My Animals (and Other Family)

by Phyllida Barstow

  On the whole the women who flocked into Builth on Mondays, when the main street jammed solid with traffic and shoppers, preferred gossip and stocking up with provisions to the livestock market itself.

  Mummy used to go to watch her beasts sold, and made a brave stab at taking on the men at their own game, learning the names and farms of all our neighbours so she could strike up conversations, compare prices and pick up local news while making her way round the outside of the sale-ring, but it was uphill work getting them to talk, and really better left to Ron.

  The life of a real hill farmer had always been both tough and harsh, so it was hardly surprising that many of them were chippy, secretive, and deeply suspicious of newcomers, particularly those with money to splash around. There is a big difference between farming because you want to and farming because you have to, and the fact that Daddy worked in London and paid the bills inevitably undermined her efforts to be taken seriously. They knew she wasn’t really one of them, no matter how hard she tried to bridge the gap, so there was always a certain reserve behind their civility and occasional underhand behaviour that surprised and wounded her.

  Daddy, who was even less at ease than Mummy when talking to farmers, used to embarrass me by putting on a phoney Welsh accent to converse with our neighbours. I don’t think he even knew he was doing it – or if he did know simply intended it to blur the distinction between us and them that bedevilled so many attempts at social interaction.

  The result, unfortunately, was just the opposite. The person he was talking to would suspect he was being mocked, and clam up at once. Years later, I found myself doing the same thing in Co. Tipperary, putting on a cod Irish accent because I imagined it would make me less conspicuous, but when someone laughed and said, ‘You’re becoming more Irish than the Irish,’ I squirmed and reverted to cut-glass Queen’s English with all possible speed.

  One annual fixture that did bring the locality together was the Hundred House Sports Day, which took place on the Fforest’s big flat field known as the Sixteen Acre. In those days it was a rough-and-ready but very convivial hotchpotch of activities that combined sheepdog trials in the morning with children’s races, games and agricultural competitions such as judging the weight of a sheep and bowling for a real live piglet, plus a few showing classes for ponies, and ended with hotly-contested ‘flapping races’ run round the perimeter of the field.

  These were open to all horses and ponies of all shapes and sizes, and handicapped by distance rather than weight. Thus you would find a 12.2-hand pony allowed half a lap start over the lean 16-hand thoroughbred racing-machine with a tiny boy clinging to the neck-strap while two burly handlers held it in check, with half a dozen medium-sized, medium-paced horses spaced out between them.

  At the starting pistol, off they would go hell-for-leather, and as the field was far from flat the smaller, nimbler animals often held their lead for a fair distance. Gradually, however, sheer speed would tell. One after another the ponies would be overhauled, and nine times out of ten as the race entered its final lap the thoroughbred would be in front. I remember intense excitement one year when we all thought a small black pony was going to flash past the winning post first, but it turned out that he still had a full lap to go, having been passed by the thoroughbred on the first circuit.

  The race that engendered the most excitement, though, was the Ladies’ Cock Chase – a hangover, I now suspect, from some pagan fertility rite and with distinct echoes of the death of Orpheus.

  Kicking off their shoes and tucking skirts into knickers, women of all ages, shapes and sizes from hefty, weatherbeaten farmers’ wives to slim slips of teenagers would line out round the edge of the Sports Field while a man with a bulging sack walked into the exact middle of their circle. He would peremptorily wave back any over-eager ladies who tried to jump the gun by surging forward, then plunge his arm into the sack, draw out an indignant cockerel, and throw it in the air, and immediately there was a wild stampede of Maenads bent on catching the unfortunate bird.

  Dodging and squawking, it would be chased until it was exhausted and finally captured and borne away in triumph with most of its feathers missing: definitely not a spectacle to appeal to the RSPCA or, indeed, to Daddy, who tactfully but firmly told the organisers that if they wanted to go on holding the Sports on his field they should consider dropping this particular competition.

