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Went the Day Well?
by Sir Neville 'Kim' Reynolds Hall
(For more information about this article go to the blog of 2nd of June 2025 )
Sir Neville 'Kim' Hall's Childhood Memoirs
Chapter 6
Newstead 1906
I could still draw a circle round the point where I was standing in the big inner hall at Queniborough. I cannot remember the occasion, though it was probably a children’s party as I was feeling rather shy, when the most beautiful woman I had ever seen came up to me, and putting me at my ease, she told me that she was my Aunt Kit, my mother's younger sister: (not Aunt Kitty, who was her sister-in-law). I suppose my appreciation of beauty was more limited at the age of five than it is to-day, but l still remember the impact it made on me. Two sisters could hardly have been less alike. Aunt Kit had pale golden hair and eyes like sapphires that glittered as she laughed, but my mother’s hair was dark, and her eyes were the soft browns and greens of the woods that glowed in the sunlight. They had both been trained at the Conservatoire at Geneva in singing and piano playing, and their voices matched their colouring, for Aunt Kit's was full of fire and sparkle and had reached professional standards, while my mother’s was soft and warm and more suitable for after dinner singing. Together, as young women, they had been taught to ride by a retired Austrian Cavalry Officer on a racecourse, and here perhaps, they were on common ground. They would be allowed only on a sidesaddle, with the left foot in a stirrup and the right leg crooked over the pommel. My mother never rode after she was married, but she once showed me her dark grey, lopsided habit. An old cousin told me that he employed a land-girl during the first war: "A charming young woman," he said, without a smile, "but I could never bring myself to allow her to enter my house in breeches''.
I am glad I remember Aunt Kit this once before she had to undergo a very serious operation, because her cut-glass beauty was not the kind to survive though she lived to a good old age. Her hair became snow-white, though this is extremely becoming, but her angles grew sharper, especially that of her splendid Roman nose, which would have been worth a fortune to a school mistress, for it commanded inflexible obedience in the young. Perhaps this is why I never fully appreciated her until I was grown-up.
Gramma – not to be confused with Granny, who was my father's mother – had been married three times and might have ventured again if she had not been ninety when her third husband died. In the dim ages she had married ‘Uncle Tom’ – as mythical to my mother as to us – who had been a Naval Officer, first commuting his pension and then losing the capital. They had then trekked across Australia living on the game he shot and making their soap by boiling the fat with soda. Looking at the Dresden-like little figure it was difficult to imagine that she had ever travelled beyond her own county, but how wrong can one be! I once got into a railway carriage with a timid-looking little man in uniform, and wondering what the army could do with him, I saw to my shame, that he wore the deep red ribbon of the V.C. Gramma was next married to my mother's father, a few years after her mother had died, but he was then an old man and it did not last long. Her third husband was Mr Overton, who was then seventy, but as he lived to one hundred and three they enjoyed thirty-three years of happy marriage.
As a young man he had been inspired by John Wesley’s teaching and had joined the Methodist Ministry himself, and when we first knew him he had a large following in Leicester. He was a tall and vigorous figure with a flowing beard, and whenever we met him he pronounced a patriarchal blessing over us, that, from his great height, seemed to come from heaven itself – perhaps it did. Gramma went to school under Miss Pipe, who was as famous in her day as Miss Buss and Miss Beal, though not from her immunity from the effects of Cupid's darts, and since the music master was the rather amorous Franz Liszt, there may well have been a few flying about.
Gramma was well acquainted with adventure and had enjoyed the flesh-pots I should think, and yet she was content to share the austerely simple life of a man who had never entered a theatre or taken a glass of sherry in his life. Perhaps it was this adaptability that made her the perfect companion for children: she appeared to us as ageless, and when we asked her to play with us she never assumed the expression of a martyr smiling at death. We always enjoyed her visits, and I remember how she had once picked up a candle end, and having softened the wax in her hand, produced a beautifully moulded mouse with the wick for its tail. On one of her visits I was unwell, and she sat by my bed making my toy monkey a perfect little straw hat by unravelling one of my father's, to his regret but my mother's satisfaction, as it had outlived its proper span.
It was soon after Gramma's visit that my parents and Bobby were invited to stay with our grandmother at Southsea, but it was made quite clear that the invitation did not include me. This made me extremely unhappy, for although I was a difficult child and showed no signs of improvement, it was my first bitter taste of rejection. Nurny was staying at Skipton with her sister, Mrs Budd, and it was arranged that I should join her for a short time, after which we were to move into rooms at Heysham. My father took me to Leeds where we met Nurny, and I regret to say I gave way to uncontrolled tears while we waited for her train to arrive. Looking back, I could weep for my father, who was as unhappy as I was, and had to travel home alone while my April downpour soon turned to sunshine under the warmth of Nurny's kindness. All went well until we stopped at the next station when, holding up my monkey to the open window, his beautiful new straw hat fell off and slipped between the platform and the train. This was about to precipitate another storm, but the guard was passing as it happened and without hesitation he moved the train on until the hat could be retrieved, which he did himself, and handing it to me with a smile he walked away before Nurny could open her purse. Good service at a time when you could travel two hundred and forty miles for a pound, or twice this distance on an excursion train.
Mr and Mrs Budd and their two daughters lived in a rambling old house that had once been a country inn, though it was being overtaken by the rash that was spreading from Skipton, but it was still within a few minutes’ walk of pleasant country. They were the kindest of people and insisted on my staying up for dinner on my first evening. Sitting in my best sailor suit with its white duck trousers I felt rather jaded after a trying day until one of the girls set before me a little lion-shaped blanc-mange and bade me eat it all up like a good little boy as she had made it specially for me. I reluctantly took a spoonful and felt better; I took another and felt better still, and by the time I had finished it my spirits had risen to such a height that Nurny became alarmed and asked what on earth was it made of. The charming girl smiled innocently and said: “Well practically nothing really but cream and brandy.” I slept well that night and woke greatly refreshed. Perhaps we pass the peak of appreciation as a child for I have tasted both cream and brandy since then, but unlike Browning's thrush, I have never recaptured "that first fine careless rapture".
In those days Neysham seemed to consist of one row of little houses where we stayed, and a sandy beach where I made sandcastles with a little girl, while Nurny sat with the parents, but there was no one else. But one day Nurny took me to Morecombe Bay in the horse-drawn tram and on the way she told me to remember this trip as such conveyances might well become outmoded. Much as I dislike change for change’s sake I must agree that she was right, and I have fulfilled her wish, but not entirely tor the reason she gave, for when we reached the terminus the rails came to an abrupt end but we continued our journey, the coachman having fallen fast asleep. The horses soon gave up the unequal struggle, however, as the wheels sank into the soft road, and the sudden cessation of sound and motion woke up the driver, who did not appear at all put out, but politely asked the passengers to help him to get the tram back on the rails.
In the spring of 1906 my father started an insurance agency with the help of the contacts that he made through my two uncles, and for this purpose he rented an office in Leicester at No. 33 Friar Lane, a house owned by Mr Davis, who also used one of the rooms in which he practised a rather leisurely profession. He was an Old Etonian with prospects, and an extremely kind man, and we all became great friends as he was a frequent visitor to Newstead. The two offices were connected by a speaking tube and when I was taken to Leicester I used to take my rest at No. 33, and before playing with my father's typewriter I always gave Mr Davis a blow. I called him Mr Davitz and he addressed me by a name that sounded like Mr Huge’ne. We would discuss big business as though I were an important client and I sometimes wonder if I were his only one.
Friar Lane had a simple charm that would have pleased Vermeer and was as narrow and quiet as his little street in Delft. I doubt if anyone lived there now, and that fortunes were ever made there, and I imagine that all the other houses were like No. 33 dozing in an undistinguished but respectable old age. My father’s office looked out over a narrow-walled garden with a paved path between flower borders that should have been planted with Dutch tulips.
Were there giants in those days or am I seeing them through the eyes of a small child? Not that, I think, for I had my father as my gauge, and he was a big man. At any rate Cousin Hal topped him. He was Colonel Hallewell, late of the Royal Scots, a grandson of William Reid and therefore my father's first cousin. He was a rather eccentric but lovable man and one of the last soldiers to wear a beard, apart from the Pioneers, for he was convinced that he would cut his throat it he used a razor. I suppose it was this feature together with his great size and benevolence that led to a misunderstanding that was corrected at my mother's knee when she heard me murmur "Hallewell Be They Name". I have been told that during the South African war he often sat in the most exposed places, eating his sandwich and gazing peacefully over the countryside, apparently oblivious of danger. About twenty-five years earlier his life had been saved by falling asleep in the train when returning from leave to rejoin his regiment, for the connection that he should have caught was crossing the Tay when the bridge collapsed, and everyone was drowned.
Cousin Hal's first wife was a Pierith and a lovely person according to my father though I never saw her. His second wife, Cousin Em, was a Frazer-Tytler; we only met once, and we did not click, to use an expression that would hardly have met with her approval. Although Cousin Hal wore the Stuart hunting trews in his regiment, I believe she wore the breeks at home, for he had the endearing but problematical habit of emptying his pockets to anybody who asked for a little help, however undeserving, so that poor Cousin Em had to keep the purse and dole out a little petty cash from time to time. When he came to pay us a visit my father met him at Syston station. He had caught an earlier train than was expected and was contentedly walking up and down the platform smoking a churchwarden pipe quite unconcerned by the interested spectators.
My father took him to Leicester one morning and rather rashly left him in charge of his office while he made a call outside. When he returned be found Cousin Hal shivering between the open door and window, with a pile of cheap pencils on the desk in front of him.
"Do you like sitting in the east-wind?" asked my father.
"Not at all, Nono” – my father's nursery name – "but the poor fellow had obviously left home before the water was hot enough for his bath; could happen to anyone you know".
"Hardly to that extent" murmured my father, “but what poor fellow and why the pencils?"
“Business”, he replied, "and I can't bear to see an honest man down to his uppers. Besides he generously offered me a great reduction if I took his whole stock, but you'll have to lend me the price of my ticket home as I'm cleaned right out.”
My great friend Mrs Tyley was probably born in the reign of William the fourth for she seemed older than Granny, whose birth was in 1873. We had come to the conclusion that she wore a bustle, for surely nature could not have formed such a majestic figure unaided. Besides. my father understood bustles as his mother had once set out for Church with one tied onto the outside of her dress, while temporarily deprived of her maid. When Mrs Tyley came to tea my father, Bobby and I were allowed to be present ae we were all very fond of her. I remember that on one of these occasions she sat on a small and light arm chair so that when she stood up to leave us the chair rose with her, firmly attached to her lower back – to use a suitable expression – so that she looked like a hermit-crab in reduced circumstances. Bobby and I were too entranced to laugh, even if good manners had not forbidden it, but our parents showed an immediate presence of mind. My father stepped behind the chair and gripped it firmly while my mother extended both hands in an affectionate gesture, and they gently parted the two pieces as though pulling a giant cracker.
Mrs Tyley lived on the wrong side of Newstead in the drab surroundings of Syston, or to use Griff’s topography, nearer ‘The gate as ‘angs well and ‘inders none’ than ‘The open anchor’. The background could hardly have been less appropriate, and I have been wondering where the right setting would have been. Not the country, I think, but one of those lovely houses in Little Cloisters at Westminster Abbey or failing to find a suitable dignitary for her, then Kensington Square. When Bobby and I had tea with her and stepped into her little drawing-room I must have bitten my lip to see if I were dreaming – a trick I still do – for such was her personality that she drew us into her own age of elegance, and when during tea she invited us to “take a little preserve” the idiom seemed quite normal until we were on our way home and the magic wore off. It was in her house that I first remember seeing one of those glass paperweights whose curved surface magnified the exquisite little embedded bouquet of flowers, now probably worth more than Mrs Tyley gave for the house.
Queniborough Hall gave two children's parties a year, one on Guy Fawkes night and the other at Christmas. On the fifth of November we watched the firework display from the billiard room, the infants kneeling on the broad window seats, breathing heavily on the glass and wiping off the condensation with the palms or their hands. The pigtails and Eton collars sat sideways behind them, and standing at the back were those ladies who had put up their hair and lowered their skirts, and any gentleman who wore a moustache, however incipient. How rousing were the “ooos” from the youngest and oldest, and how indulgent the smiles from the adolescents as the rockets lit the inky sky with their showers of falling stars and the Roman candles tossed up their coloured fireballs, while the "devil amongst the tailors” hurled his jumping and crackling demons all over the tennis court. During the short intervals I could see the pale disembodied faces of my father and Uncle Herbert by the flickering light from the long wax tapers they carried. The display ended with a ‘set piece’ of King Edward the Seventh and "God save the King".
