Daughter of Empire

by Pamela Hicks

  Belinda wasn’t always serious, though, and together we were prone to fits of giggles and madcap schemes, such as the occasion during my second year when we decided it was high time that all the girls in our dormitory ran away. We plotted in hushed tones at lunch and tea and spent the whole of the next week stuffing our elasticated knickers with bread rolls. On the appointed evening we went to bed as good as gold – no doubt alerting the teachers straight away that something was amiss – and at the prearranged hour, we dressed furtively then sneaked out one by one into the corridor. But I was paralysed by a sudden thought: who would look after Sunshine if I didn’t go back home? As a special treat Sunshine had been allowed to come with me to school and was housed at the local stables. ‘Come on, Pammy,’ hissed Belinda, ‘what are you waiting for?’ She gave me a shove. ‘I can’t come,’ I said, ‘I can’t leave Sunshine.’ ‘Don’t be such a chump,’ she replied, pulling me along. But what did she know? She didn’t have a pony and couldn’t possibly understand. I shook myself free, handed over my bread rolls then went back to bed, feeling like the worst traitor ever. It wasn’t long before the other girls came back too: they had made it as far as the roof before they were caught and sent straight back to bed.

  At Adsdean, my family was coming to terms with two recent tragedies. The first involved some of my German cousins. Cecile, my cousin Philip’s older sister, was married to Don, Uncle Ernie’s son, and they had three children with another on the way. Cecile had been so kind in Germany, when we were living with Aunt Onor and Uncle Ernie, even writing to me in England, enquiring as to the health of one of my dolls. I was looking forward to seeing them again at the wedding of Don’s brother Lu Hesse to Peg Geddes. The Hessian family – including Aunt Onor (Uncle Ernie had recently died) – was travelling to London, and there was a great sense of anticipation with all the family coming together. They set off by plane from Germany but in thick fog they crashed into a brickworks’ chimney in Ostend and everyone on board was killed. Cecile’s little girl Johanna had been left in Germany as she was too young to come to the wedding, and I couldn’t stop thinking of her now all alone, without her parents or her brothers or her grandmother.

  Then, one afternoon as I was going into the drawing room, Patricia said: ‘Don’t go in there just now, Pammy. It’s Grandmama. She is writing a letter . . .’ She paused, realising she hadn’t given me enough of an explanation, ‘. . . and she’s crying.’ There was nothing I could say after the shock of this revelation so I went into the garden to play with Lottie. I had never seen a grown-up cry before and I didn’t like the feeling it gave me. I knew why she was in tears, for her son, my father’s brother Georgie, had died from cancer that spring, just before my birthday. There seemed to be all sorts of bad news around, and at that time the grownups never seemed to be totally free of worries. Knowing that our grandmother, usually so strong and resilient, was in tears made me very unhappy.

  Maybe you couldn’t be sure of the world after all. There was talk of war too, a rumbling undercurrent of unease that ran through the snatches of conversation I overheard between my parents, Bunny and their guests. Too young for anyone to explain the facts to me, I was unsettled, as if I didn’t know what I would wake up to the next morning. I didn’t like this feeling one bit.

  5

  Ever since the beginning of 1938, my mother had been heavily involved with the nation’s preparations for the war that seemed increasingly inevitable. She joined the Red Cross and attended first aid and anti-gas demonstrations and accompanied the King and Queen to air-raid precaution lectures in London. Most local boroughs had started to stockpile gas masks and conduct public air-raid demonstrations. My father secured masks for everyone at Adsdean and carried out his own drills. In the park below the terrace where we all assembled, gas masks covering our faces, the danger of an attack seemed far away. In London, the atmosphere was much more tense.

  For me, at school or at home, the signs of the impending crisis were few and far between. That summer, Cousin Philip often came over to stay, which was always good fun. He was my first cousin, the son of my father’s sister, Princess Alice of Greece. Eight years older than me and three years Patricia’s senior, he was the inspiration behind all the naughty, boisterous games we played, including vicious bicycle polo matches with my father. Philip was very handsome, and even though he was my cousin, hero worship blossomed during those innocent months. I was in awe of him.

