Cherry

by Sara Wheeler

  Sometimes Laddie went into the village with Hobbs to get a horse shod. They took the brougham (the carriage was reserved for more formal occasions) down Lamer Lane and over the Mill Bridge where the Lea formed a pool by the Bull Inn and yellow wagtails darted in and out of the reeds. Laddie loved the forge with its hoofy smell, the sizzle of the hot shoes in water and the flying sparks of struck metal.

  On Sundays the horses were not taken out unless it was raining, and the family walked down to St Helen’s in the village for Morning Service. Before leaving the house the children lined up in the hall to be inspected by the General. He was a martinet, and he brought his army training into his home; but he was a very lovable martinet, and his military severity was mitigated by his wife’s indulgence.

  St Helen’s was an old flint-and-limestone church, slender-spired and daffodilled in spring. The General led his family to the Lamer chapel in the north transept, a place where the dead outnumbered the living. During Canon Davys’ interminable sermons Laddie contemplated the lidded urns and swagged sarcophagi detailing the achievements and multitudinous progeny of his ancestors. He sat alongside a recumbent Sir John, the first baronet, his marble-cool wife Lady Elizabeth and, in the panel below, effigies of their fourteen children. The dead ones carried skulls into which, when his father’s head was turned, Laddie poked his finger to see what lay behind.

  The new lords of Lamer held skating parties in winter, and, in the summer, crayfishing parties on the banks of the Lea near Castle Farm. The General was a sociable fellow but a stickler for punctuality, and when the parties were over, he went round saying goodbye with his watch in his hand. Laddie and the girls socialised at the other big houses, the best party being the Children’s Ball given by the Salisburys at Hatfield House, where there was a real band and a proper supper and wax candles – one year there was even a conjuror who baked a cake in a top hat and brought it out steaming. The Salisburys were top of the Hertfordshire gentry tree – when the Cherry-Garrards moved to Lamer, Gladstone had just narrowly ousted Lord Salisbury as prime minister. (The Tory titan was not yet finished with Downing Street, but he was to be the last prime minister to govern from the Lords.)4

  For those who marry late, ingrained domestic habits are harder to break. But familial intimacy is often sweeter, too. After decades of military life it was agreeable to hear a childish tune tinkle from the nursery, and to find a mewling baby on one’s wife’s knee in the drawing room. Besides, it was easy to slip down to the Naval and Military Club in London, or to receive Bedford pals at home. They came with their grooms, and a pile of freshly laundered horse blankets was stored in the harness room for visiting servants required to stay overnight.

  In their old age, the Cherry-Garrard offspring recalled a blissful childhood and a happy parental marriage. The wear-and-tear of proximity never spoiled the magic for the General and his wife. It was known among the servants that they shared a bed – an unusual practice among the gentry – and it made them seem more human. After they arrived, Lamer quickly acquired a reputation as a good place to work, though the young parlour-maids complained that the General did not allow them to go out at night, and slacking and impropriety swiftly met with their reward. On one occasion, a footman failed to answer a late-night ring on the General’s bell. A search was made, and the hapless man was discovered in a housemaid’s bed. The footman was summoned to the General’s presence, dismissed on the spot and ordered onto the first train out of Wheathampstead in the morning. The housemaid’s mother was summoned the next day and she tearfully took her daughter home.

  The General had always been a keen shooter and he continued to raise partridges and pheasants, as he had at Denford. He took his son out with him, and Laddie walked in the line, watching the beaters march ahead and marking the number of birds bagged in his father’s morocco shooting notebook. Latin was another shared experience. Late in the afternoon, when the room was patchily lit by gas jets, the General gave Laddie lessons in the bow-fronted library. It didn’t occur to the old man that the girls might have wanted to learn Latin, too.

  Eighteen ninety-four was a rainy summer, and in August Laddie’s Bedford grandmother died. His mother was often absent over those long, damp weeks. But there was to be a ruder shock before the trees in the park lost their leaves. Laddie was going away to school.