We were carried to and from Queniborough in the brougham, but the motor car was beginning to replace the carriage as a reliable means of travelling. The Christmas party always started with a conjuror who performed on a stage set up at one end of the inner hall. One year, when we were all seated, the word went round that there would be a slight delay as one of the cars arrived with a child short, who had evidently fallen out on the way. This was taken placidly and even with some amusement, my mother probably recalling the story of how her father had gone so far as to fall out of the train on the way to London without any harm at all. We were not kept waiting long for the sturdy child was soon picked up, none the worse.
The conjurer never deviated from his previous programme, and we would have been disappointed if he had, for we liked to see what we had looked forward to. After doing the Chinese ring trick, which still baffles me, and having produced his rabbit from Uncle Herbert’s top hat, he gave us a ventriloquist act, which I did not enjoy as the puppet reminded me in expression and voice of my bête noir and an incident perhaps best forgotten. He had been invited to my birthday party, and I had locked him into the Upper long room while I enjoyed my tea to the full; but this flagrant act of discourtesy was regarded by my parents as a blot on the family escutcheon little short of the bend sinister. The show always ended with a few chords on the tambourine which had such a muffled tone that our entertainer scowled, and thrusting his fist through the parchment he whirled out hundreds of yards of pink ribbon, accompanied by the pianist with the rollicking tune that she played later for the gallop that ended the dance.
The supper table reminded me of the coloured illustrations in Mrs Beeton’s ‘Book of Household Management’, which is not surprising since all the dishes would have been made from its recipes. There were cold chickens covered with glistening. mace flavoured, white sauce; trifles; tipsy cakes; charlotte russe; jellies and creams. There were also Christmas crackers; as well as the usual paper hats and jokes, that few of us could understand and those that could were reluctant to explain; there were fire balloons and snakes that wriggled hideously out of little grey pyramids of an extremely poisonous compound at the touch of a match, and of course those delightful Japanese flowers that uncurled from round discs when dropped into finger bowls.
The main feature of the Newstead party was the magic lantern display, though Mrs Beeton also did her bit. Before I was born my father had bought a second-hand pair of very fine dissolving lanterns and sets of hand painted slides, now possibly a hundred years old, in which one picture merged into another without any cessation of vision. The principle was extraordinarily effective in giving the scene a kind of animation which I cannot describe. The use of two lanterns allowed tricks to be played and the grand finale showed the portrait of a man in profile whose eyes rolled hideously while his nose slowly grew until it nearly reached the edge of the screen, compared with which Cyrano de Bergerac’s would have appeared commonplace. Unfortunately, this unusual spectacle was the image of the Queniborough coachman who was sitting at the back with Griff. There was not much love lost between the two men, owing perhaps to a status complex between the top hat and the bowler, and as the eyes began to roll and the nose extend across the screen he could not contain himself any longer for he said aloud what was in all our minds: “What a striking likeness to Newbold.” There was a moment of embarrassed silence followed by my mother’s familiar rebuke: “Griffin, you forget yourself.”
Chapter 7
Newstead 1907-1909
I was now seven years old. Dashy had left us and poor Nurny had retired after a serious illness, greatly missed, and as I was too old for another nurse my parents decided to engage a governess. They were fortunate in finding a charming girl of nineteen called Mildred Hughes, who was the daughter of a nearby Vicar, and had been educated at the Blue Coat School. She was willing to come to us for eighteen pounds a year – less than we paid our cook – but I am glad to say she subsequently made a very happy marriage to a rick man, remaining as friendly as ever and naming her fist son Douglas after my younger brother. It seems strange now to think that it took my parents over a year before they tentatively asked her permission to call her Mildred, though Bobby and I took the matter into our own hands and addressed her as Hugh from the day we met her.
If I could find an exact replica of myself – perish the thought – I wonder if we would meet as strangers. I cannot say that I knew myself as I am now, but I can take a purely subjective view of what I was as a child after I have changed my skin so many times. I must have been a great problem to my parents for although I was in advance of my age in subjects that interested me, I refused to learn to read and write or practise my five finger exercises, preferring to hear my mother read and play to me, and thereby gaining an appreciation of good literature and music at an unusually early age.
I had invented a system of hieroglyphics for identifying the cases of the large number of phonograph records that we had collected. My father had no difficulty in grasping my method but suggested that as others might not be as gifted as we were I might go further and fair worse than learning to read in the conventional manner. I could find no argument against this shrewd advice. All I needed, of course, was a little mental discipline, and for the first time in my life I set myself to do something that ran against the grain. For this purpose I chose a book that my mother had not found strength enough to read to me call “Chillago Charley”, which I used as my Rosetta Stone, and by the time I had finished it I could read fluently and had acquired a loathing for Westerns that still remains. As far as I can remember I made little use of my new faculty, still preferring to listen to my mother’s pleasant voice. I found, in fact, that reading, like other branches of learning, was apt to bring disillusionment, for when I found that Griff’s “Open Anchor” was nothing more than “The Hope and Anchor”, a fascinating mystery was solved in a very commonplace manner.
My parents, however, were unwilling to let my achievement go no further than a proof that I was not an idiot, and came to the conclusion that the wisest course would be to send me to a day school, provided that my health could stand the racket and a headmaster could be found who had the courage to accept me. Consequently, I was taken to Nottingham to see Dr Marshall, who had a great reputation as a children’s specialist. The report was encouraging for, apart from my lameness which we all knew was incurable, though now more of a nuisance than a disaster, he could find nothing wrong with me that a good hiding would not speedily put right, and even seemed prepared to apply this treatment without any extra fee. We therefore left this sensible man in high spirits and explored the museum in the castle, where there was a bust of Lord Byron, for whom my mother had a slight weakness, declaring that it was the image of Bobby. But my greatest treat was still to come, for built into the space between two shops there was the strange sight of what appeared to be the back of a railway coach, and when we stopped to investigate it the guard, who was standing outside, told us that we were just in time to jump in as he was about to blow his whistle. We did not regret doing so for we were given a most original and delightful little adventure for sixpence for grown-ups and half price for children. We found ourselves the only passengers in an observation car whose open end was represented by a screen on which was thrown a moving picture of the rails ahead and the beautiful country through which we sped, and to add to the effect there was a vibrating rumble of wheels beneath our feet. We came to a great lake where a ferry was moored to a jetty and, finding ourselves on board, we steamed silently towards the opposite shore, actually rolling gently from side to side, our car – now ferry – being supported on trunnions to allow for this motion, and our skipper, who was the twin brother of the guard, heaving on a lever to produce it.
We were over the first hurdle but there was another to come. My father wrote to Canon James West, who was the headmaster of Wyggeston School in Leicester, where Bobby had been for the last three years, requesting that rather austere man to accept me, but the reply was disturbing, for he said he would certainly do so provided that I passed the entrance examination. My parents were justly proud of me for not being as idiot, but this was going beyond what was reasonable. Nevertheless, on the first of January 1909 my father took me to the school to undergo my ordeal. I remember that I gripped his left hand as we crossed the wide vestibule to the torture chamber, and that we were met by a tall man with a sad drooping moustache and brick-red face, who reeked of drink. He said to my father, “I’ll look after him”, and seeing that I liked support on my right side, turned to offer me his left hand. He was the art master, and a fine artist when sober, and we still have in the family a small oil painting of his of the Scottish Highlands. I remember this short episode so clearly as I was greatly touched by his quick perception and thoughtfulness. Later on, I asked my father how it came about that such consideration could be shown by a drunkard, and his reply must have been rather disturbing as I was told it was an affliction that came to the nicest and kindest people, which exactly described my parents. But before long I understood the meaning of ambiguity and was comfortable again.
On returning to my father after my examination he had scarcely finished saying, ‘Don’t worry, Shrimp, someone always loses”, when the news came that I had passed, but by what cunning, threat or even blackmail, I cannot recall. He had many names for me indicating rather subtly the degree and quality of his regard, Shrimp being top of his list. But those visitors at Newstead who were unfamiliar with the code might be puzzled by overhearing, “Where’s Scrimshire?”, followed perhaps by Griff’s reply, “I’ve just seen the Major, Sir, going off with the Colonel.” Scrimshire was lower in the scale than Shrimp, and might even imply that I had done something that did not entirely meet with my father’s approval.
I was taken to school the very next day, with the term’s fee of thirty shillings in an envelope to be given to the Bursar on arrival. I wore a neat worsted suit and brown leather gaiters, and the arms of Willam of Wyggeston emblazoned above the peak of my skullcap, and a repulsive sight I must have been, as cocky as Burlington Bertie of Box, to use contemporary language.
The building was a most depressing example of Victorian institutional architecture which had replaced the Tudor Hospital School twenty year earlier, and part of the present playground was surrounded by railings to keep the boys from desecrating the site of the old chapel. The new school was a blot at the centre of what must have been a beautiful old square with the great church – now the cathedral – on one side of it. There was nothing else to be seen but the high walls of old gardens, and once prosperous houses with their dulled windows like tired eyes looking at the past. It was a decaying district with more than a touch of artistic squalor about it, but for all that, it was quiet and peaceful.
The school day always started with prayers in the great hall, which was T-shaped, with an open class taken at each extremity, and a dais at the centre of the shorter part with a fine organ. Train-boys and Jews were allowed to forego prayers and I always left school a little before the other boys so that I could catch the four twenty-five home.
Though I was a year older than the average I was rightly placed in the first form. We always kicked off with gym, taken by an extremely well-developed man with a handlebar moustache, call Mr Robson. I enjoyed showing off on the parallel bars and climbing the rope to the high ceiling for what strength I had lost in my legs I had gained in my arms, which is a common form of compensation I believe. When our exercises were over Mr Robson use to replace my gaiters and put on my tie but towards the end of the term he suggested, quite kindly, that it was about time I learnt to dress myself.
Our classroom was at the top of the tall building where the danger of fire was the greatest for the only means of escape would have been by a narrow passage and staircase. My father was appalled by the total lack of precautions through the school, and asked permission to organise a system of alarm bells and fire drill in conjunction with Mr Robson. I was very proud when the first alert was sounded and the whole school was evacuated without a hitch.
My governess, Hugh, through no fault of her own, failed to teach me anything and it soon became apparent that Mr Chad, our kind and patient form master, would be equally unsuccessful. I am quite willing to admit that if he had wrung my scraggy little neck it would have been brushed off in a French court as a “crime of passion”. Yet perhaps I was not entirely to blame either. I had been grossly spoilt at home and my parents had been warned not to force me, but now that I had been passed as fit I found myself in a class of younger boys who were above me in book-learning and beneath me intellectually. We were given Wordsworth’s ‘We are seven’ to learn by heart, but on reading it through I recognised the narrator as a man with neither tact nor perception and dropped the acquaintance. On the other hand, there were excellent stories in our ‘readers’ such as Washington Iriving’s ‘Rip Van Winkle’.
A kind Providence, through the medium of the alphabet, had seated me by the window, where I was able to find more distraction from Mr Chad’s rendering of ‘Lucy Grey’. My judgement was soon rewarded for beyond one of the ancient garden walls my eyes became focussed on a lantern or cupola of the kind sometimes found on the roof of a great house, such as Sudbury, and as the sun lit its veridian dome and gilded cock it became an oasis in my dreary desert. It was the copper-hooded cupola and my imagination in the hidden building that supported it that led to my lifelong interest in old houses.
I did not have long to wait for my new love to burgeon, for we did ‘Art’ on the other side of the road by the minute tuck shop where we could buy a good bag of sweets for a penny. The house where we were to have our lesson looked much the same as the others in the street and I was unprepared for the surprise as I passed through the front door into a large, oak-panelled hall and saw the beautiful staircase with its polished, shallow treads. Perhaps the impact was enhanced by contrast with the hideous building I had left a moment ago. Only one small detail added a touch of amused repugnance to my rapture, for at the foot of the staircase there was a life-size statue of a Greek god on which, under the duress of false modesty, someone had imposed an iridescent, spiral sea shell, making a shame of what it hid, like a bikini on the Venus of Milo.
