2. To pay for a complete permanent wave of the said DAUGHTER’S head of hair, as when and how and where the said DAUGHTER shall prefer.
3. As and when and where the said DAUGHTER shall desire (always providing that the said DAUGHTER first obtains permission from the person familiarly known as the ARSENAL* and that such permission is advised by Dr Watson of Salisbury, or some other local medical man in good repute amongst his fellows in the profession) to pay for a consultation with a London skin specialist of high standing and also for his advised treatment, such advice and treatment being designed to remove from the countenance and ears of the said DAUGHTER the spots and blemishes which for some time have been blighting the said DAUGHTER’S young life …
It is hereby suggested that in return for the PARENT’S compliance with the terms of this agreement the said DAUGHTER shall, to be best of her power and goodwill, refrain from casting a gloom over the household of Ditchampton Farm, particularly with regard to the effect of such gloom upon the aforesaid person familiarly know as the ARSENAL.
GIVEN under my hand and seal this third day of March in the year of our Lord, 1938
SIGNED, Arthur George Street
That this present was received with suitable gratitude is clear from Pamela’s consequent rapturous diary entry: ‘Pop (Mummy too) gave me my birthday present!!!! So marvellous. 1) Driving lessons. 2) Perm!! 3) Skin-man. Oh lovely!!! Pop Mummy are quite [sic].’
Besides being the possessors of five horses, the Streets were by now a ‘two-car’ family; Arthur drove a large Humber Snipe, and a Baby Austin had earlier been purchased in which Pamela could learn to drive. Pamela’s diary records that she passed her driving test on 25 April 1938. She later wrote of her father’s reaction:
My father was always very keen that I should do things in the same way and at the same time as other girls with whom I had been brought up, but I understand that the first day I took AXY (as we called the car) out by myself after passing my test, aged him considerably.
Pamela’s diary entries for the remainder of 1938 read in much the same way as those for 1937, but now include references to art school, at which she once professed she made scant effort. This remark was probably made more out of modesty than truth. One successful result of Pamela’s art school training was the family Christmas card that she subsequently composed that year, a copy of which survives to this day. Pamela’s diary records much praise for her card from such disparate friends of her parents as Lady Radnor, the cartoonist and her father’s fellow Savage Club member Leonard Raven-Hill, and Mrs Holtby, mother of Winifred Holtby, the author of South Riding.
At the end of 1938 and beginning of 1939 Pamela was due to attend a number of dances, and a constant preoccupation was that of finding suitable partners to accompany her. Two young men had by now taken her fancy: one, Ian Benson, was the handsome young whipper-in of the Wilton Hunt; the other, Robin Sayer, was a pupil on a neighbouring farm. It appears that although both were on friendly terms with the Street family (Ian sometimes borrowed Street horses for hunting or riding at local point-to-points) and frequently visited Ditchampton Farm, Pamela’s feelings remained unreciprocated. On 7 December 1938 she writes: ‘Awful down in the dumps. Lost Ian and Robin and nobody to partner for all the forthcoming dances …’ On one occasion her parents’ solution was to import a partner for Pamela from the agricultural college at Cirencester. The result was evidently a success; Pamela’s entry after the event records: ‘Oh marvellous time. Frank was awfully nice. Robin danced twice. All OK … And best of all Ian and I got on awfully well although I kept cutting his dances by mistake etc but he was really very sweet about it and everything is just lovely.’
By now Pamela had begun to follow her father’s broadcasting career with genuine interest. On Sunday 2 October 1938 she writes: ‘Daddy’s Harvest Home Broadcast last night was huge.’ Then on 19 December she writes: ‘Caught 2.30 to London to meet Pop and went to Alexandra Palace for television to watch Pop. Marvellous.’ The following day she continues: ‘Met Freddie Grisewood, R. Arkell, Mr. Middleton, S.A.B. Mair all last night.’