  That September the eight-year-old Laddie started at the Grange prep school in Folkestone, Kent. He had a new trunk, and a wooden playbox with his name painted on the lid, and the cook made him up a large tin of mixed biscuits.

  The Grange had been founded by the Reverend Arthur Hussey in the early years of the 1870s. The General had been so miserable at Harrow that he was attracted by the school’s newness: it was not mired in the brutality of the old prep schools. In addition, Folkestone’s position on the south coast gratified the Victorian obsession with the benefits of fresh air. At the time Laddie was despatched Folkestone was a deeply fashionable town: rich families decamped there for the summer, installing their servants in the big houses on the new wide avenues and indulging in the new craze for sitting on the beach in canvas chairs. The Grange was known around Lamer, and other Hertfordshire boys were sent away with Laddie. They were a nervous lot when they were decanted from the train at Radnor Park station, their spam-coloured legs sticking out from grey flannel shorts and their striped caps jammed over their eyes.

  For Laddie the anxieties of the playground were exacerbated by his short sight, and his discomfiture at not being able to see fuelled his innate shyness and nervous disposition. But the Grange wasn’t too bad: Hussey, still the headmaster, was popular with the boys. They called him Old Buzz. After classes they collected worms from the dark laurel boscage at the end of the playing field, and when it was warm high-collared masters marched them purposefully down to the harbour to bathe in the bitter English Channel. In July 1896 Laddie wrote home:

  Dear Mother,

  Could you send me a new toothbrush as the one I have now has a lot of the brisels coming out. I have just been sitting out in the pavilion.

  It is only two weeks from the holidays.

  I am looking forward to the time when we wake up in the morning and find that we are going home.

  I am your very loving son

  Apsley.

  No doubt his mother found time to send the toothbrush.

  For most of Laddie’s childhood Evelyn was either pregnant, or nursing, or both. Margaret, to be known as Peggy, made her appearance on 21 September 1896, when her brother was ten. He was now outnumbered four to one, and left alone in the school holidays to nurse his finches by the kitchen range, build crow’s-nests in the trees and ride his pony. In the summer he corralled as many of the male staff as he could for games of cricket. Tom Hobbs, the coachman’s son, was a mainstay of the team, and his niece recounts an episode that entered the lore of her own family:

  The young master did not much like being bowled or caught out, and once in a fit of temper threw a ball which hit the coachman’s daughter on the head. For his bad-tempered action he was rebuked by Mrs Hobbs who had witnessed the outburst, the more so because he denied the act and tried to frame the footman. ‘Fie, Fie, Master Apsley!’ Mother said. ‘That is not the way for a gentleman to behave.’

  That year, after term ended in December Laddie went on holiday to Devonshire with his father while his mother was with her family in Bedford. They took the train, and stayed at the Torbay Hotel on the seafront at Torquay. ‘Dear Mother,’ Laddie wrote two days after their arrival, Father and I went to church this morning and after church we went to try and get ourselves warm but it came on to rain so we had to retreat to the hotel. You can’t imagine how nice it is here especially when it does not rain and how I am enjoying myself. There was a collier in yesterday at least it has been in for a good time I should think as it was here when we came unloading the coal, it went out this morning early, we have got a very nice room facing the sea and not too big and not too small just ripping. Father and I went for a walk ye
sterday afternoon down by a place called Daddy’s Hole, it was very nice and so pretty. I am going to try if we get some decent weather to get some shells for my collection. I hope the baby is all right and kicking I shall expect to have some very pretty music from her when I come back to Lamer. It was an awfully nice journey down here, and having our dinner in the train . . . mind you tell the baby when I come to Lamer to celebrate my arrival with a tune. With much love to all I am your very loving son Apsley.