There were two doors on the landing. That on the right, facing the front of the house, opened into the classical sixth classroom, which was taken by Mr Pink, a very senor master whose scholarship and bearing would have graced any public school in the land, and whose non-residential salary was one hundred and twenty pounds a year. I never set foot in this sanctum but as I went through the opposite door I held my breath for the second time that day, for I found myself in a perfect example of an early Tudor long gallery. One wall appeared to be made entirely of glass, the little diamond-shaped and leaded panes being lightly tinted with the cool colour of pale Chinese celadon, and the opposite wall was lined with sun-bleached oak. It was thus that I sat enraptured by my new love while my sad-faced friend, who had been so kind to me a few days ago was compelled to teach us the meaning of the primary, secondary and tertiary colours, as he added his alcoholic vapour to the antique atmosphere of the gallery.
I always had the feeling that the place was haunted. Old houses have their ghosts that can be traced to beams that shrink in the cool of the night or rats scuffling behind the wainscots, but it is hard to explain how a door can open and shut without pause to let someone pass through who never appears. Bobby told me that this used to happen though I never saw it myself; I did have a very curious but not inexplicable experience however.
We often left our art class by a door at the far end of the long gallery, through which there were several small rooms whose walls were almost hidden by my friend’s unsold oil paintings. A narrow staircase then led us down to a courtyard that ran along the side of the house to a door in a high wall that opened into the street. Owing to my habit of loitering, for I was interested in everything except my lessons, I was alone when I stepped on to the pavement and saw an old man approaching me. He had a long and unkempt beard and wore a dark and tattered gown, and the story that we had lately read suggested that he had woken from another age. When, therefore, he stopped and asked in a soft and courteous voice if I knew what had happened to the old hospital, I could barely wait to tell him that it had been pulled down a hundred years ago before I hurried across the street and stopped the first master I met to tell him that I had been talking to Rip Van Winkle. He showed neither surprise nor interest but replied, “Don’t lie to me, the man has been dead for years”. I must now confess, however, that I have discovered the date when the Tudor building was destroyed and the old man would have been alive – a pity.
At one o’clock we were offered a cut off the joint and a solid pudding for 10d – half the price of a postage stamp today – which was prepared by a local cookery school, or we were allowed to take our meal outside. Bobby and I preferred to bring sandwiches with us and eat them at No. 33 as I did not care to be parted from by father for more than four hours at a time. I had been at school a month on the first of February, which was Bobby’s eleventh birthday, and when we arrived at the office he was told that he had a wonderful present of a baby brother. Perhaps he was a little disappointed in the choice of a gift and we were taken completely by surprise at the news.
It was still a long time before children were told everything there is to know and when Bobby was married, twelve years later, his birthday present was at his prep school Brockhurst, in Shropshire. He was given leave to attend the wedding in London, and when he returned to school his headmaster, Mr Marshall, who had previously taught the Naval Cadets at Caborne, wrote to tell my parents of his safe arrival. Apparently he had shown off at supper that evening, putting both elbows on the table, which was strictly forbidden, and exclaiming, “Well, any day now I may become an uncle”.
Our new brother was christened Douglas after his godfather ‘Uncle Billy’, then Captain but later Admiral Dent, who was no relation but the second generation of a very close family friendship. There was also our past relationship with the Selkirks, who had lived in Kirkcudbrightshire and whose surname was Douglas. Mildred Hughs remained with us to look after him and if a precocious cuckoo were to be heard it could have been traced to Griff in his groom’s bowler taking ‘the Corporal’ for a walk in his pram.
Chapter 8
Keith Marischal 1910
My Great-grandfather, William Reid, had eight daughters. Sophia married Edmund Gilling Hallewell of the 20th Foot, who served on his father-in-law’s staff in Malta until the Crimean War, and their second son, Henry Lonsdale Hallewell was our cousin Hal. By his first wife, Charlotte Caroline Peareth, he had a daughter Charlotte, our Cousin Char, who married Maurice Skene-Tytler of Keith Marishal, Pencaitland. Thus cousin Char was of my generation but she was not much younger than my parents.
We had been invited to stay at Keith Marishal during the Easter school holidays and on the first of April 1910 my father, Bobby and I took an early train for Edinburgh, Douglas having decided to stay at home to look after his mother as he was only fourteen months old. Our excitement ran high as we crossed the border for it was Bobby’s and my first visit to the land of our forefathers and Keith Marishal had become something of a legend to us. Towards the end of our journey I remember seeing two schoolgirls of about our age and when we arrived at Edinburgh Cousin Maurice introduced us to them. They were the daughters of Lord Polworth, who lived at Humble House; next door neighbours but at least a mile away.
We had a fifteen-mile drive in the back of a huge open Albion motor car through Dalkeith and pleasant farmland, where the well-kept beech hedges were still thick with last year’s dead brown leaves that made a good wind break. With gravity on our side, we paced a hare coursing along a wide grass verge, but our breakneck speed was frequently restricted by the ten miles an hour speed limits, peculiar to Scotland. It was a splendidly luxurious car, but the silence of the engine was somewhat marred by the thrashing noise of the chains that drove the back wheels. The countryside between the few small villages looked well cared for and prosperous but showed no sign of house or cottage until we came to a lodge in a long plantation where we turned into a drive that ended in a wide circle before the house.
I was told by old and intimate friends that among my other faults I sometimes indulge in exaggerated flights of fancy, but no one ever suggested that Bobby’s feet were not firmly on the ground. He got to know Keith Marischal better than I did for when he joined the Royal Scots in the first war he often spent weekends there. When we were both over seventy it cropped up in the course of conversation and I said how much I had loved the place, and after his characteristic pause, to give it due consideration, he replied, “Yes, it is the most lovely house I have ever known.” I think that the English Stately Homes were surpassed when the renaissance added its touch of gaiety to the Gothic tradition. But surely the great Scottish houses were neither conceived nor built! They were tossed up by the earth when it was young and sang with the other planets. Did it pass through Bobby’s mind that loveliness adds another quality to beauty? And like me, did he also still dream of Keith Marischal and wake up longing to see it again as it used to be?
Before we had rounded the sweep, the front door was opened to reveal a splendid figure of a man, who I soon discovered was neither the Prime Minister nor the Headmaster of Eton, but Cowan, the butler. In a few minutes, as he was stooping over me to disentangle me from my woollen muffler, something in his manner put me at my ease. Could it possibly have been an almost imperceptible flicker of an eyelid? Nothing of course, as vulgar as a wink. They were wonderful men, these Edwardian butlers; superb actors, but so much more besides. I sometimes think they had much in common with that incomparable race of nurses, for like them, they selflessly identified themselves with the families they served, taking over their charges from them and sharing their joys and sorrows yet apparently suffering none of their own, nor even having Christian names. Cowan soon become my good friend and a few days later, having become thirsty, I had the temerity to call on him in his pantry, where he received me with the utmost cordiality in his shirtsleeves, and while he squeezed lemons into the largest glass he could find, he entertained me with stories of his early life as a ‘running footman’, whatever that might have been.
Cowan now preceded us to an inner hall and up a broad staircase with the grace and dignity of a King of Arms leading his order of chivalry until we came to what had the appearance of yet another hall rather than a landing, for it had a fireplace, a table and chairs. I was still to learn that these Scottish houses had been built in the old tradition when their owners never lived at ground level, so that they could greet any callers to whom they were ‘not at home’ with a little molten lead – a custom which the exorbitant cost of this metal and prejudice of a so-called permissive age has now discouraged.
I was relieved and delighted to find that Cousin Char was as warm-hearted and full of fun as Aunt Kitty, whom she rather resembled in looks and manner. Turning to Bobby and me she said, “You are going to sit up to dinner every night, but there is an old lady staying here, called Miss Macdonald, and if I were you I would not be heard singing “The Campbells are coming, Hurrah! Hurrah!” “Oh no”, I replied, “she may not like music, lots of old people don’t.” For some reason this caused considerable amusement. There was no accounting or the grown-up sense of humour; when I tried to be funny I was rebuked, yet everybody laughed when I didn’t.
I was becoming ravenous before I heard the resounding summons but hardly were the gastric juices stimulated when I learnt that this was only the dressing gong.
Cousin Char had arranged that the three of us should sleep in the dormitory, for I think she had wrongly imagined that I was still something of an invalid, and when we were taken up to it we saw that it was well named. It was a vast room with a blasting coal fire at one end and a large bed between two small ones at the other. By the time that my father had got into his evening dress and Bobby and I into our Eton suits, which had all been laid out for us, we did not wait long before the house reverberated once again with the sound of the gong, but this time my father forestalled the activity of my juices by saying, “Not even yet, Shrimp; this is only the signal for us to assemble in the drawing-room but it won’t be long now before you can put your head in the trough.”
Miss Macdonald was old, small and lively. I always got on well with the elderly and was not unacquainted with the eccentric, often having much in common with them myself. I have already mentioned that in those days drinks were never taken before meals, so it was not long before Cowan announced that dinner was served. Cousin Maurice bowed to Miss Macdonald and offered her his arm, my father doing the same for Cousin Char. We then performed a kind of slow march to the dining room headed by Cowan, looking more stately than ever.
Never can I forget my initiation into high life, though my memory of it is somewhat carnal I am afraid. This was no party but apparently the normal evening meal, yet we worked our way through six courses: soup, fish, entre, meat or game, sweet and savoury, followed of course by dessert – a make-weight never written on the menu, though now becoming one of Mr Fowler’s ‘elegant variation names for ‘pud’. Opposite Cousin Char there were two tall runners and a small glass jug of the sparkling burn water that was pumped up to the house continuously by the thumping ram. After the port had been circulated I saw that Miss Macdonald passed her glass across her finger-bowl before drinking her silent toast to ‘the King over the water’. Fortunately, she restrained herself from hurling the glass over her shoulder to save it from the taint of disloyal lips, but I have no doubt that Cowan would have been hovering in the slips if he had thought it expedient for he was up to all the tricks.
Bobby and I went to bed when the ladies left the table and found our room brightly lit by the huge fire that had been made up to last until the morning, and the polished copper cans steaming with rainwater. A thoughtful servant had put a silver biscuit box by my bedside to stave off the pangs of hunger during the night watches; a precaution, however, that proved unnecessary.
After my dreamless sleep I was only half conscious of Cowan’s soft footsteps as he laid out our clothes, newly pressed and brushed; then fully awake when I heard the rattle of curtains and saw him place the tea-tray with its plate of transparent bread and butter by my father’s side. Bobby and I were out of bed in a moment and running to the windows, which looked over the sweep of the drive to an endless parkland of small trees such as the mountain ash and the almost wild, purple rhododendrons, not yet in flower. I saw no garden, but my disappointment was soon forgotten when I found that one of the drawn curtains disclosed a narrow opening in the three feet or more of solid stone wall, and passing through it I found myself in one of those delightful ‘pepperpots’ perched up at a height that seemed to my elated mind to be nearer to heaven than earth. From one of its windows I could see the front of the house as far as the semicircle of a round tower wearing a tall dunce’s hat, which my father told me contained the old spiral staircase.
Owing to my habit of dawdling, the others were dressed before me, but my father told me that breakfast was informal and I could follow them when I was ready. Soon after they left me there was a tap on the door and without waiting for my answer, in walked a very neat and small woman, well and plainly dressed in black, but without cap and apron, who asked me in a soft voice and French accent if she might help me to dress. I was prepared to be a little resentful if she were my nurse, for I had outgrown them, but shocked if she were not, for I considered it improper to be seen doing up my knickerbockers by anyone else. I was in a cleft stick, but when she knelt down and laced up my boots she could almost have been Nurny and, after all, the French are well known to be rather free and easy in this way, so no great offence was made to the conventions. I was sorry to hear later that she had given her notice, explaining with the greatest respect that it was bad for her image to dress a lady who appeared to enjoy looking like a tramp. This, of course, was irrefutable on both counts for Cousin Char was never happier than when she wore a sack round her waist and had a trowel in her hand.
I found the men sitting down to their porridge though I had half expected to see them standing up to it, if not dipping their spoons in a quaich of whisky. No servants appeared at breakfast but the sideboard, which reached nearly the length of the room, held a row of silver dishes, each standing over its little methylated spirit stove, together with cold grouse and a great home-cured ham. They say that appetite comes with eating, which Bobby and I proved to be true, for last night’s six courses had vanished as though but a biscuit and a glass of milk. In the middle of the table there was a coffee percolator consisting of a glass globe and cylindrical funnel, whose gurgling eruptions emitted an aroma that blended deliciously with the vapour from its burner – or so I thought. There was no toast but plates of scones of different kinds and a heap of oatcake, which always reminds me of Marty’s name for it: “The grub that makes the butter fly”.