  Then, as if there hadn’t been excitement enough, the day would end with a dance in the village hall. It would be scheduled to start at 8pm, but never did. For hours, it seemed to me, the men and teenage boys, unnaturally slicked and scrubbed, stood or lounged against one wall pretending to ignore the girls, curled and primped to the nines, who chattered and giggled in tight little groups against the opposite wall, stealing glances across the bare-boarded dance floor while pretending that such things as boys did not exist.

  Forced by Mummy to put in an appearance, and unable to mingle easily with either group, I found this was pure agony until, after what seemed an interminable hiatus, that trusty old saviour of wallflowers known as the ‘Paul Jones’ would come to my rescue. Music would blare from a wind-up gramophone with a big horn, and at once the girls would join hands in a big circle and start to revolve clockwise, with the boys chivvied into circling anti-clockwise outside them. When the music stopped, you had to dance with whoever you were standing opposite, and although there was usually a bit of bunching to claim the most popular girls, by and large the boys played fair and each, however reluctantly, grabbed his allocated partner and manoeuvred her into the shuffling crowd, in a haze of Brylcreem and nervous sweat.

  So, for the minute, the tension eased. It was not considered necessary to talk while dancing, which was just as well because in the first place neither I nor my partner could be sure of understanding what the other was trying to say, and in the second, we had no common ground on which to base a conversation. All too soon, though, the music would stop and one had to say something if he was not to skedaddle back to his mates, leaving one stranded in no-man’s-land. At meals, family rules required us to make three attempts to talk to a neighbouring stranger, and only if these drew no response were you justified in abandoning conversation as a lost cause and devoting your attention to your plate. Applying the same principle at the village dance, I would kick off with a question about the day’s competitions.

  ‘How did you get on at the Sports?’

  ‘Not so bad, ta,’ was the usual unhelpful response.

  Silence. He was about to ditch me. ‘Do you live near here?’ I’d ask desperately, but it was no use. He would mutter the name of some farm I’d never heard of and lumber off before I could even formulate a third question. It was disheartening.

  An unexpected lifeline out of such social impasses proved to be television, which was slowly spreading to all but the most inaccessible farms. At last there was a shared interest we could chat about, and though I was always straining to understand the quirky speech patterns peculiar to Radnorshire, with their carefree use of pronouns (‘Us do know more about she than her do know about we,’ was one of Mummy’s favourite examples) it made talking to our neighbours – whether at shearing lunches, harvest suppers, or these stiff and stilted dances – very much easier for me.

  During these teenage years, Fforest Farm was always crammed with extra children, many of them foreign and not slow to complain about hard work and minimal comfort. Since Ron and Milly Weale had left to run their own farm, Mummy had joyfully assumed supreme command, though she still had to rely heavily on the inherited lore of her newly promoted foreman, young Bill James, barely out of his teens but serious, hard-working, and well-liked in the neighbourhood. Between them they set to work to build up a herd of pedigree Welsh Black cattle, a tough, long-lived, dual-purpose breed far better suited to local conditions than the poor delicate Guernseys.

  She also continued to rely a good deal on child labour, which came as a bit of a shock to town-bred teenagers from France, Switzerland, or Spain who
thought they had come to improve their spoken English, only to find themselves roped into feeding, herding, and mucking-out farm animals, painting barns and repairing fences along with their hostess’s children.

  Beastly little snob that I was, I was wary of inviting my schoolfriends to stay, being all too keenly aware of the difference between our higgledy-piggledy life and their well-ordered holiday entertainments. When I stayed with girls from my form, our days would be filled with Hunt Balls and tennis parties, concerts and plays, whereas to any non-rider who came to us all I could offer in the way of diversion was painting the enormous roof of the covered yard which had replaced the midden as the farmyard’s central feature.

  Gerry was far more socially confident than me, and his friends made themselves useful about the farm, revelling in driving tractors with no nonsense about age or licences, and tinkering with farm machinery. Though willing, they were often naïve and failed to anticipate danger until it was upon them. Many a time the stripped-down, all-purpose Land Rover was bogged or overturned on the hill, and everyone had a scare when a big strong Etonian who had been assigned the job of stacking hay-bales at the top of the barn failed to respond to questions from below about why he had stopped unloading the elevator.