  It was in September that pictures of the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain – the peace settlement in one hand and his black umbrella in the other – appeared all over the newspapers. The house was alive with adults discussing the newspaper headline ‘Peace in Our Time’. I had to catch Patricia one day to ask her what it all meant. She explained that the prime minister had gone to Germany to have a meeting with their leader, Adolf Hitler, who said that, after the horrors of the First World War, he didn’t want to go to war with us. That sounded good to me, so I was confused as to why my parents were cross with the prime minister and kept telling everyone that they were ‘anti-appeasement’. In fact one day at tea, when Zelle casually mentioned that she had been stopped in the street by someone collecting for ‘Appeasement’ and, having been persuaded that it was a good national cause, had given him quite a bit of money, my mother cried, ‘No, Zelle! That won’t do any good at all.’ I listened then as my father patiently explained why they believed appeasement was wrong, thinking that Hitler could not be trusted.

  There followed another extended period when my parents were both away – my father on naval duties and my mother on a challenging adventure with Bunny along the newly completed Burma Road to China. She wrote to tell us how her presence had astonished the Chinese officials, as she was the first woman to travel along the road. Apart from the fact that she could never find a woman’s toilet, she didn’t encounter any problems along the way, even though there were hostilities between the Chinese and the Japanese at the time. In May 1939 – she missed my tenth birthday – she came home with two wallabies, Dabo and Bobo, a gift from New Guinea. When my mother had asked what she should feed them, she had been told, ‘Oh! Too easy, too easy. Just give them orchids and they will be fine.’ Eventually it was established what alternatives would suit them if orchids were found not to be abundant in England.

  In the summer of 1939, as war rapidly became a certainty, my mother volunteered to take in some evacuees. Her father had recently died, bequeathing Broadlands to her, but as there were more important matters at hand, and many of our staff had been conscripted, my parents decided we should remain at Adsdean for a while. In August, twenty-four children and two teachers came down from Wimbledon. They arrived looking completely underdressed for a large, cold country house, shivering away in their skimpy cotton dresses and short trousers. Rationing was beginning to test even the magical powers of Mr Brinz, but these children melted his heart. As they were from London, he decided that fish and chips would be the most familiar food and he dished them up a large quantity for their first tea with us. The children looked at their plates in great confusion, then looked at each other, looked at their teachers and promptly declared the feast inedible without vinegar or newspaper.

  On 3 September, my sister and I were sent for. As we came down from the nursery to join our parents, we could sense by the stillness in the house that something of great significance was happening. We sat in silence, listening to the declaration of war as Mr Chamberlain’s bleak voice was relayed from the wireless. I had never heard an announcement on the radio before and I lay in bed that night wondering what it would be like to wake up in the morning ‘at war’. The next day, however, nothing had changed, and after a few more days my father came back from HMS Kelly at Portsmouth and took Patricia, Grandmama and me for a picnic lunch at Maiden Castle in Dorset. Scrambling up the tremendous grass mounds at the castle and looking down at the undulating fields and forests below, I felt like a medieval knight looking out for invaders.

  I had now inherited Patricia’s pony
Puck, who was bigger than Sunshine. One morning my father was waiting to be recalled to the Kelly. As he knew that he was due to go to sea at any moment he wanted to enjoy a last ride, so he decided to take Patricia and me in turn, leaving the other to stay close to the telephone and act as a ‘dispatch rider’. It sounded rather thrilling. During Patricia’s ride I had never prayed so much for something to happen, and after watching the phone for what seemed like ages, I went to the stables to make sure that Puck was tacked up, ready for the off. When I heard our butler, Frank Randall, telling Mr Birch, the head groom, in an urgent voice, ‘You must saddle up and ride out to find his Lordship,’ my heart began to pound. ‘But Mr Randall,’ said Birch, ‘his Lordship has left strict instructions that Miss Pamela should act as the courier.’ ‘Oh, I don’t think we can have Miss Pamela going up there on that little pony. No, Mr Birch, you will have to go.’ Horrified that the moment might be denied me, I cried, ‘No, no, Frank. Daddy wants me to go, that’s why they left me here.’ I ran past him, leapt on to Puck and careered away before he could stop me. It took quite a while to catch up with my father and Patricia, and Puck – who by now was gone in the wind – was making a lot of noise by the time we reached them. I could hardly speak with excitement: ‘Daddy, the telephone call has come. You’ve got to go back to your ship!’ Knowing that I had done something important all by myself made me feel giddy with triumph. As my father and Patricia galloped off, Puck and I stood together in a cloud of dust, wheezing and puffing for a while, until I collected the reins and we turned for home.