As the 1930s progressed, Arthur Street would have been as aware as any of his contemporaries – indeed probably more than most – of the increasingly serious international situation, but he evidently shielded his daughter from his concerns. Pamela later wrote of this period:
By that time I was far more preoccupied with riding and hunting than anything else. Wars took place in other countries, the kind we learned about for School Certificate. And anyway, had not my parents said that the 1914–18 war was a war to end all wars … As far as I was concerned, my own country was the best place on earth and I was thoroughly enjoying the 1930s.
By the spring of 1938, it was beginning to dawn on even the sheltered Pamela that this so far idyllic period of her life might not last. The first reference in her diary to the possibility of war comes on 15 March 1938: ‘I’m afraid this diary is frightfully narrow because there’s an awful lot happening abroad etc. Hitler has marched into Austria and got it!’
Contingency planning for war was by now gaining momentum. On 24 April 1938, Pamela’s diary records that the Air Ministry had requisitioned a poultry farm owned by one of her uncles, a flat acreage of land on Salisbury Plain suitable for an aircraft landing strip and outbuildings. Further entries for the year showed Pamela’s increasing awareness of the threat from abroad. On 16 September she wrote: ‘Being me forgot to put down there is a frightful international situation. Chamberlain to Hitler etc etc. I don’t know much.’ Then on 21 September she wrote: ‘Still terrible Europe pot-boil.’ And on 26 September: ‘The war situation is getting worse and worse …’ The following day her entry becomes more personal: ‘Saw Ian. He was terribly sweet … and I said if there was a war he was to come and wish us goodbye!!!! … War situation is still awful.’ On 28 September Pamela reports: ‘War situation still bad and everyone digging trenches for air raids.’
During 1938 Pamela made several references to attending a first aid training course, presumably by way of preparation for future hostilities. After taking the final exam on 2 December, she was clearly worried about the outcome: ‘First Aid exam by Dr. Taylor Young. Lot did quite wrong forearm bandage just like me.’ Despite such doubts, two days later she records that she passed successfully.
One incident during the hunting season of 1938 made an enduring impression on Pamela:
It was just after Mr. Chamberlain had returned from Munich with his Peace with Honour slogan. It was a golden morning, the kind one sometimes gets in early autumn, when all the colours of the countryside seem so much more vivid than at any other time of the year. We were on top of the downs waiting at a cover. The sunlight was just beginning to disperse the mist in the valley below, so that we watched it come into view, rather as if someone was turning a spotlight on a stage.
A rather happy-go-lucky gentleman said to my father, ‘Don’t you think it’s mornings such as this that ought to make us feel grateful to Mr. Chamberlain?’
I fear my father’s reply was more or less unprintable. So far as he was concerned, we may have got peace, but there was no honour attached to it.
Note
* Arthur and Pamela’s nickname for Vera Street.
Two
Wilton at War (1939)
The year 1939 started for the Street household in much the same manner as the previous one, with the usual riding activities and local dances. Despite the possibility of military conflict which, as far as Arthur Street was concerned, Chamberlain’s visit to Munich had done little to dispel, plans were soon under way for a radical makeover of Ditchampton Farmhouse. This took place later that summer, during which time Vera and Pamela Street were packed off to the seaside to be out of the way. Pamela later wrote about the reasons for the alterations:
Although both the farm and house were rented, my father decided it was worth having quite extensive alterations done. He wanted a study tucked away somewhere, instead of his present one at the front of
the house, where he said he was in full view of anyone arriving at the front door and therefore much too easily ‘got at’, as he put it. He also wanted the staircase moved, as it annoyed him that it was the first thing one saw on entering the hall and was far from beautiful; and my mother and father wanted a larger drawing-room where they could entertain and where I, too, might have small parties if they put down a suitable floor for dancing.
The extra space thus obtained was very soon to prove invaluable, though hardly in the way the occupants of Ditchampton Farm had originally intended.
At various stages in Pamela’s diaries she recorded the books she was currently reading, amongst which were Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Gone with the Wind, Testament of Youth and South Riding. The last two deserve a particular mention in terms of the intellectual development of the young Pamela. She started reading Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth in 1937, shortly after she began keeping a diary, and a rather self-conscious entry in October that year reads: ‘Am reading Testament of Youth. My diary isn’t anything like a diary should be apparently.’
