Under the Ivy

by Graeme Thomson

  Where did she come from? We could do much worse than begin here, a refuge to which Bush has returned again and again in both body and song. East Wickham Farm was always more than just a patchwork quilt of bricks, mortar and dense foliage. A 350-year-old plot situated just off Wickham Street in Welling, Kent, to the south-east of London, it was once the focal point of the local community and even at the turn of the twentieth century remained extensively rural. By the time the Bush family settled there in the Fifties there had been some relatively minor augmentations and cosmetic additions, but the basic footprint had remained unchanged for centuries. Though no longer a working farm, and no longer surrounded by acres of open land, it still had a palpable presence.

  In the compact but densely packed grounds stood a brick duck pond, later converted into a swimming pool, a circular rose garden, a dovecote, a Wash House and a mice-riddled grain store known by all as the barn, which would later become Bush’s private studio and in childhood, too, served as a kind of refuge. With its dilapidated pump organ, its cracked, uneven brick floor and its wooden steps edging upwards towards a loft with a distinctive round window looking down onto the farm, for Bush it was a “mouse’s nest”,1 both a retreat and a favoured launch pad for her imagination long before she recorded songs like ‘Running Up That Hill’ there.

  Once the farm would have stood in splendid isolation among the surrounding countryside, but by the time Bush had started primary schoolin the early Sixties only the back of the property looked onto open ground, as it does today, the scrubland of ‘Fanny on the Hill’ stretching away to the north-east towards Plumstead Cemetery. By the mid-Sixties Wickham Street, the road lying at the end of the short front drive leading to the farm, was buzzing with traffic and its flanks lined with new houses. On the same side of the road as the farm entrance stood a number of modern properties, low-level blocks of flats to the west and neat suburban houses to the east. London, that most voracious of cities, had crept up and devoured it.

  And yet a sense of solitude remained. The farm was protected from public view by a large outer fence and a dense thicket of trees on all sides of the main house; nestled in greenery, rooted deep in its own history, the modern encroachments all around served only to emphasise East Wickham Farm’s sense of somewhere out of time, a hushed oasis in a sea of bustling modernity, with half a foot and most of its oaken heart in another world.

  It offered numerous opportunities for concealment and countless sirens’ calls to escape, imagine, create, pretend. In her brother John Carder Bush’s 1986 book Cathy, which contains 29 briefly annotated photographs of his sister taken when she was between seven and 12 years old, we can see her at play in this magical place. The book – a simple collection of evocative black and white images – is both beautiful and revealing. There she is, dressing up, posing, preening and role-playing beneath the black roof beams, made out of wood scavenged from old warships broken up at the docks at nearby Woolwich; or draping herself over deer- and goat-skins plundered from the Scottish Highlands and Iceland; or gripping old swords, almost her own height, wearing her brother’s over-sized motorcycle boots and a quizzical expression; or twirling near a shed that housed two unexploded World War II bombs, a legacy of Bush’s grandfather Joe, who had moved into the farmhouse for the remaining 13 years of his life after his wife Annie died in 1950, and retained an unaccountable fondness for the incendiaries.

  Some of the pictures in Cathy bring to mind The Cottingley Fairies, the celebrated photographic hoax of 1917 which showed two young sisters playing with nymphs at the bottom of the garden; others showcase her eldest brother’s love of the great early twentieth century book illustrators, Eduard Dulac and Willy Pogany; others still are clearly partly a homage to Charles Dodgson, better known by his literary pseudonym Lewis Carroll, and his vivid photographic portraits of children, specifically young girls like Xie Kitchin and Alice Liddell. Where some of Dodgson’s portraits had obvious sexual overtones, the ones in Cathy are by turns playful, melancholic and sensual, at their best hinting at the woman within the child, capturing the surreptitious weighing out of knowledge and innocence, a girlon the cusp of something she can feel even if she can’t yet put a name to it.