After my father had smoked his pipe in Cousin Maurice’s study – for he would not have been encouraged to light up anywhere else – we were taken to a part of the house that we might not otherwise have seen. Apart from the two halls and the gunroom, the rest of the ground floor could be reached only by a door opposite the main entrance and opening into a stone passage. We must have turned to the left and left again for we came to the base of the round tower, half in and half out of the front wall of the house, which I had seen from the ‘pepperpot’ and which contained the spiral staircase. We were then shown a large vault-like room, whose small windows let in the light through tunnels in the thickness of the outer wall. There was a sixteenth century date on the front of the house, but I think this part must have been earlier than this. One of the inner walls showed the faint outline of a built-in door, which if I remember right, was not seen on the other side, and suggested some hidden place. Cousin Char had a sanctum upstairs which had a deep cupboard with a hole in one of its walls – too small to creep through – that opened into what was thought to be a secret room. I have since wondered if this was connected by a flight of steps to the sealed door that we had been shown. I remember one other thing in this almost medieval room that interested me very much; an ancient 'mangle' consisting of a large box loaded with stones and supported on rollers, that was drawn to and fro over the washed linen by chains and winches at the ends of the long table.
On the far side of the carriage-sweep there was a small ruined chapel where we were shown a tablet to Keith Marischal to James VI. It was a pity that the place had not been restored, and I am sure my father would have done so if it had been in his hands.
Houses and gardens should be complimentary to one another. Montecute and Blickling have their formal parterres that reflect the symmetry of their architecture. But Keith Marischal was never planned nor its garden designed; it grew out of the foreground of the gentle and unbroken view beyond the Mains of Soutrer to the Lammermuire, or so it seemed to me as I stood in the drawing room and looked down on it. It was one of those double rooms divided by a wide opening and in the smaller part there waw a French window and open staircase leading down to the garden.
The cool spring air was laced with magic and crisp as a breath from the cirrus clouds as Bobby and I explored the winding paths between the purple and yellow drifts of crocuses and the green tapestry embroidered with golden daffodils and paler jonquils and poet’s narcissi, stitched here and there for contrast with the soft blue of grape hyacinth and the bolder shade of scilla. At 11 o’clock Cousin Char came out to find us with an orange as big as a grapefruit in each hand; after all, it was two hours since food had passed our lips.
Unlike Leicestershire, Pencaitland was more interested in grouse shooting than hunting, but the stable block was a busy place even though it kept no horses. It was built in the form of an open square with the coach houses facing a branch of the drive, and I suppose the biggest one could have held five or six motor cars. It was here that we met Smith, who was an old friend of my father, and had been coachman to the former generation. We took to each other on sight, and I later spent many a happy hour helping him – as he kindly put it – in his work. He had a most unusual appearance for when the carriages had become horseless, he had exchanged his top hat for the chauffeur’s peaked cap but had retained his mutton-chop whiskers. Since he had misjudged his distance and collided with a gatepost his driving had been restricted between the front door and the coach-house: but with his Scottish genius for machinery he had become an expert mechanic, maintaining the two cars in perfect order. This included a regular inspection of the tyres. All the flint chips were removed, the slits opened out and filled with raw rubber, like putty, and then vulcanised with a steam jacket curved to the shape of the tyre.
As well as the big Albion that had met us in Edinburgh there was a 1905 model, which resembled a four-post bed without its comfort. The passengers faced each other in square formation, one sitting on a folding seat on the only door, which was at the back and which was entered with the help of a neat little step-ladder. Curtains hanging from the flat canopy could be drawn to keep out the night air and even some of the rain, though the driver, of course, would have to get wet. I had been told that motor cars, like ships, were always feminine but I think that this was an exception for it had neither grace nor beauty and a deep, bass voice like the booming of the bittern, magnified by the flat petrol tank that acted as a dashboard and picked up a sympathetic vibration at the cruising speed of seventeen miles an hour. Smith had a great fondness for this strange vehicle and with the despotism of the love retainer he had made an inflexible rule that it should be used alternately with the smart new car. I can well understand that poor Cousin Char should sometimes kick against the pricks and I remember one occasion when se was dressed up for calling and had been told that her ‘carriage’ was at the door, how she glanced out of the window before exclaiming, “Oh golly! Not Chug-Chug!”
A passage by the big coach-house led to the open courtyard with a row of cottages on the far side, and in a house on the right there was an oil engine for generating the electricity, which Smith used to start up by climbing the spokes of its enormous flywheel. There was also a workshop with a mortising machine for making five-barred gates and a metal-turning lathe driven by an engine that could be coupled to an air compressor connected by a pipe to the coach-house for pumping up the tyres, that required a pressure of about fifty pounds per square inch. I cannot remember if there was an estate carpenter, but I am sure that Cousin Maurice did much of the work himself. Like many other landowners he may have been a rich man on paper but with a house to keep up, that burnt 200 tons of coal in the kitchen alone, I doubt that he had a great deal of ready cash. It was suggested that we should all take a walk by the burn to see a new suspension bridge that he had designed and built, largely with his own hands, and as Cousin Char had considered it too far for my legs, I was mounted on a donkey.
On Sunday we sat in the gallery of the little kirk at Humbie and I heard the metrical version of the psalms for the first time. On one rare occasion Cousin Char had absconded for no valid reason and the Minister had included in his extemporary prayers a fervent appeal that Mrs Skene-Tytler should have a speedy deliverance from her indisposition, which stretched Cousin Maurice’s diplomacy to it limits when the congregation made their kind enquiries after the service.
Cousin Maurice was a good host and entertained us in the way that we most enjoyed, by taking us for long drives almost every day. One fine morning we set off, with a picnic hamper – basket would be too mean a word – to see Melrose Abbey, and from there to Abbotsford. My great-grandfather, Basil Hall, was a friend and admirer of Sir Walter Scott, and had spent the Christmas of 1824 with him in this pseudo-Gothic castle, when he made the notes in his journal that later became the substance of a chapter in Lockhart’s ‘Life of Sir Walter Scott’. We had tea in a near-by house owned by a Mr Scott, who I was told, bore no close relationship to the author. Mrs Scott was expecting her husband to return at any moment from London where he had taken delivery of a new motor car. As we were leaving the front door we heard a murmur from the steep drive, and as we turned towards it we saw a magnificent ‘Silver Ghost’ Rolls-Royce touring car, which drew up in front of us. I remember that Mr Scott told Cousin Maurice, who was examining it with some envy, that she had taken the Lammermuirs on top gear at sixty miles an hour. On another day we were taken to Edinburgh to see the Castle and Holyrood Palace. We were shown the flower clock, whose hands were troughs filled with bedding plants, and I was told that the trams that ran up and down Prince’s Street were drawn by steel cables under a slot between the rails. We had luncheon with Dr Bell, whose extraordinary powers of observation and deduction had inspired Conan Doyle to write his stories of Sherlock Holmes. I remember Dr Bell as a very large old man with a moustache, and very different from the popular image of the hero, with whom I was familiar in our bound copies of ‘The Strand Magazine’.
My father was anxious that Bobby and I should see our ancestral home, which overlooks the Dean that divides Berwickshire from East Lothian near Cockburnspath, and he had heard from our cousins that although they would be away from home, they had arranged that we should be shown round the place. So another fine morning saw us turning into the Dunglass gate and wending our way along the near-milelong drive. We gave ample warning of our approach and time for the housekeeper to glance through her notes on the family portraits, for it was Chug-Chug’s day out.
Chapter 9
Dunglass 1910
The house could be seen from a distance that made a focal point in the splendidly planted landscape but robbed it of Keith Marischal’s breathtaking impact. My father never liked it but his great interest and pleasure in architecture ended with the early English period and all that came later he described as debased, having a more scholarly approach to churches than houses. The front door was a storey above the ground level and was flanked on either side by curved and balustraded carriage ramps, and as this seemed too dignified for Chug-Chug’s boisterous progress he was left a little way off in the shade. My father remembered when the coachman had worn the dark red and green livery of the house – and he probably still did – which would have made a more appropriate arrival.
We walked through one large hall into another, with a domed ceiling and a staircase with wrought iron banisters, leading to wide landings and broad architraved doorways. I remember a deep recess displaying some fine pieces of china but perhaps it was the thickness of the inner wall that impressed on my mind. Close by there was a room whose lofty ceiling supported a canopy with brocade curtains that shrouded a bed with the awful splendour of a catafalque (a decorated wooden framework supporting the coffin of a distinguished person during a funeral or while lying in state). Would anyone who fell asleep in it wake up alive? Or would a blazing fire have dispelled my Edgar Alan Poe-ish humour to have shown me a bright and cheerful room of great beauty?
No morbid fancies could be induced in the light and lovely drawing room with its Oriental hand painted wallpaper, with climbing plants growing from coloured earthenware tubs. At the foot of the tower we were shown the laboratory where Sir James continued his geological research. His famous experiments, in which he verified Sir James Hutton’s theory of igneous rock, were completed in the old house and at George Street, Edinburgh. There was an old cannon barrel on the floor and my great-great-grandfather used this tough and well-tried steel for his crucibles, which were subjected to tremendous pressure. There was a small museum at the top of the tower but all that I can remember was the revolting sight of a dried human hand in a glass case, but I think this was a curio brought home by my great-grandfather, Captain Basil Hall, rather than the result of a bit of after-dinner fun.
The little, early 15th century Collegiate church of Dunglass, with its unusual stone roof, was only a few paces from the house and was probably used in old days as a chapel of ease. It was sadly neglected but no longer in use as a coach-house and carpenter’s shop as it had been at the time of the old mansion. The walls were covered with the memorial tablets of our family and one was to the memory of Sir William de Lancy, who married Magdelene, sister of the 5th baronet, and was one of the officers who left early from the famous ball in Brussels on the eve of Waterloo. He received a fatal wound while riding with the Duke of Wellington – a friend of his boyhood – and was nursed by his young wife amidst the terrible scenes of the battlefield until he died a week later.
In a glade near the church we were shown the extraordinary wicker cathedral which Sir James had designed and employed an old cooper to build in order to demonstrate his theory of the origin of Gothic architecture. By the time we saw it the willow wands had grown into flourishing trees but the shape of the nave and transepts was still quite clear. I suppose genius and extreme eccentricity have their meeting points and even overlap, for the beautiful illustrations that he has left of the curves, tracery and fan-vaulting that the withies so easily formed could well have inspired the early builders.
In 1918 the entail was broken and the whole estate sold to Mr Frank Usher by the 9th Baronet, Sir John. About four years later I had tea in London with his wife, Cousin Sophie. She showed me some of the family portraits including the Reynolds of James, the 4th baronet, and the Raeburn of Lady Helen, his wife, and going to her desk, Cousin Sophie drew a receipt from a pigeon-hole, as though it had arrived by the morning’s post, in which Raeburn had charged seventeen guineas for his painting and twenty-five for the frame. The Reynolds was more expensive for I have lately seen the receipt for fifty guineas.
I only met Cousin Sophie this once, but I have seldom got to know and like someone so much in so short a time. Perhaps she fell into step with my mood or I with hers for when she pointed to the great Dunglass bell that the tenants had given her she told me without words where she still belonged. I ask myself how anyone could have had the fortitude to exchange the rushing dean and those green rides and gentle glades of primroses and forget-me-nots that Robert Burns described as “The most romantic, sweet place he ever saw” or this expensive and dreary street that had died with George IV. And did she, with me, confine her love of London to its departure platform?
All that I ever saw of Cousin Johnny was the shape of his top hat under a white silk handkerchief on the hall table as I left the house.
My slender memories of the third Dunglass – the house I visited as a child of ten – cannot be widened for it was demolished after the second war, having become ruined by stripping the lead off its roof to save the rates. But my interest has been revived by reading a copy of a manuscript written ninety years ago by Helen Russell, who was a granddaughter of Sir Jame and Lady Helen. It is a short account of a busy and happy little family – as gifted as they were eccentric – during the reign of George III and the Regency, living in the old house that rose over the dungeons of the castle, which was probably destroyed during Somerset’s invasion in 1547. It is full of amusing little anecdotes that a Georgette Heyer might have woven into a light-hearted novel.
The principal characters are James, who succeeded to the title as a boy of fifteen and his wife Helen, who was a daughter of the Earl of Selkirk, whose silver plate was raided by the pirate Paul Jones, who later became an Admiral in the American navy. There are several versions of this curious story. According to Helen Russell there had been a plot to kidnap the Earl and hold him to ransom but hearing that he was away from home, Paul Jones sent a message to the Countess saying that rather than put her ladyship to any inconvenience she could hand out the silver in pillowslips, for his men would expect some compensation for their loss. Certainly part of it was subsequently returned but whether the whole of it seem doubtful.