  When Gerry climbed up to investigate, he found his friend collapsed and only semi-conscious, having been gassed by the fumes trapped under the roof, and had to drag him out double-quick.

  Riding home on top of the hay-load in the warm, velvety dusk, with the sweet scent of honeysuckle wafting from the hedges, itching and tickling and aching all over after hours of heaving bales about, and looking forward keenly to supper and cider and singing, is one of my defining memories of summer in those years. Like all farmers, we kept a close eye on the weather, and an even closer ear to the predictions of our neighbours, and if a hot spell out-lasted the hay harvest we made the most of it with a visit to the sand-dunes at Borth, our nearest bit of seaside.

  As soon as Gerry passed his driving test, he would drive us over the intervening hills in the open Land Rover, with a couple of us seated on the wide, square bonnet, clinging to the handles placed there for the purpose, and the rest crammed onto the bench-style front seat, legs entangled with the gears, or standing in the back, hanging on to the flimsy framework which normally supported the canvas top. Top-heavy and wildly overloaded, with arms and legs and flying hair in every direction, the jeep used to look like the illustration of police pursuing Mr Toad in The Wind in the Willows.

  The only place Daddy refused to let us ride was on the tailboard.

  ‘I’ve seen too many soldiers bounced off and run over by the vehicle behind,’ he said very seriously. Though I couldn’t see why we were more likely to be bounced off from the tailboard than from the bonnet, it was so rare for Daddy to put his foot down on a safety issue that nobody argued.

  It was an exhilarating way to travel. We would wiggle up the mountain roads past Llangammarch and Llanyrtyd Wells, past Llwyn Madoc and Abergwesyn, and on to the open single-track, gravelly road that crossed the wild mountains, home to nothing but a few straggle-fleeced sheep and tangle-maned ponies, and finally creep down through narrow lanes flanked by high hedges until our noses caught the unmistakable tang of seaweed.

  Bumping in low gear as near as we dared to the sea, we would abandon the jeep among the dunes and carry our food and rugs and towels to the edge of the beach, which was usually deserted, since Aberdovey, just across the estuary, drew most of the fledgling tourist trade. Bitterly cold though the water was, the exertion of getting there would keep me just warm enough for a brief dip and shoulders-under, but Gerry and Miranda were much hardier and would stay in – it seemed to me – for hours. No-one bothered with sun-cream in those days, and after sprawling about on the beach throughout a blazing August afternoon, most of us would return home with the shape of our bathing dresses or trunks clearly outlined in white against the rest of our lobster-red bodies and the prospect of several days of unattractively peeling noses, but given Radnorshire’s usual dismal weather, we all regarded these as a badge of honour.

  Now and again Daddy would prevail upon Mummy to join him in London for a few days, and the summer when I was fifteen I was proud to be left in charge at the Fforest while they were away. Gerry was in British Columbia with the British Schools Exploring Foundation, and the other children had gone with an au pair to stay at Chapel House.

  Before she left, Mummy asked me to take Warrior, a young black gelding whom we were just starting to hack about the hills, over to the blacksmith – a boring job which I put off until his shoes were loose and clinking as he moved before reluctantly saddling him on a hot afternoon and riding the three miles to the smithy at Cregrina and waiting in the shade while the farrier put on a new set.

  Warrior had a peaceful, laid-back nature and no great eagerness to exert himself in the heat, and we were slopping along the road on the way home, with me holding his reins in one hand and using a frond of bracken to swish away flies with the other when… I opened my eyes to find Mummy bending over me as I lay on the bottom bunk in the room I shared with Miranda, looking more frightened than I had ever seen her, saying, ‘Can you hear me, darling? What happened?’

  I tried to answer but my mouth was so swollen I could only mutter, and the odd thing was that although only semi-conscious I knew quite well I was lying when I told her I had been riding on Beili Bychan Common, which was right at the other end of the farm.