  In June 1897 Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee was celebrated from Zanzibar to Simla. The British Empire covered a quarter of the earth’s land surface, Lord Salisbury was back at the helm of the nation, and there were still plenty of reasons for landowners to celebrate. The forebodings of Kipling, the adult Laddie’s favourite author (‘Lo, all our pomp of yesterday/Is one with Nineveh, and Tyre!’), were hardly representative of the national mood. In Wheathampstead the Jubilee was marked by a feast in Parson’s Field next to the rectory lawn. The servants were given the day off. Dressed in their best clothes, they gathered for freckled cylinders of tongue, beer and rolled jam puddings. In the regrettable absence of the monarch herself, Evelyn glided between the tables doling out gifts while the village band played and the children raced donkeys. But Laddie was imprisoned at Folkestone. At the end of May he had written to his parents:

  Lots of boys are going up to the Jubilee, they are going up one day before and coming back one day after. I do not no what Mr Hussey is going to do about it but I think very likely we shall have 2 or 3 days holidays. My wrist is nearly all right we are having very changeable weather here. But it is not cold. I hope you are quite all right. The map we had on past Sunday was Spain and Portugal we have got to finish it today.

  I am your very loving son

  Apsley.

  In the end they had boiled mutton and tapioca pudding and walked to the end of the road to watch the Jubilee bonfires.

  In the summer of 1899, Laddie left the Grange for the last time. There was nothing to regret as he leant out of the train window and watched the columns of steam dissolve above Radnor Park station. He rather suspected that there might be worse to come at his next school, and he was right; but now he had the summer to enjoy at Lamer where, as ever, little had changed. The River Lea was still teeming with trout and crayfish, and his cricket pads were still in the back hall. He knew very little about the enormous world beyond the trouty river and the mighty chestnuts. It was to be a savage dawning.

  That September Apsley submitted to his first weeks at Winchester College, a procedure likened by one old boy to the initiation rites of the Australian Aboriginal. Founded in 1382, Winchester was one of the top three public schools in Britain. The year Apsley was admitted, it came first in the league table of Higher Certificate passes, beating Rugby and Eton into joint second place. It was famed for producing an intellectual élite, and at Oxford and Cambridge, Wykehamists5 were noted for their ambition, singlemindedness and self-reliance. The General chose the school in the touching belief that it was not like Harrow, which he had hated so intensely. The trunk and wooden playbox were handed over to the station-master and despatched to school in the guard’s van. Shortly afterwards a white-faced Apsley was enrolled as a commoner at Culver House, nicknamed ‘Kenny’s’ after the housemaster, Theodore Kensington. During the first two weeks of that term – ‘Short Half ’, in Winchester parlance – new pupils were indoctrinated into school culture under the tutelage of an older boy called a ‘Father’, and, after this fortnight was up, fagging began.

  Kenny’s was a red-brick, flat-fronted Victorian building in a quiet street to the west of the ancient part of the school. Inside, forty boys (eight were admitted each year) slept in a bare-floored, practically unheated dormitory. Every morning at 6.15 they were obliged to jump into a metal tub full of cold water, one after the other. There was so little privacy that the lavatories did not have doors. The boys dressed like miniature men, in stiff collars, ties and buttoned-up jackets, and at seven in the morning, after a spartan breakfast, they sat down to Morning Lines and Henry’s Latin Primer in its mulberry cloth binding, each boy working in a cubicle in the ground-floor hall. They were all hungry all the time, and constipation was compulsory, as John Betjeman wrote later of his own public school.

  The rigid respect for tradition at Winchester extended to a private tribal language which each boy had to learn. The canings doled out by prefects were called tundings, the cubicles were toys and boys were not allowed to use the word ‘think’ until they had been at the school for two years. Arnold Toynbee, later a famed historian and sage, was a prize-winning scholar close behind Apsley. (As a scholarship boy he lived in the fourteenth-century College buildings, not in one of the boarding houses.) ‘For five years at Winchester,’ Toynbee was to recall, ‘I . . . tasted what life had been like for Primitive Man. One found oneself suddenly plunged into a world of arbitrary prohibitions and commandments (chiefly prohibitions).’ A boy was not allowed to wear brown boots until his third year, Christian names were outlawed, and you had to refer to your parents as ‘Mater’ and ‘Pater’. It was a gigantic exercise in control, which perhaps worked for confident boys. But it didn’t do much for those of a more subtle plumage, especially if they had short sight.