Judging by Raeburn’s portrait of the beautiful and lively middle-aged woman wearing a beribboned lace cap, my favourite would have been Aunt Tibby, who left her own estate to bring up the orphaned family at Dunglass, where she remained, apparently living amicably with Helen, for the rest of her life.
It was quite usual for the ladies of the house to grow herbs and concoct their remedies and lotions in the still-room, but the enterprising Aunt Tibby sold the medicinal rhubarb, which flourished in the rick soil near the house, and spent the proceeds on a silver coffee pot which was to be decorated with the handsome divided leaves of this species (officinalis).
She set up the loom in the long-gallery for a carpet to be made from the wool spun and probably dyed on the estate, which was finished many years later with the help of Helen and any of her visitors who could be pressed into this pleasant occupation. The design was of flowers drawn from nature and it was shaped to surround three sides of a four-post bed.
Then there is Aunt Tibby’s brother, the absent-minded Uncle Willie of Whitehall, who roamed his woods and pastures in search of wildflowers and had been seen wearing several flat hats on his head at the same time. It was on one of these rambles that he came across a friend and as they were near his house and the time for dinner was not far off, he was invited to share the meal, which would be about 3 o’clock in the afternoon. He was shown up to a dressing room to wash his hands but being deep in thought and losing touch with time and place he undressed and put himself to bed in the room next door. After a time a servant was sent to look for him and he was found to be sleeping peacefully and dreaming, we may imagine, of enchanter’s nightshade.
Uncle Willie never married and it was said that he had forgotten to attend his own wedding. The charitable Helen Russell could not believe that any woman who knew him well enough to have accepted his hand would be unable to overlook a trifling lapse of this sort, but I have my doubts, and that weddings can slip the memory is shown in a little story that was told to me by an old Naval Officer. He was serving as Commander in the Royal Yacht in the days of Queen Victoria when his Captain, whom everyone had considered to be a confirmed bachelor, asked him to act as his best man. While they were on their way to the ceremony in London, the Captain lowered his newspaper and, seeing his Commander sitting in front of him, he exclaimed, “Where on earth are you going?”
“To your wedding, Sir.”
“God bless my soul! I’m glad you reminded me.”
Despite his eccentricities, Uncle Willie was an able man and a very distinguished botanist.
When James was a little boy he was so full of drolleries that his parents could not decide whether to consider him as an idiot or a genius – after all, the difference is often marginal. The cane had not yet been replaced by the psychologist but when they were staying in London they took him to the roof of St Paul’s to watch his reaction. He neither gibbered nonsense nor composed an epic poem but, leaning over the parapet, he exclaimed, “Eh, there’s a cuddy.” This was the remark of a normal boy and showed a certain amount of perspicacity to distinguish a drab coloured donkey from such a height. His parents’ anxiety was allayed and although his oddities remained all his life he was to become the friend of Lavoisier, Black and Hutton and President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh; but all this I must leave to the biographies.
At the age of sixteen James entered Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he remained for two years, without graduating, but this did not imply any failure as a degree would have been immaterial. From there he studied at the Military Academy at Brienne when Napoleon was training there as a young cadet. Many years later my great-grandfather, Basil Hall, called at St Helena in his ship, and mentioned this circumstance in the course of conversation with one of the suite, and in consequence he was granted an audience.
“I remember your father very well”, said Napoleon, “for he was the first Englishman I ever met. I wonder if he remembers me.”
“Indeed he does”, Basil replied, “for he charged me never to miss an opportunity of seeing such an extraordinary man.”
This remark amused him very much and he said, “If Sir James considers me such a curiosity, why doesn’t he come and see me himself?”
The family had a large house in George Street, Edinburgh, where they did much of their entertaining, and it was probably there or in the Selkirk’s town house that Aunt Tibby first met Helen and invited her to stay at Dunglass. On a hill overlooking the house there was an exquisite little stone temple built in the 18th century French style and calling for the plighting of troths and no doubt such a thought had passed through Aunt Tibby’s gentle mind, but we could have assured her that Cupid’s darts are apt to pierce more deeply in the unromantic atmosphere of a London fog or dusty attic. Wherever the shot was received, however, it seems to have taken for soon after the visit James wrote to his aunt requesting her to let him know if anyone came forward as a suitor for Helen’s hand as he would then come home by return of post. Apparently all went without mishap for we are told that a few years later Great-aunt Tibby is taking the little boys to church with her, and it is she who has to be scolded. During the service she noticed that one of the children had a loose hat ribbon. Taking a bodkin from her housewife, she did no more than thrust it through the ends to hold them together, but this flagrant desecration of the Sabbath so appalled an old woman sitting behind her that she leaned forward and exclaimed, “Could your laddyship no’ ha’ done the same wi’ a pron?” (pin)
A few years after the marriage James was travelling in France with his brother-in-law, Lord Daer, who was the heir to the Selkirk earldom, but returned when he was warned of the impending storm. Daer, on the other hand, had become deeply involved in French politics and refused to leave, even witnessing, it has been said, the destruction of the Bastille. There is an interesting observation in Helen Russell’s manuscript that with many other young men of his day he imagined that the regeneration of mankind would follow the revolution. We may suppose that his opinions changed with the reign of terror that followed, but he became a broken and discredited man, not surprisingly estranged from his family, and died of a decline soon afterwards. Many years ago and quite by chance I came across a marble tablet to his memory in Exeter Cathedral, showing the beautiful Byron-like profile of a young man, but how and why it came to be there I have not discovered.
Referring to James, Helen Russell quotes from Lord Cockburn’s memoirs: “His large house in George Street was distinguished by its hospitality both to science and fashion and the interest of his many evening parties was not lessened by the stories of his oddities which were sure to make the morning laugh.”
Certainly Sir James was no Beau Brummel and I doubt if he even allowed this man to dress him for we are told that during a large dinner party after a race meeting he was seen to be peeling the tissue paper off the silver buttons of his new coat, as unconcerned as though toying with a bit of toast. Nor would Lady Helen have fancied herself as a dress-maker’s model for I have read somewhere that she was a homely lady, and she always disliked Raeburn’s portrait, which showed a lovely young woman in lightly powdered hair, with a slightly sensuous expression about the eyes and mouth, which she said was the picture of a dawdle. In fact, she impressed this opinion so strongly on another artist, who was about to paint her miniature, that the result was insufferably bold, and having paid the bill she washed it out with a wet brush. But I suspect it was the domesticated Aunt Tibby who was not above cutting a dash for Mrs Cockburn writes in one of her letters: ‘I came from my chamber and found Tib Hall contemplating my beautiful cloak. “I wager”, says she, “Nat Cummings contrived that cloak”; so readily do artists recognise each other’s hand.’
We are told that Helen was always up and dressed by 5 o’clock in the morning and often occupied the time before breakfast by spinning flax, which was woven by an old person at the top of the dean for table napkins. She attributed this early waking to a habit she had formed as a child, when she and her numerous brothers and sisters had been told by their father that any time they could make between rising and breaking their fast was entirely their own to do with as they wished. They had taken so full an advantage of this privilege that they often played in the grounds of St Mary’s Isle, the Selkirks estate near Kirkcudbright, by the light of a lantern from 4 o’clock in the morning.
Admirable though this habit may have been it took its toll for by the late afternoon her eyelids became heavy with sleep and often closed between the courses of a long dinner party without giving offence to her guests or embarrassment to herself. She had invited her cousins and close friends the Misses Buchannan of Drumpeter to spend a cosy evening with her in George Street and it was not long after their arrival that she was overcome by the urge to close her eyes. Having told them that she would retire to her room for ten minutes and return completely refreshed she fell into a deep sleep from which she was awakened by the sound of the front door shutting behind them so, calling for her sedan chair, she followed them home and spent the remainder of the evening at their house.
Helen was unable to travel after dark as it made her feel unwell so that when her eldest daughter was to be presented in London the journey lasted a fortnight, though it normally took a week. When the long-awaited moment arrived and they were standing dressed in the hoops of the last century that were still required for Court, it was announced that the Prince Regent was too unwell to take the drawing room, the news having been put off to the last minute for the sake of the dressmakers.
The family always hired a house when they stayed in London and employed Gunters to cater form them. On one of these occasions the great confectioner himself was waiting on Helen who told him that the dinner must include a roast suckling pig, which was one of her favourite dishes. The poor man threw up his hands in horror at what he considered a vulgar suggestion, but finding that she was quite adamant, he said, “Of course it must be as your ladyship wishes, but I must ask the favour that no-one is told who dressed your dinner.”
It seems that Helen was an advocate of fresh air at a time when others were stuffing their keyholes with cotton wool. She had engaged a new nurse to look after the youngest child and had insisted, to the woman’s disapproval, that the casements should be left open at night. She did not have to wait long before her misgivings were proved to be well-founded – or so she thought – for waking up in the middle of the night she found that the infant was nowhere to be seen. Rushing from the room she gave the alarm, exclaiming that a peacock had stepped through the open window and carried off the child, which was only to have been expected, but before the footmen had time to powder their wigs the child was found to have rolled under the bed where it was contentedly asleep.
Aunt Tibby died in 1804 and the old house did not long survive her for James began to have doubts of its safety, though when it came to its demolition his fears were found to have been uncalled for. He had travelled throughout England studying the finest examples of churches and houses and had been greatly impressed by the writing of Sir Uvedale Price whose principle, I gather, was that the house should be designed to supplement the landscape rather than the reverse – the picture should be worthy of the frame – and even advocated that an artist as well as an architect should be employed. The site was unsurpassed in the Lowlands of Scotland and James took his advice. So the third Dunglass grew above the original foundations, dominated by the octagonal tower whose height appeared to be doubled by the depth of the dean below it and from whose parapets the long line of the Lammermuirs could be seen as they dipped to the shores of the North Sea.
Chapter 10
Cley 1910
Mr Davis was now married and living, I think, in Melton Mowbray. He must have been a sad loss to my father, who was slow to make intimate friends and was quite out of his element In Leicester. He was now using an office with a Mr Stephens – who like all men of his generation never revealed a Christian name – in a small building at the end of the strip of walled garden at No. 35 Friar Lane. He was a pleasant man, though with none of my father’s interests, and he sometimes spent a Sunday with us at Newstead where he had formed a mild attachment to my pretty governess Hugh without much response, the fickle girl having forsaken me in favour of Douglas, who was already something of a Don Juan.
It was probably on one of these visits that the problem of our summer holiday cropped up. For the last two years we had gone to a seaside town that my father described in his diary as a beastly place, with the barely adequate excuse that our landlady was and ex-lady’s maid with the characteristics of a guardian angel. Mr Stephens told us that for some years he has spent his holiday in a cottage near a little place in Norfolk called Cley, the haunt of bird watchers in the spring but those who looked for nothing more than peace and quietness in August. If such a place appealed to my parents, he was sure he could find suitable rooms in the village. This understatement of all that they desired was tantamount to an offer of nothing but silver and gold and they accepted his kind suggestion with alacrity.
Thus it was not many weeks before we found ourselves climbing into a maroon-coloured carriage of our familiar Midland Railway and out of another in the exciting yellow livery of East Anglia. We arrived at Holt, the nearest station to Cley in such good time that the coachman who met us with his four-wheeled brake was quite sober. While waiting at the station he drank at such a constant rate that we found on subsequent visits that his intake could be predicted nicely with the use of my father’s stopwatch, and once, when our train was exceptionally late, it soon became apparent that we would be overturned. My mother gave him a good trouncing with her umbrella which tilted his top-hat over his eyes and slackened his hold on the reins so that the sagacious horse, being freed from irrelevant jabs on the bit, took us to our destination at a well-bred trot.
But today, however, our train was punctual and the coachman had to wait no longer than it took to wet his whistle, so we had a delightful four-mile drive, and those who have never heard the clip-clop of hoofs and the sound of iron-rimmed wheels on a gritty road have been deprived of an inexplicable pleasure that jet-propulsion will never replace.