Vera Brittain’s great friend, Winifred Holtby, wrote South Riding just before her untimely death (indeed it is mooted that Vera Brittain may have completed the final sections for her posthumously). Mrs Holtby, Winifred’s mother – herself from Yorkshire farming stock – was an admirer of Arthur Street’s work and had managed to befriend him. When the latter was due to speak at a luncheon club in Yorkshire in February 1939, she offered the entire Street family hospitality at her home in Harrogate for a few days afterwards. Pamela’s feelings about this experience were decidedly mixed:
It was just after Winifred Holtby died, and Mrs. Holtby laid great emphasis on the fact that I was to occupy her daughter’s one-time bedroom. Being a somewhat imaginative young girl, I did not care for the idea at all. I was more than a little afraid of Mrs. Holtby, who was a very imposing old lady and reminded me of my Grandmother Street. After dinner on the first night of our visit, she wound up some long story she was telling us by suddenly directing her gaze towards the corner where I was sitting, stifling a yawn and saying, ‘And now, my dear, you may go to bed.’ I obeyed immediately, although secretly hoped to have been ignored until we could all go upstairs together.
By now Pamela’s artistic aspirations had been matched or even superseded by a determination to follow in her father’s footsteps as a writer. Throughout the year her diary is punctuated by references to poems or articles being posted off to various publications and almost invariably being returned with the customary rejection slip. Occasionally, however, Pamela succeeded. Her first literary effort to see print was a humorous poem composed earlier that year, ‘Wessex Wins’, a title Arthur Street liked so much that he subsequently borrowed it for a forthcoming collection of essays and broadcasts published in 1941. In a talk to a local historical society many years later, Pamela remarked that it was ‘rather a cruel poem’; what she meant – as her diary reveals – is that the poem was based on Robin Sayer, the pupil on a neighbouring farm whose affections Pamela had tried in vain to win, and this was her way of hitting back. Cruel or otherwise, the poem shows Pamela’s natural talent for rhyme and rhythm, together with a somewhat precocious awareness of social nuances. It was published in a magazine called Everywoman later that year, accompanied by her own cartoon illustrations:
Wessex Wins
The parents of Claude Shillito in justified alarm,
Sent their wanton son from Chelsea down to work upon a farm,
Hoping fallow field and fences,
Might restore him to his senses,
Whilst a little wholesome pig-sty wouldn’t do him any harm.
So in condescending manner this too precious high-brow boy
Descended on South Wiltshire quite complete in corduroy,
Thought old Giles a priceless fellow
With a rather raucous bellow,
And his farm of ten score acres an amusing sort of toy.
Then the anxious local mothers begged him fervently to call,
Would he partner dear Belinda at the Wire and Poultry Ball?
At the village entertainment
Would he don a shepherd’s raiment?
And Claude said, most obligingly, he’d love to do it all.
But although they tried their level best this gigolo to spoil,
Claude began to take an interest in his unaccustomed toil,
Found the finest thing to rake on
Was his bread and cheese and bacon,
Which he ate as only those can eat who work upon the soil.
So he settled in Mudhampton, and the life of Cheyne Walk
Seemed to fade into the background as he learnt the native talk,
Whilst the mysteries of sowing
And the art of turnip-hoeing,
Made the country rather grow on him, as charlock grows on chalk.
And when Ma and Pa, relenting, went to visit him one day,
They both returned to Chelsea filled with horrified dismay,
For on seeing how he’d stuck it
They informed him he might chuck it,
Claude said simply but quite firmly that he’d much prefer to stay.
Pamela’s financial reward for this effort arrived on 28 July, as she records: ‘My cheque came from Everywoman’s, and they’ve paid me five whole and untarnished guineas!!!’ But elsewhere in her diary she writes of her frustration at her lack of progress: ‘At present I am just drifting. I do wish I could get at something definite, like Pop’s new book … I’m never going to earn any money.’