  This was the last time I was to gallop across this stretch of the Downs, for while I was at school that autumn, my parents left Adsdean and moved to Broadlands. When I came home for the half-term holidays, I was astonished to discover that my new house was a proper stately home, set among 6,000 acres of land. Despite the beauty of the inside of the house, it was the outside that captured my imagination. The River Test flowed by beside the front lawn, and through the magical gardens that had been shaped by Capability Brown for the 1st Viscount Palmerston in the eighteenth century. Mr Brown had constructed an ornamental canal along which there were some spectacular features, including the Ornamental Dairy, designed for the delight of the Palmerston ladies and their guests. Here, like Marie Antoinette, they could play at milking and butter-making. When I discovered it for the first time I was enthralled – it was like entering a museum with all the old churns, large china bowls and wooden spoons lying around, and as I picked them all up, I felt as though I were being transported back in time.

  From the dairy you had a choice of where to go next. You could either return to the house by following the canal that disappeared by the old icehouse into a tunnel below the lawn, re-emerging beyond the house to run through the pleasure grounds and finally join the river. Or you could turn left up one of a flight of paired stone steps through some decorative gates and into the walled gardens. The steps met at the top in a wide stone plinth upon which my grandfather had carved on the left-hand side ‘Lest We Forget. The Great War 1914–1918’. The right-hand side was empty, and six years later my father was sorely tempted to have carved ‘As We Forgot. Second World War 1939–1945’. There were three gardens enclosed by the wall. The first had apple tunnels on two sides and a greenhouse, and the walls themselves were covered in espaliered plum trees. Here too was a pool with mulberry trees planted by King James I. The next was a flower and vegetable garden and, farther on still, a section that had once been my step-grandmother Molly’s white garden. Beyond and below all three was a tranquil Japanese Garden with a decorative bridge and a summerhouse over a pool. I loved the large bronze sculptures of a stork and a heron that stood in the water.

  I was particularly enamoured of the glass orangery in which grew orange and lemon trees, reminding me of Malta, as well as camellia and gardenia. The third Lord Palmerston, Queen Victoria’s prime minister, had held parliamentary meetings in it nearly one hundred years before. It was quite awe inspiring and I felt strangely honoured to be there. Lottie and I ran around, discovering parts of the house and gardens, for a week – though there were times when I panicked, overwhelmed by the sheer scale of everything, worried I might become lost in all the space or swallowed up by the high clipped hedges. My father was away with the Kelly, Bunny with the Coldstream Guards, and although my mother had finally been able to volunteer her services, she had yet to find a position that could fill up her time and employ her ample amounts of energy and drive. When we weren’t at school, she, Patricia and I rattled around the large house with the dogs. My sister and I expected things to be very low key for Guy Fawkes’ Night because fireworks were banned, but our mother surprised us by taking us down to the cellars and letting off indoor fireworks, allowing us to run about giggling and waving sparklers in the dark, underground passages. When it was time to go back to school – Buckswood had been evacuated to Rhyl in North Wales as a safety precaution – I still hadn’t explored the house fully.