Soon after leaving the little town we came to a dense wood where we descended to a water-splash, then rose to open flat country that was saved from dullness by the flash of scarlet poppies, then turning to the left and falling gradually to sea level we saw, with the suddenness of a projector changing its slide, the broad, clear water-colour landscape of Norfolk, and we were not alone in coming under its lifelong spell at first sight. Blakeney church stood up on a ridge of higher ground a mile in front of us, with its great tower at the west end and smaller beacon tower over the chancel, and at half this distance and a little to our left we could see the smaller church of Wiverton. At the foot of the hill that we had been descending three roads surrounded a triangular green, and on our right we passed yet another splendid example of ecclesiastical architecture for my father to study, even though it was built during the perpendicular period, which was a little too modern for his taste. Then, round a bend in the road, we saw the flint houses of Cley, with the sails of the windmill high above their Dutch gables and russet pantile roofs.
Our landlady, Mrs Mountain, lived in a narrow cottage at the beginning of the village street and opposite the road to Blakeney, but it was larger than its two-roomed front suggested, for we had a sitting room and three bedrooms, while the Mountain range extended to three generations. There was a long strip of garden at the back, ending in the usual earth-closet, for there was no plumbing in the village except in the big houses. This could have its drawbacks, but fortunately Norfolk is a dry county. My father, who could give sound advice on all subjects, told Bobby and me to leave the door wide open and make a loud noise at anyone’s approach.
I woke early to the pure bell-like sound of steel striking steel, and ran to the open window to find that there was a blacksmith’s forge in the corner of the road opposite our house. This did not explain, however, why there were two notes at an interval of a perfect fifth, and repeated in the same musical rhythm over and over again at the same time every day, but I never discovered how or why this happened. Perhaps the smith had thrown off the fetters of reason and beat out this little hymn to the morning because he felt like it. But who am I to question the goings on in this enchanting county, where a Wyndham had once set fire to his night-gown to cure an attack of hiccups?
I had scarcely returned to bed before I hear the unmistakable rattle of chains and robust bass voice of a 1905 Albion motor, and I was at the window once more, half expecting to see Smith’s beloved Chug-Chug having come all the way from Keith Marischal, but although I was right about the make it was the top-heavy scarlet van of the Royal Mail that had drawn up at the corner and was panting to deliver all the penny post before breakfast. It was hardly worth getting back to bed, and Bobby and I soon joined my father, who was standing outside the house sniffing the delicious smell of newly baked bread. We soon traced it to its source, a tiny shop a minute’s walk from us, where we were greeted by the bearded, ex-Naval baker, who told us to choose our own cottage loaf, for there were some who liked them brown and some who didn’t. The flour came straight from the grindstone of the windmill and the wheat had grown behind the village.
On this first day we set the pattern for the rest of the holiday, except, of course, for Sundays, which were different in those days. After breakfast we all did the shopping together, for my mother catered and Mrs Mountain and her daughter did everything else. The grocer’s shop was almost next door; so beautiful, and without a trace of old-world affectation – and was still unchanged when I saw it over sixty years later. The open door stood between two large bay-windows and faced a broad flight of shallow steps, and behind the counter were tier upon tier of drawers, rising to the ceiling in diminishing size, like the tiles of an old building, which gave the appearance of added height by false perspective. Everything had to be arranged by size rather than convenience, and if there was a call for peppercorns there would be a tall chair to stand on, for time and motion were given cheerfully in those days. As there was no chemist in the village, the grocer was at liberty to show an essential medicine on the counter, such as dill-water, sal volatile, ‘Mother Seagull’s Syrup’, and the excellent clear magnesia on the label of whose bottle was displayed the rather sinister claim – to the best of my memory – that, “This Elegant Preparation is most effective when taken after a surfeit, and has been in continual use by the Aristocracy for over a century”. My mother always kept it handy, but to do us credit, it was seldom used. There must have been a butcher and a fishmonger, but I cannot remember either.
Having left the provisions with Mrs Mountain we collected our bathing dresses and set off for the beach, which was about a mile away. The street turned sharply to the right at the George Hotel, whose brick and terracotta front gave a startling contrast to the rest of the village, and especially to the Gothic arch in the wall by its side. A little way beyond this we passed Mrs Gibbs’ house, where we stayed the following year, and the entrance to the windmill yard; and then the taxidermist’s shop, with its stuffed animals in the window.
We had now come to the end of the village, though the old grey houses continued for some way on the right of the road, facing the salt marsh, which separated it from the shore. We took the footpath on the high, grass-covered bank, that made a sea-wall to guard the village from devastation of storm and tide, though it failed to save it from the terrible flood of 1953 when the water rose to a height of six feet above the level of the ground floors. From here we had a view of the magnificent windmill, with its cluster of old buildings, and a boat or two in the yard above the river that flowed past it.
Perhaps the beach was the least attractive feature of the place, for it was nothing but a ridge of shingle as far as could be seen in either direction, and a cold wind blew perpetually from the North Sea. We never spent long in it as ti was neither warm nor calm, but if the breakers became too boisterous we bathed in the river, which ran on the opposite side of the beach. Nevertheless, my father, Bobby and I always enjoyed our dip as we were used to cold baths.
There is a note in my father’s diary referring to a separate account of our holiday written by my mother – now unfortunately lost – but he makes this one cryptic entry: ‘Miss Hughes loses her first button.’ This might well puzzle a curious reader, but I remember the incident and its sequel very clearly.
We were returning along the bank to the village when Hugh exclaimed, “Oh dear, I’ve lost a button off my coat”, and in a few more paces Bobby saw it lying in the grass. In a day or two she found that she had lost another button, and as we were walking on the beach to get warm after our baths, she turned to me and said, “Now it’s your turn to find my button”, and stooping down, I picked it up from amongst the pebbles. The improbability for this to occur once would have been extraordinary and twice incredible, so perhaps Hugh said a little prayer to St Anthony, despite her father’s low-church principles.
In the afternoon the tea basket and Douglas – I revert to the priorities of a ten-year-old – were packed into his mail-cart, and we were all ready to explore the countryside. We took the right-hand fork past the big green opposite the church, and crossed the little road that went to Wiverton. We were now in a narrow lane where tall hedges had grown, here and there, into small trees, and restricted the open view to patches of field and water-meadow. It was not long before we joined another land at right angles, with a stream behind it where willowherb and meadowsweet grew. We turned to the right, which the stream must also have done, for it flowed over the road in a wide for, crossed by a wooden footbridge, then broadened into a long lake with an old watermill at the far end. Beyond the bridge we saw a row of cottages facing the little church of Glandford.
We had no difficulty in choosing a pleasant place to have our tea – in fact it would have been hard to find a dull one – and the time passed happily, in little walks and rests, and I have no doubt that my mother read to us, until the clock struck six, and it was time to return. But scarcely had the reverberations faded before the bells played tow verses of a simple hymn tune, that floated to us delightfully across the water. Before our holiday was over we had discovered that there was a different hymn for every day of the week.
It was the following year that we were standing on the footbridge when Douglas, without warning, if not premeditation, cast one of his shoes onto the untroubled water, where, righting itself, it drifted slowly but surely towards the millrace, at the same time exclaiming, “Funny Cutlet!” The dryness of this humour was lost on my father as he waded knee-deep into mid-stream, but my mother was torn between vexation and pride at such a singularly succinct remark.
We were rather conservative in our walks, for having found what we enjoyed, we never tired of repeating it, and the Glandford bells were always a great attraction. There were other walks, of course, and one was a particular favourite. For this we took the left-hand fork at the green, and climbed the hill that we had descended in the brake on our arrival, carrying straight on at the top, where it joined the road for Holt. This soon took us to a heath, which was a network of small open spaces and narrow paths between the gorse bushes, where a child smaller than myself would get lost as quickly as in the maze at Hampton Court. I have since seen it in the spring as a blazing sheet of gold, but now the blackberries were beginning to change colour. It was many years later that we discovered the green lane that continued for ever without getting anywhere.
Although I have since become so familiar with the charming village of Blakeney, I can still only remember seeing it once on this first visit to Norfolk, when Bobby and I accompanied my father to the chemist’s shop, where he paid a few pence for the use of the darkroom and necessary chemicals to develop some negatives. I had become a keen photographer, having bought a ‘Little Nipper’ from Gamage’s for two shillings, which took almost recognisable pictures. My father was a very knowledgeable photographer, and was using an extremely bulky reflex camera, which took the form of a wooden box with a door at the back from which a black bag could be withdrawn for exchanging the exposed glass plates from a magazine – he did not approve of roll films. Before taking a photograph he measured the intensity of the light with a small round instrument, which had a little window on its face, divided across it centre, one half covered with a brown surface and the disclosing part of a sensitised disc. Holding this photometer in one hand and his vast, gold stopwatch in the other, my father measured the time taken for the two halves of the window to be indistinguishable, and from this datum the correct exposure could be calculated, or even read from a table. But what would be regarded as a lot of trouble then was an added interest and pleasure in those days. He also had a few interesting relics of his youth: a ‘Ticker’, not much bigger than a pocket-watch, and a ‘Secret Agent’s’ camera, like a gigantic bun, which was worn under the waistcoat, with the lens protruding through a button-hole, which would have given his tall and slender figure such an unusual paunch that I cannot think he would have got far as a spy.
Starting by the post-office there was a long, straight footpath between tall, flint wall, covered in the spring with small, yellow wallflowers, and I wonder if these were the wild species (Cheiranthus fruticulosus) which Sowerby describes as ‘Abundant on the old ruined walls of cities, castles and monasteries throughout Britain, where its bright yellow flowers are very ornamental and fragrant in April and May’. The end of the footpath faced the grounds of Cley Hall, at the closed end of a country road leading to the north side of the church, and a similar passage joined the village street near the windmill, making a pleasant, short walk.
I think the weather must have been kind to us as I remember little of our rooms, though we had most of our meals there. My father and I had a partiality for pickled onions, but my mother and Bobby had a more refined taste, and Douglas was still on a restricted diet, becoming addicted to them a little later. At any rate, my mother had unselfishly provided a large jar of them for my father and me to enjoy with our cold mutton, but unfortunately we left the fork standing in it, where it remained until we next had a cold joint. When my father was about to help himself to an onion or two we found that all the prongs of the fork had vanished, to make a deadly solution of lead acetate, so not only had we to compensate Mrs Mountain, but we lost our splendid jar of pickles.
One day a carriage drew up to our cottage, and out stepped Captain Douglas Dent, known to us as Uncle Billy – as his father had been known to mine – who was handing out a tall and beautifully dressed woman, soon to become ‘Aunt Olive’, and an extremely handsome pair they made. He was a typical Naval Officer of his term in the Britannia, gentle and kind in his tweed but inflexible in uniform, but he had been true to his maxim that no Naval Officer should be allowed to marry under the rank of Captain. It must be remembered that in his day it was possible for a more junior husband and wife to remain separated for eight years, which was an intolerable situation leading to early retirement, or worse.
When Uncle Billy was at least eighty and Aunt Olive about ten years younger, I spent a fortnight with them in their Norfolk house. Intellectually they were both as brilliant as ever, and his Naval reminiscences were extraordinarily interesting. He had become a full Admiral during the first war, and I had always understood – though not, of course, from him – that he was a safe bet for the post of First Sea Lord. But he told me, without rancour, that he had disagreed with Churchill over the Dardanelles, going so far as to tell him that he was wasting lives and ships. I shall always remember one short and detached remark that he made one evening, when he said, “I had a young man on my staff called Cunningham and, mark my words, that young man in going to go far.” “Well,” I replied, “He’s not done badly so far.” About twenty years later I told this little story to the Captain of the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, when Lord Cunningham was staying with him, to whom it was promptly repeated, and I hope he was duly gratified by Uncle Billy’s and my opinion of him.
Of the two I think Aunt Olive had the more lively sense of humour, but there were times when Uncle Billy made a remark that was like a glass of Teo Pepe after Bristol Cream, and I sometimes wonder if the Cunningham anecdote was an example, for he never showed a sign of mental deterioration.
I remember one of Aunt Olive’s stories in particular, and have reason to believe it was no exaggeration. She had lately attended a funeral where the mourners were taken to a mausoleum in the park. When the vicar took his place for the service he was found, to Aunt Olive’s surprise, to be wearing a helmet, which he had tried on but was unable to remove. What with having to hold open the visor to make his voice audible, and the ambient temperature of the summer day he became a little over-heated, but after a visit to the blacksmith, he was able to enjoy the ‘baked meats’.
Twenty years later I repeated this curious episode to a couple of elderly sisters, belonging to a well-know Norfolk family, thinking it might amuse them, but not at bit of it, for their only comment was, “Ah yes, that would have been Cousin Dick, who was always a little absent-minded.”