  The curriculum was embedded in the classical tradition, though it had been reformed, to a limited degree, in the decade before Apsley arrived. Mathematics, science and modern languages had been introduced, though the extent to which these subjects were taken seriously varied: French and German were taught by the maths masters. The thirteen-year-old Apsley embarked on a staple course of Latin, maths, English, history, divinity and some science. ‘Except in the Army Class,’ wrote Toynbee, ‘education in Winchester was nine-tenths classical. The reverse side of the excellence of the teaching of Latin and Greek was that other subjects were starved.’ In the mental world of Winchester, Toynbee went on, ‘we were hardly aware that science and technology were on the march; that they had joined hands with each other; and that mathematics had stooped to lend efficacious services to them both’. Apsley’s attitude to science on his Antarctic expedition six years after he left school reveals the absence of any real education outside the humanities. He displayed the frenzied enthusiasm of the convert, almost giving his life for a little knowledge of the life cycle of the Emperor penguin.

  Games were more than important; they were a cult. The most prestigious sports were cricket and a peculiar form of either six- or fifteena-side football. While Apsley was at Winchester one Richard Stafford Cripps starred in the Houses VI football team. He was to come within inches of 10 Downing Street.6 The boys also went swimming under the lime trees at Gunner’s Hole, a hundred-yard-long stretch of the River Itchen dredged of mud, took two long runs each week, and endured regular sessions in the gym. A boy called George Mallory was a star in this last department. He was a year behind Apsley and, as a mathematical scholar, a member of the Parnassian élite of Collegemen. But not all Apsley’s peers came off the top shelf. The future Socialist MP and lawyer D. N. Pritt was the son of a Harlesden metal merchant. (‘Under the system then still prevailing,’ Pritt remembered, ‘some 95 per cent of my work consisted of translating Latin and Greek into English, and English into those languages, in prose and in verse.’)

  The Boer War broke out during Apsley’s first term at Winchester. Down at the bottom of Africa the Dutch settlers of the two Boer republics and their British neighbours in Cape Colony and Natal were still locked in bitter dispute, twenty years after the General buried his men on the plains of the Transvaal. In the second week of October 1899 the pent-up bitterness and violence exploded into full-scale war. The Boers were challenging British hegemony, and millions of imperial hearts quickened. The mood among the British was confident: few had any doubts about their right to dominate southern Africa or indeed anywhere else. Cecil Rhodes, colonial statesman, financier and until recently Prime Minister of Cape Colony, still expressed the hope that the British might win the United States back fo
r the Empire. The school was gripped with a febrile elation that put a stop to the rather wearisome talk of the new century. Patriotic fervour swept through the cloisters, masters pored over the morning newspapers and the school magazine – the Wykehamist – carried a proud list of alumni on their way to the front. Apsley had been weaned on stories exalting the defence of the Empire, and his experience at Winchester endorsed his father’s attitudes. The ethos of the public schools at the end of the nineteenth century was imbued with the ideals of imperial glory, a ruling class and chivalry. The boys were indoctrinated with noble notions of honour, patriotism and leadership, so when a war came along they were gasping for it: war was the authenticating forge of nationhood. For the whole of that academic year, the ‘School News’ section in the Wykehamist teemed with war data – including a report of an Old Wykehamist dinner held in Pretoria during a pause in the fighting – and captains on leave hurried back to their alma mater to address boys longing to march off to wars of their own. The honour of the school and the glory of war were tightly entwined, and tangled in with it was an idealisation of death stoked by the Greek tragedians. Even as the Mentioned-in-Despatches lists melted into obituaries and some boys vanished from school to reappear wearing black armbands, there was still a sense that the pupils filing into the chapel lamented their ill luck at being born too late.

  As for the reality of the war – the concentration camps where Boers were starved, the living skeletons of ‘natives’ crawling across the veldt by the hundred, the disease that killed thousands of proud young officers, the swooning military incompetence – of these things, the boys heard nothing.