  A lot of knitting went on that winter. My mother was given duties in the Depot for Knitted Garments for the Royal Navy and at school we spent a great deal of time knitting for the brave soldiers, sailors and airmen who were risking their lives for us. Actually I felt trebly sorry for them – for being away from home, in danger, and also for having to wear the garments we made for them. I couldn’t believe anyone would actually wear the scarves, socks and balaclava helmets we were producing. But it wasn’t only at the Depot that my mother worked – she had also joined the Joint War Organisation of the Red Cross and St John Ambulance – and it seemed that all this work was changing her. There was a bounce in her step, she loved planning and organising and making things happen, and she had the skills, charm and presence to make a difference, propelling her towards every opportunity that came her way. She looked dashing in her uniform and cap, forever set at a jaunty angle. Our new Brook House had been bombed, so the family’s London base was now a small house in Charles Street, Mayfair. The depot my mother was supervising was in Belgravia, so it meant that she could walk between the two in a brisk fifteen minutes. She had to call in the help of as many people as she could, including Zelle and Isa, and I couldn’t help worrying that accident-prone Isa might fall foul of some knitting needles.

  I noticed my father looking at my mother with a new sense of pride, telling us that she had found her ‘purpose in life’. He, on the other hand, was a bit down. Kelly was making only short forays out of Portsmouth, and desperate to be at sea for longer, my father often found himself at home with time on his hands. At the end of January, he took Patricia and me into Southampton to have our photographs taken. We were each to have a turn wearing his naval ‘monkey jacket’, the plan being to chart our growth through a series of photographs. In my first, the jacket came down to the floor but Patricia, being fifteen, was showing rather a lot of leg. At the first attempt, the photographer obviously did not understand the purpose of the project because the prints arrived showing only our faces and upper bodies. Enraged at this incompetence, my father took us straight back to have our feet included. With an image of me smiling gleefully from my father’s monkey jacket, this photo was to become one of my favourites, though it did come back to haunt me when my father came to Buckswood to show some lantern slides on the Royal Navy. I never forgave him for proclaiming, ‘And this, girls, is the final slide – a picture of a monkey in a monkey jacket.’

  By April 1940 there was mayhem in the seas around Norway and the Battle of France was brewing. HMS Kelly was ordered to sea. I went with my sister to have lunch on board the ship before our father departed. He showed us his cabin – which as always was decorated in exactly the same way as his bedrooms were on land; his desk was full of instruments and his bookshelves crammed with a complete war library of manuals and memoirs of service chiefs. I was worried that he had no novels – I would have been lost without mine – and planned to send him some while he was away. The day was tinged with a sense of foreboding, and although he made it enjoyable for us, the offi
cers even giving us presents, I felt unsettled. When I got home, the only way I was able to express my fears was to scribble a note along the margin of my diary, in tiny writing as if I didn’t want it to be real: ‘Daddy has gone to sea. Good luck to him.’

  Within a couple of weeks, Chamberlain resigned and Churchill took his place. Hitler’s troops stormed through the Low Countries into France, horrifying the adults around me. I now wrote in my diary that ‘Daddy is having some awful adventures in the North Sea’. When he came home in May 1940 I realised that this was no escapade – the Kelly had been torpedoed. What I didn’t know at the time was that twenty-seven men had been killed and many more injured and that the blast had ripped a hole in her side that a double-decker bus could have been driven through. When she finally reached the Tyne, crowds cheered her all the way up the river. I later learned that my father had evacuated the rest of the crew from the ship, then he had crept back with only six officers and twelve men. Miraculously in a perilously listing ship, through three hundred miles of hostile seas, they had met with no further grave injury, despite being attacked by an enemy torpedo boat and strafed by German fighter planes. When I was taken to the cinema to watch the newsreels, I was immensely proud to see my father’s heroic actions on the screen. We were all hugely relieved to have him back safely.

  I knew, though, that my parents were worried about Bunny, who was fighting in northern France, and Yola, who was back at home, especially when Zelle told me that ‘Paris has fallen’. My mother had heard nothing from Bunny for a while and from Broadlands we could see the flares from the explosions around Calais, twenty-two miles away across the Channel. Each distant flash made us anxious for the safety of our beloved Bunny.