  These kinds of complex ruminations on childhood are potently late Victorian and Edwardian obsessions, and crop up in some of the keynote works of literature that Bush loved as a child and continued to love as an adult, among them J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind In The Willows and Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince (the latter celebrated in ‘December Will Be Magic Again’). They are obvious touchstones for the aching sense of loss and deep-rooted Englishness in much of her music. It is not the impish, chimbley-sweep Englishness of The Small Faces’ ‘Lazy Sunday’, nor the detailed kitchen-sink vignettes of The Kinks, nor even the Blakeian Albion of The Libertines. It’s certainly not the diluted, warm-beer-and-cricket version pined for by the likes of John Major, nor the mock-Tudor chintz framing the suburban dream.

  Half Irish, Bush connects with a harder, more mythical England, a pre-Christian Celtic land, a deep, green dream of a country that has never truly existed except buried deep within our own minds. As a child she went hunting for it in on Sunday afternoons in the beautiful old gardens at Hall Place in Old Bexley; she sought it in Ealing comedies, dark folk songs, dusty old children’s novels and cheesy TV dramas. It’s a country populated by ghosts, ghouls and phantoms roaming among wild flowers, brambles and mossy graveyards, much more a half-remembered feeling than a physical place, wet with the tears of lost innocence, scented with a whiff of greasepaint. Filled with a glorious nostalgia, it’s both ecstatic and desperately sad, full of beauty, mystery and horror.

  It’s the world she inhabited as a girl, and the one she has strived to hold onto as an adult: the delicious – if painful – heightened awareness of youth, the yearning to return to uncomplicated, instinctive modes of behaviour, an acute sensitivity to the crackle and static of real life. The desire to break down the barriers we erect in adulthood can be felt in many of her songs, and can be traced back to those early photographs of her at East Wickham Farm, among the ivy and tall stone walls, the decrepit barn and shady, leaf-strewn pool, the open fires and old bellows, the wooden Wendy house with the windows of real glass.

  It is indisputably the same world depicted on the front cover of Lionheart. The farm bequeathed to the child the kind of intense feelings – melancholia, innocence (and its inevitable loss), a fear and attraction to horror and dark corners, peace, solitude, sensuality – as evoked in later songs like ‘Oh England, My Lionheart’, ‘In Search Of Peter Pan’ and in the almost unbearable sense of sadness found in the words to ‘Under The Ivy’. In ‘Suspended In Gaffa’ she sings “out in the garden there’s half of a heaven,” while both ‘Warm And Soothing’ and ‘A Coral Room’ recall coming into the house from the garden, through “the back door.”

  In one of her earliest – and best – unreleased tracks, ‘Something Like A Song’, she plugs into ‘The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn’ section of The Wind In The Willows, telling of an embodied spirit voice, a muse, calling her from the grounds of the farm. She sings about seeing a piper “by the willow,” only visible at night when all the lights in the house are lit low. She calls out to him as he moves across the pond, but he “won’t answer me.” This house, it is clear, is one of the deepest pools from which her songs spring. In ‘The Fog’, a song about having the courage to step away from the certainties of the past, she looks into the mists of her childhood and sings: “Just like a station on the radio, I pick you up.”

  The past is her constant companion, and one of the most compelling narrative strands of her career has been the fight to maintain contact with this place, to keep it continually alive in her present.

  The Bushes moved into East Wickham Farm in the Fifties and it remains in their ownership today, filled with the memories of over half a century of rich family life. Catherine Bush, the youngest member of the household, was the product of a marri
age of understated English scholarship and vivid Celtic spirit, with each side of the union bequeathing many shared qualities, not least among them eccentricity, kindness and a love of music.

  Her father, Robert John Bush, was born on April 4, 1920 in South Ockendon, a village in Essex, just east of London, dating back to mediaeval times but long ago subsumed by post-war prefabs and modern housing estates. His was not a privileged start, but he was bright and worked hard to win a scholarship to the highly regarded Grammar School at Grays, a few miles south, and later won a place at medical school to train to become a doctor.