  From that day to this I have no memory of what happened that afternoon, though I had ridden or led Warrior home and turned him out in his proper field, walked up the drive and put his tack in the stables before collapsing on Miranda’s bunk.

  Plainly I had fallen headfirst on the road. My face was a mess, nose broken again – ‘Why can’t you put your hands in front of it?’ asked Mummy despairingly – and a semicircle of cuts on my cheeks and upper lip looked as if one of Warrior’s new shoes had played its part. I still wonder what happened to scare him into such uncharacteristic behaviour, but the hours between 3 and 10pm that day remain obstinately blank.

  The cuts and bruises gradually healed, but it was agreed that nothing much could be done about my nose until I finished growing.

  Two years later, however, I was taken to the Middlesex Hospital to meet the New Zealander Rainsford Mowlem, who had learned from the pioneer plastic surgeon Sir Archibald McIndoe how to reconstruct damaged faces. He stared at me from every angle and explained what he could and could not do in the reconstruction line; then he and Mummy had fun drawing lots of noses within these parameters, all of which looked much the same to me.

  I was booked in for an operation in which he scooped a sliver of bone from my hip, carved it into a suitable shape and used this to prop up the remains of my nose, with a neat seam at the bottom of the septum to add to all the other scars. Mummy warned me not to look in a mirror for a week, but of course as soon as I got out of bed I couldn’t resist having a peek, and nearly screamed when confronted by a greeny-black-and-blue version of the Lord of the Flies, with tiny slits of eyes – definitely no rival for Helen of Troy.

  The swelling took a good ten days to go down, and meanwhile I luxuriated in the undreamed of comfort of the Middlesex’s Woolavington Wing, ordering my own meals, reading one trashy novel after another, and slowly losing the £5 per day which Daddy had thoughtfully provided for me to place bets on horses. It was an agreeable interval, though curiously my hip hurt more than my nose.

  By the time I was ready to face the world again, everyone agreed that Mr Mowlem had done a good job.

  ‘It’ll do for a few years,’ he said laconically. ‘If it looks absurd when she’s forty, we can do some more work on it.’

  Forty seemed unimaginably distant to me then – a world away. Absurd or not, even when I reached and passed that age I felt no urge to tinker with his handiwork, though for fear of a repeat performance I have taken particular care to protect my nose from violent contact with hard surfaces ever since.

>   CHAPTER SEVEN

  France

  NOW I WAS over sixteen and had finished with school it was time to see a bit more of the world. Apart from two skiing holidays cosily cocooned among English-speakers I had never been abroad, so the thought of launching off among foreigners on my own was both exhilarating and daunting.

  The first question was where to go, and for various reasons France seemed the obvious choice. Mummy loved the country and had spent much of her early childhood in Normandy where, before the First World War, her father had owned a flourishing textile factory near Rouen and cut a dash with his racehorses at Longchamps and Maison Lafitte. However, when France devalued its currency after the war, Grandfather lost his fortune overnight. From 24 to the pound sterling, the franc fell to 240, dealing his business a crippling blow. The racehorses were sold, the factory couldn’t pay its suppliers, and in 1921 he fell victim to the Spanish ’flu epidemic and died.

  Mummy was only seven at the time but her eldest brother, my Uncle Breynton, resigned his cavalry commission and, with one brother, Jack, at Dartmouth Naval College and the youngest, Giles, at school at Bradfield, set to work to learn the textile business so that he could pay off Maison Mills’s debts and put the firm on a sound financial footing again.

  My widowed grandmother, Elsie, was the third daughter in the large family of a fashionable portrait painter, John Hanson Walker, a protégé (and natural son) of Sir Frederic Leighton. She had been only 22 when she married her 44-year-old husband Robert Mills, who came of a line of Gloucestershire parsons and was, by all accounts, a clever, didactic and irascible man. He tried – not very successfully – to dominate his young bride and curb her extravagance, but during their marriage, Granny became expert at getting her own way while maintaining a pretence of demure obedience. When Robert died, leaving her to cope with his money troubles, she rose to the challenge magnificently.