being terrible until it was dark, and to avoid them we crouched so close to the fire that we were practically in it. The sausages were charred but delicious, and we recklessly cooked both fish as well, giving the heads and bones to Lucy who wolfed them down and looked around for more.

  ‘We’ll get you a rabbit tomorrow,’ I assured her – an empty promise, as it turned out for, in the whole three days, those two tiny fish were the only food we caught. Living off the land was a non-starter. There were no blackberries. No mushrooms, not so much as an edible fungus that looked anything like the illustrations in Gerry’s pocket guide. The hazelnuts were still unripe, their insides more pith than kernel, while of rabbits, pheasants, pigeons, hares we saw no trace. As hunter-gatherers we failed abysmally, but I felt this was partly because we didn’t devote enough time to searching for food. The trouble with camping is that it takes so long to keep yourself reasonably warm, dry, clean and fed that self-maintenance swallows up most of your waking hours, and there is precious little time or energy left to do anything else.

  We did explore the wooded slopes of the river in a desultory way, but it was so hot that I was always glad to get back to the campsite and flop down by the remains of the fire on the pretext of getting it going again, while surreptitiously golloping down another chapter of my Ngaio Marsh.

  Sheep occasionally grazed into view, and after sharing our porridge oats for meal after meal, Lucy would not have objected to eating one raw. There were even moments when I thought she might turn on Gerry and me. We were also getting hungry and increasingly tetchy by the morning of Day Three when we struck camp, loaded the haversacks, and set out to cross the dauntingly steep ridge that lay between us and our RV with Mummy on the road beyond the Deuddau Pool.

  After two hot clear days the weather had
become steamy and oppressive, with little black flies dancing maddeningly round our heads as we forced our way through deep bracken. Gerry set a slow pace and kept stopping tactfully to give me a breather, and although I suffered from the classic follower’s resentment of the boots trudging steadily in front of me, for once I managed not to say anything disagreeable and we reached the top without a major bust-up.

  We were sprawling in the sun on the rocks that crowned the ridge, with Gerry trying to pick out the rowan tree above the pool through his binoculars, when the turf on the hillside opposite suddenly turned a darker shade of green, lightning flashed overhead, and seconds later, down came the rain in torrents. It was so violent, so unexpected, that we were soused through before we had the wit to squeeze beneath the overhang of a big flat rock, evicting a startled ewe which had been enjoying a fly-free snooze there. She pronked downhill in great bounds, her back appearing and disappearing in the bracken, while we pulled the rest of our kit into the shelter and lay peering out through the downpour.

  Nearly as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped, and the hillside began to steam in the sun.

  ‘Better get across the stream before it starts again,’ said Gerry, and we stumbled and slid downhill as fast as we could in our clammy wet clothes. But when we reached what should have been no more than a shining thread of water, a mere brook that you could practically jump across, it had become a foaming torrent, impossible to cross, and we were forced to set up camp on the wrong bank, out of sight of the road and our rendezvous.

  ‘What if she comes and can’t find us?’ I whinged, keen to end the adventure asap and get home to hot baths, warm beds, and food, glorious food.

  Unlike me, Gerry was positively revelling in adversity. Up till now things had gone altogether too easily for his taste. ‘We’ll just have to camp here and hope the stream goes down overnight.’