  In early 1943, at the age of 22, the newly qualified General Practitioner married Hannah Patricia Daly at St Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church in Epsom, Surrey. An Irish staff nurse two years his senior, born June 20, 1918, Hannah worked at Epsom Grove Hospital and was one of 12 children who originally hailed from the harbour town of Dungarvan in County Waterford.

  A little over a year after the marriage, in the spring of 1944, their first child was born and named John Carder Bush. The unusual middle name, which the oldest Bush brother has always used professionally, is in honour of Dr Bush’s maternal grandfather, John Carder. To friends and family he would always be simply Jay.

  Dr Bush spent the remainder of WWII serving in the army in India, while Hannah looked after the new baby. When the doctor returned he began working in Welling as a GP and settled with his new wife and family at East Wickham Farm. Patrick followed eight years after Jay on December 9, 1952, and finally Catherine arrived, almost six years later, on July 30, 1958, born in Bexleyheath Maternity Hospital in south-east London. She was known as Cathy or Catherine throughout her childhood; the shift to Kate after she left school seemed to have some small but worthy significance.

  She was born when her mother was already 40, late in the day even by today’s standards and exceptionally so by those of the late Fifties, by which it might be speculated that her arrival was not entirely planned. (Bush also became a mother very late, just shy of 40). As a consequence, by the time she had started school Jay was already at Cambridge University studying law – though he never qualified – and Paddy was attending St Joseph’s Academy, the local Catholic grammar school. The quirk of having three children arrive at such irregular intervals did much to dictate the sibling dynamic. Her brothers not only became a profound influence on Bush through their pioneering forays into books, music, philosophy and art, but there was little in the way of rivalry or the kind of turf wars that frequently break out when siblings are born close together. It was a harmonious unit, and if they were each highly protective of one another, it’s hardly a wonder that Jay, in particular, became such a fierce defender of a sister who could almost, in terms of the 14-year age gap, have been his daughter.

  Her looks have always been closer to her mother, the Celt – tiny but shapely, dark hair, pale skin, rather elfin – but her voice is her father’s: the same slow, southern English accent, the same charmingly weak ‘r’s. She also inherited his sense of patience and outer calm, while internalising her mother’s energy and crackling vivacity, stored up for use in her work. Dr Bush ran his surgery from home and in time Hannah stopped nursing and effectively became a housewife, answering the phones when required but generally serving as the dynamo of the household, constantly on the move: singing, laughing, making cups of tea and offering sustenance, occasionally snapping at the mess her children made or their lack of activity. Dr Bush, with his pipe, his armchair and his considered manner, was the ballast.

  It was a winning combination. Everybody loved them. “Kate’s mum was universally accepting of everybody, she was just one of the sweetest human beings ever,” says Charlie Morgan. “And Kate’s dad as well, the Doc. He was a sweetheart, a realnurturer of his kids’ creativity. Her family were so functional and so nurturing and so loving. Her brothers being very close to her and her parents being very close to her, it [was] such a great luxury to have.” The KT Bush Band’s original drummer, Vic King, recalls his first visit to the house late in 1976. “Very friendly family: ‘Come into the kitchen!’ It was cups of tea, cake and biscuits until you couldn’t move. Kate’s mum was lovely, she floated around; Dr Bush was really nice, made you welcome.”

  In a rare 1979 film clip we see them all together, sitting in the garden at Wickham Farm. Faced with her parents’ obvious pride – although as ever it is quietly expressed and understated; there was never anything brash about this family – Bush, aged 20, still seems very much the baby of the brood despite her star status. She sits with her head bowed, half-embarrassed, half-overjoyed. When her father speaks a few simple words of kindness, you can see her affection and respect for him radiate from her.