Cley was still almost unchanged when I last saw it four years ago. My wife Dorothy,and I; Douglas and his wife, Rachel; their eldest daughter, Marion and her husband, John Fuller-Sessions with their two girls, Ruth and Sarah, had rented Fairstead House, which was halfway along the road between Cley and the church. This was over sixty years after our first visit in 1910 and yet several people remembered it very well. One old man politely enquired, “Would you be the young gentleman who stayed at Mrs Mountain’s with your mum and dad and governess?” I am afraid I must assume that he had made enquiries as I cannot think that I have not aged a little since I was ten, however well-preserved I may fancy myself.
The previous year our family house-party had rented the old windmill, which, with the counting-house and other attached buildings, had been converted into a large and very beautiful place, filled with antique furniture. I noticed that the clock on the drawing room mantlepiece bore a name that make me almost afraid of winding it. The owner, Major Hubert Blount, who then lived in a large house just outside the village, told us that he used the windmill as an overflow for his family as he was not very keen on his grandchildren playing football in the drawing room – a reasonable objection I think – but he was always willing to let it to friends when it was not required for this purpose. A former tenant had been the ‘flying’ Duchess of Bedford, who preferred to live in the windmill alone, but had installed ten of the Woburn servants in the George Hotel to attend to her simple needs.
“See Naples and die,” by all means, but “See Norfolk and you’re got.”
Chapter 11
Newstead 1910-1911
Having entered the first form at school a year above the average age I remained in it for five terms, when the syllabus was intended for one. I was sick of this tepid bread and milk diet, in which most of the poetry that I was expected to learn had been saved from ‘The Stuffed Owl’ for the simple reason that it had not yet been published, and the ‘Pen of my aunt’ had become a mockery. I was on the shelf, and it seemed that I might share the fate of one of Captain Marriat’s ‘Young Gentlemen’ who spent their whole service as hoary bearded Midshipmen, being unable to make the grade. I had one accomplishment, however, for I could write in a most elegant copper-plate style, for which I had been awarded ‘Aesop’s Fables’ and ‘White’s Natural History of Selborne, bound in calf. I was even made use of a king of pupil teacher, in this useless art, which I feel sure would have taken precedence over an ink monitor.
I have nothing but respect for Mr Chad, who could have been said to have saved my life on more than one occasion by refraining from wringing my scraggy little neck, without any acknowledgement from the Royal Humane Society. There were even rare occasions when he would replace dictation by something less dreary, and I remember that he once invited us all, in turn, to tell him a funny story. He dismissed mine before it reached the crux with a hasty, “Not funny. Next boy,” but I have not forgotten one of the efforts, which he converted into a rather good ‘Shaggy Dog’ story long before its day.
“Our parrot once shouted, ‘I’m in the custard’.”
“Not funny. Next boy.”
“But, please Sir, he really was in the custard, up to his neck.”
“Still not funny, sort of thing anyone might say in the circumstances. Next boy.”
I achieved my promotion in a deplorable way, though I must confess I am still rather proud of it. The custom in this school was for the various masters to visit us while we remained in our.form room. I was in the throes of a blazing row with one of these poor men when in walked the Headmaster himself who, owing to the lurid account of my character, and the shocking scene he had interrupted, was momentarily taken off balance. The unhappy master turned to him saying, “He is impossible; I can do nothing with him.” Canon Went then made an obvious strategical error, for he replied, “I cannot think where some of these boys are brought up.” One of my least endearing achievements was a devastating skill in repartee, known to my elders as ‘answering back’ and, assuming a slightly puzzled air of innocence that could deceive no-one, I replied out of turn, “Surely, Sir, in your school.” There was one of those uncanny silences when nature holds it breath between the flash and the thunderclap, but it never came. I suppose we all have our own way of tempering the violence of our emotions, but the Canon’s was a strange one, for giving a little tug to one of his huge and outmoded side-whiskers he produced the loud hiss of escaping steam from between his teeth, which reminded me of the sudden lifting of the safety valve of an over-stressed boiler. Thus relieved of pressure, he made a dignified exit having entirely forgotten his original mission. He was a just man and knew the rules of cricket, for he accepted the fact that I had caught him fairly in the slips, and I received neither punishment nor rebuke, and found myself, the following term, in a form befitting my age. There is no doubt, however, that I became very unpopular with the other masters, perhaps out of their loyalty to this generous man.
I was not moving with the stream and soon got my second move to Mr Hanschall’s form in another of the open classrooms in the great hall, but despite this my education was not progressing as it should. Under Mr Chad I was urged to work but had no inclination to do so, but as a reformed character I was willing enough, but Mr Henschall had no intention of teaching us anything. He was the organist as well as our form-master, and was supposed to teach us mathematics, but I cannot remember his giving us a single lesson. In fact his only slender connection that I have in my mind between this vivid personality and figures was his fondness for the splendid hymn that begins with the line ‘Ten thousand times ten thousand’. Perhaps this had suggested to Canon Went, who was a ‘Greats’ man, that he would be a suitable addition to the mathematics staff.
Before settling down to our appointed lesson one of us would hand Mr Henschall an interesting book, and if he approved of the author, he would continue to read it to us until the end of the period. If, on the other hand, it failed to impress him, he would hurl it at the boy’s head, telling us that if we could do no better than that he had a mind to make us work. This threat was never fulfilled, however, for suddenly bursting into song, he would move to the great organ at the end of the hall, followed by two or three of the stronger boys to pump up the bellows by means fo long wooden levers protruding from one side. The rest of us would then take our places in the body of the hall, followed by the other two classes, whose masters had long given up a losing battle, and the rafters would soon reverberate with music – not noise – while the pumping boys leapt up and down to keep up with the wind.
Mr Henschall and I had a very good understanding of each other, and he paid me the compliment of throwing more missiles at my head than was considered to be normal; but I was still disliked by most of the other masters, whom I made no attempt to mollify. For instance, I remember very clearly when I was writing alone in the classroom during the morning break, that two of them walked in – one even a stranger to me – and standing behind my chair, began to discuss my many failings in a most offensive manner. They were obviously trying to bait me, but I refused to rise, until one of them became so infuriated by my apparent indifference that he said, “Haven’t you heard a word of what we’ve been saying?” Turning in mock surprise, I replied, “I’m afraid not, Sir, you see I’ve been trying to do a little work.” These poor men were probably the cream of the earth, doing a thankless job on a pittance, but I must say it had gone a little sour in the process. I wish my unconventional form-master had entered his classroom in time to witness this deplorable scene, and I think his mental reaction would have been to cut out my crafty little gizzard with a blunt knife, but not behind my back. I can also see him escorting my tormentors from the room and humming ‘Oh for the wings of a dove’. This, of course, is only a caricature of a pepper and salt man who added so much flavour to a dull dish.
But I should be wrong in implying that school life was all dull, for every now and then we were given a lecture on general science, which I enjoyed immensely. One day we learnt about the aniline dyes that were derived from coal-tar, and when the talking was over, the lecturer poured water into three large jars that had been smeared with an invisible trace of dye, and they became the splendid emblems of the chemist’s shop. On another occasion we were shown experiments with a vacuum pump, and a sheet of rubber was burst by reducing the atmospheric pressure on one side of it, and so on. The last of the series was the most dramatic, and could well have ended in tragedy. Two wide-necked bottles holding about a gallon, but known, for some reason, as Winchester quarts, were placed on a bench in front of us, one containing sticks of phosphorus the size of candles, and other blocks of metallic sodium about an inch square in cross-section and three inches long. It was explained to use that the phosphorus had to be kept under water to prevent spontaneous combustion, and the sodium in light oil, since its oxidisation in air was so rapid that its progress could be watched, but it reacted in water with explosive violence. All this he demonstrated with fragments of the two elements, and all went well until he was about to replace one of the large lumps of sodium, when one of the boys asked him what would happen if he dropped it into the wrong bottle. He had just made the alarming statement that none of us would see next Christmas – only a fortnight off – when, without a word of warning to us, he dropped to his knees behind the bench, and there was a tremendous report. Fortunately for us there had not been time to replace the glass stopper, so that the bottle did not burst, but acted as a trench mortar, shooting the entire contents up to the high rafters of the hall, which soon began to smoulder. A few of the boys were rushed out to receive first aid for minor burns on their faces, but, by a miracle, no one was blinded.
This accident gave me a great interest in the subject, and I was given a simple ‘chemistry set’ on my next birthday, but it contained neither of these fascinating elements. There were, however, rows of pill boxes and little bottles of harmless chemicals and a miniature glass spirit lamp. Having completed all the experiments in the instruction book, I spent all my small savings on new equipment and material from a shop in Leicester which sold nothing else. I learnt little from this phase, when I took a collector’s delight in the beautiful glass vessels and labelled bottles, and I lived in the world of the alchemists, searching for the elixir of life and the philosopher’s stone, as they leaned over their bubbling retorts and fuming crucibles.
I owe a great deal to a young master who taught us Latin in this form, for it was owing to him that I snapped out of my nonsense and took to methodical study. He was a wonderfully good teacher, and I am sure he must have gone far, but, oddly enough, I cannot even remember his name. In a haphazard way I had muddled through a little Latin in my previous class, and had got through ‘mensa’ as far as ‘by, with or from a table’, and the inevitable love stuff ‘amo-amas-amat’ even learning how to translate ‘meet to be loved’, which, owing to my uncertain spelling, I confused with sirloin. To help me remember the verb ‘To be’ my father quoted a rhyme he had learnt at Radley which began:
Sum – I am a gentleman
Es – thou art a fool
Est – he is the biggest ass that ever went to school
This, for some reason, was not appreciated when I repeated it in class. My new master never made the mistake, as others had done, of assuming that I was going to act the goat before I did, but waited until I put out the inevitable feeler, and then, with a pleasant expression and voice, told me to stop making a fool of myself, which of course I did from then onwards. Under this man I found the subject interesting and, consequently, easy and had no difficultly in maintaining my place at the top of the class.
I cannot remember when, or even how, ‘the second-hand lady’ entered my life to alter its pattern, but it is typical of memory to reject the great events and cling to the trivial ones; but it was probably through one of those ‘smalls’ in the local paper, such as:
‘Second-hand gents and ladies. Snip!’ At any rate, my father and I lost no time in tracing her to a tiny shop in a back street in Leicester, and thirty shillings changed hands. She was long past middle age but must have been a beauty in her youth, with her swan-necked frame, low saddle and high handlebars; and we fell in love at first sight. Now I had only to learn to ride.
Our poultry farm on the big tennis court had given place to the needs of the pony and my latest ambition to become a second W.G. Grace and a cricket pavilion had replaced the large henhouse, while Griff had scythed the long grass round the pitch. This was the ideal place for my ‘second-hand lady’ and met to get together, and my father was wise in leaving us entirely alone to work out our system.
I had always admired the errand-boys’ unconventional methods, some sitting on the back mudguards, other remaining stationary, by a feat of balance, while the doyen even sat their saddles back to front, with an occasional glance over their shoulders at the oncoming traffic. This might come later, but it was the middle group that inspired me, for what a butcher boy could do I could do as well. Thus I lifted my weaker leg over the saddle and gave a hop with the other and promptly fell off the other side. I repeated this process over and over again until I remained on the saddle long enough to find the pedal with my better foot and pushed off. So far, so good, for if you can remain on a stationary bicycle you certainly can on a moving one, and as I rode round the cricket pitch my oscillations diminished with every circuit. But the time came when the pangs of hunger reminded me that I must now learn to dismount, so making a forced landing in the haystack I thought the matter over. This problem was easily solved, for all I had to do was reverse the operation of mounting, that is, to stop dead and fall gently onto my stronger side.
It was no exaggeration to say that my new acquisition changed my life. Queniborough Hall was now within easy reach, and Aunt Kitty invited Bobby and me to spend every available day of our holidays with her boys, generously assuring my mother that it would be so good for them. Thus began our second golden epoch in this delightful place. Bobby and Brian, both rather grown-up for their age, spent their time playing tennis and billiards, while Christopher and I chased each other around the gardens on our bicycles and played in the brook, which we dammed so successfully that a neighbouring farm was nearly deprived of its water supply.
Every few days, when I heard the irregular chuff and sigh, and the deliciously revolting blend of mignonette and paraffin vapour was wafted on a gentle breeze – the emblem of my love of flowers and engines – I would hurry to an open door in the stable yard where I would find George tending the electric light plant. How beautiful were those works of functional art in glistening steel: Every moving part of these great engines was visible, even the skirt of the piston, popping in and out of the large cylinder to receive its drop of oil. I remember the governor that pirouetted above the monster like a little ballerina and controlled the exuberance of the pattern of active chuffs and passive sighs. There waw the red-hot tube that took the place of the modern sparking plug, and the steaming tank that nearly reached the roof, with a ladder leaning against it for topping up the cooling water. All this and more was explained to me by George, who had taught me to tell the time before I could read or write.