There are one or two references early in the year to Pamela’s plans to ‘go away’, by which she meant to attend an art school in London, and how to achieve this without upsetting her parents, or more particularly her mother; it seems that Arthur Street was more accommodating towards his daughter’s wishes because on 1 August she records: ‘Caught 9.30 to London to meet Pop. Looked round the Chelsea Art School which we liked and the London Central …’ All too soon, however, any thoughts of a serious artistic or writing career would become irrelevant.
In an age of constantly updated news bulletins beamed to us via satellite from every corner of the globe, it is easy to forget how comparatively difficult accurate news would have been to come by in 1939. In those days the voice of authority was the British Home Service (the precursor to today’s Radio 4), and it was commonplace to find whole families huddled round the wireless to listen to the nine o’clock evening news which, in any case, was censored. Reports of the alarming unfolding events in Europe could not have been easy for an average 18-year-old to grasp. Despite this, Pamela’s diary makes it clear that she was trying to keep herself well informed.
On 15 and 16 March 1939, the Nazis – having already annexed unopposed, in May of the previous year, the Sudetenland part of Czechoslovakia, and emboldened by the appeasement policy of other Western European nations at the Munich Conference the following September – occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia. During this period Pamela’s diary records: ‘March 6th … the world is in an awful mess and I am very ignorant of the whole situation … March 18th … Another European bust-up … March 19th … Hitler gone back on Munich.’ By now the threat of war on English soil was becoming very real, and further measures were being taken to protect the civilian population. On 6 April Pamela states: ‘We had our gas masks fitted … Oh dear no end to Hitler’s doings. Awful mess abroad.’
Despite the current uncertainties, it appears that life in the Street household continued as normally as possible, and that there were a number of bright interludes. Arthur Street was more in demand than ever as a broadcaster, and Pamela’s diary records that on 7 May he took her mother and her to a Ladies’ Night at the Savage Club, which Pamela much appreciated: ‘Never enjoyed myself more – it was marvellous. Table with Mr Purvis and Mr Hogan etc etc etc. Lovely show. Enjoyed Hugh E. Wright and Billie Bennet & the Western Brothers. Dorothy Sayers in the Chair & everything topping …’
Pam
ela’s diary goes on to mention a Polo Club Ball, flag-selling outside Barclays Bank when one of her boyfriends sought her out and gave her a whole shilling (which she considered very generous), and then on 17 June a darts match at the Black Horse Inn at Teffont, where Arthur Street was commentating for a live broadcast. Work was now well under way on the renovations at Ditchampton Farm, during which she and her mother were dispatched to the seaside, where they stayed at various lodgings or small hotels near Studland Bay for much of the summer. At one point that July, Pamela records: ‘Mummy and I both agree it’s been one of the most lovely holidays we’ve ever spent – went from start to finish without a hitch.’
However, on their return mother and daughter found that Ditchampton farmhouse was still far from habitable, and for several weeks they lodged at the Black Horse Inn in nearby Teffont. But eventually, with all members of the family exercising considerable elbow grease, the farmhouse was ready to be lived in once again, and plans were made to make use of the newly extended drawing room. Much in vogue at the time were ‘sherry parties’ for young people, and on 18 August Pamela states: ‘Wrote out 40 girls 26 boys invitations to Sherry Party which will be on the 16th Sept, lovely I hope …’
Sadly for Pamela, events abroad soon conspired to prevent the eagerly awaited party from taking place. On 23 August the Germans signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviets (with secret provisions for the division of Eastern Europe, including the joint occupation of Poland); on 25 August Britain – acknowledging the futility of its former appeasement policy – signed a pact of alliance with Poland. War now seemed almost inevitable. After a few days’ delay during which time Hitler tried, unsuccessfully, to secure the neutrality of England and France, on 1 September the Nazis advanced into Poland. The British government immediately declared the mobilisation of the British Armed Forces, and put in train the mass evacuation of children from London and the southern coastal ports. On 2 September Britain and France issued a joint ultimatum to Germany to withdraw from Polish territory, which would expire at 11 a.m. the following morning; having received no response within the time limit, at 11.15 a.m. on 3 September Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain made the formal announcement that Britain was now at war. Pamela records this period as follows:
Farming, Fighting and Family Page 4