  Much was later made of Bush’s ‘privileged’ background. So prevalent is the notion that pop stars are forged in the fires of dysfunction, her childhood looks like an anomaly by comparison, the kind of upbringing which offers no imperative to challenge or create or push for inner change. At times, the stability and constancy of her early life has been used as a stick to beat her with, as though it somehow negates her claim as an artist. She has even pondered the thought herself. “I’ve had really quite a nice life, actually,”2 she said, rather apologetically, in 1979, later adding. “I often think people are looking for something in my life that they can’t find. A number of performers, I suppose, come from working-class families, or their parents were divorced. Perhaps that gives them the urge to go out and struggle for something.”3

  Her struggles were real enough, but they were never immediately obvious. She was usually ferried around in her father’s car and money was never a problem – she always seemed to have it and never had to earn a living by any conventional measure, nor did she seek the kind of temporary work that teenage girls often take on, like waitressing or babysitting, for pocket money. From an early age, she was free to carve out her vision of the world as she saw fit, but that fact doesn’t make her urge to create any less urgent, or somehow invalidate the importance of what she is saying. Bush had a favourable start, perhaps, but the important thing is what she did with it. How many other all-singing, all-dancing daddy’s girls have knuckled down and come up with such astonishing results?

  In fact, her parents were both from solid, unshowy country stock; they were not born into wealth, but they did become extremely comfortable. A doctor in the Fifties and Sixties was at the higher end of the social scale, and the Bushes not only had Wickham Farm, but came to own a property in the village of Birchington-on-Sea – a small, secluded and rather sedate seaside resort close to Margate in north-east Kent that looks out onto the North Sea and is much favoured by the retired – where family holidays were often spent, as well as a three-storey house in Lewisham, divided into three large flats, where first Jay, then Paddy, and finally Bush herself all later lived.

  There was also a grand adventure to the Antipodes when Bush was aged six. The family – minus Jay, studying at Cambridge – travelled by boat to Australia and New Zealand to visit members of Hannah’s family and, it seems, to investigate the possibility of emigration. In the end they stayed for about six months, putting a serious dent in both her and Paddy’s school attendance; she was seasick on the way there and had measles on the way back. Her hazy, hallucinatory recollections of the trip stood out as an exotic memory of childhood, but more important than the money that enabled it was the general atmosphere of creativity and knowledge that surrounded her; and always that sense of a vaguely Bohemian permissiveness, that alluring pull of a faintly mystical ‘other’ life tugging at her hemline.

  Although she was given an astonishingly sensible upbringing – she was protected and cared for without ever being spoiled, she was given freedom without being over-indulged, she was treated with respect without being made brattish – it was by no means an ordinary childhood. Loving and calm, yes, but hardly conventional. Her school friends recall Dr Bush taking surgery in a flowered smock; when the house ghost, a Victorian serving maid who would swish past in the hall, became too tro
ublesome the family had her exorcised; Bush later recalled how her mother, when ill, had “taken off like a balloon and hit the ceiling.”4 There was nothing sinister in this, it was simply evidence of a very real engagement with unseen realms of influence. “The whole family were very unusual and artistic and spiritual, but all completely different,” says Stewart Avon Arnold, Bush’s long term dance partner. Other descriptions of the Bushes range from “eccentric and lovely,” “bonkers, great fun, very charming” to “mad as a bat”5, but every single one brims with very genuine affection.

  To outsiders, they seemed somehow divorced from the mundanities of Sixties and Seventies suburban life. The evidence in support might be esoteric – they practised karate and Kyudo, Japanese Zen archery, which Jay still teaches all over Europe – or prosaic: they had their groceries delivered each week rather than lugging them home from the shops. An alluring mixture of nouveau-hippie Sixties sensibilities, scholarly pre-Raphaelite sensuality, and solidly pre-war middle-class family values – there were rabbits called Winkle and Took hopping around the farm, and various other furry things in hutches, including a hamster – the Bushes appeared to exist in their own rather rarefied bubble. Inside, the influences came thick and fast. “I think being brought up in a situation where music is there, people are being creative, it feels natural for you to do that too,” said Bush. “I think that was a very big opening for me at a very young age to have that kind of energy around me.”6