We had been promoted to the dining room, where my old friend Wicks now waited at table, and as she stooped to hand me the asparagus she would whisper in my ear, “Take a little more, Master Kimmy, you must think of your frame,” and I can still hear the tinkle of the ice in the frosted jug, like a carillon of tiny balls, as she poured out the delicious Queniborough lemonade, which was brewed, I believe, in large stone crocks. Perhaps it was the mixture of formality and homeliness that was so typical of Edwardian England.
My father had set up a very tall flagstaff in the kitchen garden and I took great interest in its operation and some amusement, I am afraid, in what was nearly a disaster. A stout balk of wood was set firmly in the ground with about a yard above the surface, and the pole was to be fixed by two long bolts. It was then hinged to the balk by the top bolt and lay nearly flat on the ground with the four steel guy ropes fixed to the ring halfway up, and the problem was to erect it and slip in the lower bolt. To do this my father had inserted a tackle between one of the guys and the bathroom window, and on giving Griff the order to heave, which he did with all his might, the flagstaff remained unmoved, and the window yielded to the force.
Bobby and I were soon taught how to break the flag and that it must always be lowered at sunset. One morning we were rather puzzled at my father’s behaviour for, having glanced at the paper, which gave no news of any public bereavement, he hurried to the garden and lowered the flag to half-mast; to be told on his return that Mr Lloyd George had been up to one of this knavish tricks – I think the National Insurance Bill.
There were two general elections in 1911 and I think it was while the autumn one was brewing that my father gave Bobby and me a blue tie to wear at school warning us that any boy sporting a green one might tap our claret unless we got in first for, in his sensible opinion, a little harmless blood-letting was wholesome enough. During this peaceful age red ties were worn only by railway employees for stopping trains in an emergency and red flags were carried only in front of steam rollers. I soon found that the battle of the blue and green ties was taken more seriously at Newstead than that of the dark and light blue ones, which was tempered by the fact of my mother having had a brother at each university.
Griff disgraced himself twice, the first time rather seriously. There was an old lady who lived in a large house on the road beyond our garden, who was a strong supporter of the Liberal Party and, one morning to the astonishment of the district, the front of her house was seen to be plastered with Conservative posters. My mother was a shrewd woman and without waiting to make any enquiries, she sent for Griff and under pain of instant dismissal, she said that every trace must be removed before the next morning. Needless to say, Griff worked throughout the night. The second occasion was during an election meeting that our candidate had been invited to hold in one of our long rooms. Griff was told that he might sit on the stairs with Bobby and me provided that he behaved himself, and all went well until he, like most of us, became rather confused by the issue. Forgetting, for the moment, which side of the House he supported, he raised his head above the banisters and began to heckle the speaker. There followed one of those silences that are felt when nature stands still between the flash and the thunderclap until, for the second time in this room, my mother’s stern rebuke rang out from the platform, “Griffin, you forget yourself.”
Chapter 12
Newstead 1911-1913
In common with many other people, I had acquired a jealous enthusiasm for what I was least capable of doing, and with me it was playing cricket. Though I could not run I was strong in the arm and could glance a ball to leg which would get past the long stop if his mind was on something else, could throw straight and catch any ball that came within my reach. But my ambition was to become a fast bowler, which was never fulfilled, for although I put all my energy into my efforts, the ball either made a dent in the ground a few yards ahead of me or soared over the batsman’s head. There were no houses in this school and as far as I can remember the youngsters played form matches or practised in the nets. They must have been a nice lot of boys, for although I hardly carried my weight, I was always included in the team, and I think it unlikely that our class contained less than eleven members.
Although our large and very pleasant playing fields were on the fringe of the town, they were within my easy walking distance and not far from the end of New Walk, which was cool and quiet as it was shaded by small trees and exempt from traffic. There were rows of small and unobtrusive houses on either side, probably most of them now used as offices. But standing in a long-neglected garden was the rather sad sight of what had once been a very beautiful country house, full of un-curtained, leaded windows, and like Hardwick Hall, ‘more glass than wall’. This was one of my haunted places, for it had the forsaken look of one that had been deserted by its owner when it was overtaken by the town, but I never knew its name or history.
At the corner of New Walk, where it crossed the road that led to the Midland Railway Station, there was a big yard with outbuildings, where ‘The Clyde Motor Company’ made one of the oldest cars I ever remember, for it had a three-cylinder engine in the form of a fleur-de-list that gave it the unusual rhythm of a ‘V-12’ missing on nine cylinders. Perhaps a better understood analogy for those days and in this hunting country would have been a cantering horse.
Noel Clark was the younger son of the Vicar of Barkby, where my father was now churchwarden; as nice a boy as you could wish to meet, and we always had our lunch at ‘Win’s Café’ at the entrance of the marketplace. Against one of the walls was a row of cubicles that, I imagine, were like the boxes in Vauxhall Gardens at the time of the Regency, and in one of these we were given a choice of meat, two veg and pud; served by a kind waitress, while a small string orchestra played extracts from ‘The Arcadians’. All this we could have twenty-four times for a pound as a concession to schoolboys. Even this was by no means the cheapest place we could have found. We had tried the vegetarian café next door but left it feeling like cattle that had found their way into an over-lush pasture and suffering from what the farmers call ‘the bleats’.
Noel and I shared a common interest in the motor car, and especially in old one, which was unusual in those days. Antiquity depends on the rate of change and although a ten-year-old one at the present day can appear brand new, one of half that age at the period I am writing about would be considered antique. Tiller steering was almost restricted to the magnificent, unconventional Lanchesters; petrol had almost replaced steam, and the rudiments of streamlining could be seen in the new torpedo bodies.
After lunch we had time to walk up Granby Street and inspect the double row of cars in the ‘Central Garage’, where they were put up for the day, as there were no parking places in those days. We knew all the makes by their brass radiators, and there were hundreds made in this country alone, and the proud names such as Sunbeam, Talbot and Vauxhall bore no generic relation to their takeover namesakes. Leicestershire was a rich county so that the splendid ‘Silver Ghost’ Rolls-Royce, that sprang to fame in 1907 as the best care in the world, were plentiful enough, and I remember two of them whose owners may have been considered to have had more money than taste for one of the cars was painted apple-green and the other mauve. The chassis cost £895 – a very high price at that time – and then there was the body to be made by one of the old coachbuilders, such as Barker or Hooper.
These wonderful cars had one fault, however, owing, oddly enough, to their mechanical perfections, for their long, flexible back springs gave them a slow rising and falling motion that had a disastrous effect on the passengers of they were bad sailors. A friend of mine once told me that she had advertised for a children’s nurse, and one of the applicants had added to her letter: “I must tell you, Madam, that I am unable to travel in the back of a Rolls-Royce.” My friend replied, ‘That would be the least likely of your troubles.”
The ‘Ghosts’ had their rivals in the Napiers and big Lanchesters, but remained supreme, though Royalty remained faithful to their Daimlers for many years to come. I think my favourite was the majestic White steamer, that would climb the steepest hill without a murmur. I remember that the driver sat behind two concentric wheels, steering with one and controlling the speed with the other.
The tradesmen’s delivery tricycles, called ‘Auto-carriers’ with their big single cylinder engines under the seat, thudded their way past the groaning trams in Granby Street, and in the autumn of 1911 the makers fitted a beautiful little coach-built body to them and sold them for £75 as ‘The A.C. Sociable’. The name implied, of course, that the driver and passenger sat side by side, which was a great advantage over the ‘Bedelia’, exhibited at the same autumn show, I think, in which the driver sat behind the passenger in order to change gears by means of a stick with which he altered the position of the rubber belt on one of the back wheels.
It was this year, I think, that ‘The daily Mail’ sponsored Mr Hucks to fly a Bleriot monoplane round England, and to our great excitement he was to make a landing in a big field about a mile from Newstead. Uncle Herbert had exchanged his little open Humber for a sedate, closed Hotchkiss, and by the time that George, with Brian and Christopher, had drawn up at our door to pick up Bobby and me, Mr Hucks was already circling the sky above us, and I remember that Douglas was woken up from his afternoon rest to see the wonderful sight but thought it was overrated. We arrived to find a large crowd gathered with their backs to a fresh breeze, and Mr Hucks, knowing better than to land into the wind and risk hitting the crowd, was deprived of his only retarding force, and ran into a hedge with such force that his tailwheel rose several feet above the ground. Having jumped out to discover that no damage had been done to his fragile little machine, he pushed it into a position facing us, and making a short speech, in which he explained what had happened, he told us that he was about to rise into the air, which he proceeded to do – straight at us. There was, of course, no danger at all, for these featherweight little monoplanes were airborne at such a low speed that they rose like a kite in the wind. But the crowd would not know this and might well have stampeded, so the trustworthy George, tucking Christoper and me under his arms and with Brian and Bobby hanging onto his coattails, did not stop running until he had bundled us into the car and driven off. So we never saw the gallant Mr Hucks take to the air, and one only has to see the prototype in the Science Museum at South Kensington to know how intrepid those pioneers were.
King Edward VII had died but the Edwardian era continued unchanged, and now the coronation of King George V was about to take place. Mr father, Bobby and I spent a few days in Southsea with my grandmother as we had been invited by Uncle Billy to attend a large party in his cruiser, H.M.S Blenheim, to watch the Review of Spithead. I think that Bobby and I were the only children on board, and when the twenty-one-gun salute was to be fired, the Gunner, who was a fierce looking little man with a complete set – beard, moustache and whiskers – invited us to come with him to see it done. I remember that he walked from side to side of the deck, timing the guns with a watch, and that one of them misfired but was taken up by another with so small a delay that I doubt if anyone noticed it. Only a few years before this he would have recited, “if I weren’t a gunner I wouldn’t be here. Fire six”, and so on.
My father had been a guest in one of the ships at the Review of Cowes in 1897, when the ‘Turbinia’ showed off her speed by running rings round the police boats. My father’s version of this story was that The Hon. C.A. Parsons was driven to this unseemly demonstration through his frustration at the Admiralty’s refusal to take his invention seriously, and that the Prince Consort kicked up a dust that the invention had not been given a trial. It was not long before the destroyer ‘Viper’ was equipped with Parson’s turbine.
The Pochins of Barkby Hall invited us all to dinner after the Coronation festivities in the park, where a large marquee had been set up, and Griff, Bobby and I ate huge sandwiches filled with home-cured ham and stilton cheese – an extremely good but robust mixture. To my surprise I saw that Griff had taken a small glass of beer, but after tasting it he shook his head and left the rest, for this strange little, red-nosed man never drank anything stronger than milk and I never heard him swear or tell a vulgar story.
In the afternoon we joined our parents in another marquee in the Hall gardens and after we had all settled down, Mrs Pochin stepped onto the platform and addressed her party. “Ladies and Gentlemen,” she said, “I have much pleasure in introducing Mr Rumpush” – for want of his proper name, which I have long forgotten – “who has kindly consented to entertain us. He is not very good so I hope you will give him your heartiest applause.” She then turned to an unhappy looking man, who had evidently wrestled with his conscience, and lost, and giving him a gracious and encouraging little bow, she returned to her seat. We soon saw exactly what she meant, but when the performance was over, the gentlemen shouted “Bravo!” – “Capital!” – “First rate!” and the ladies exclaimed, “Too killing!” – “Extremely diverting!” – “Quite remarkable!” Then we all called for an encore, but Mr Rumpush had wisely shot his bolt.
Barkby Hall was late Georgian; large, four-square and unembellished, and the same description would apply equally well to the Squire, who slept loudly between each course at dinner, his son, Norman, smiling charmingly at my mother and telling her that the old man was rather tired as he had been through a long day. They were very kind people and we were driven home by the head chauffer in the new Rolls-Royce.
This was an exciting year for Bobby and me for one day my father took us to London with him when he had to attend a board meeting of the British Automatic Company, and I think it was on this occasion that he asked for three tickets to ‘Gore Street’ at the underground. The booking office clerk said he had never heard of such a place, and although both knew exactly what the other meant, neither would haul down his flag so we had to take one of the new taxi cabs, which cost sixpence for the first mile. Mr Lennie, the Secretary, invited us to have lunch with him and then took us to ‘The White City Exhibition’ at Shepherd’s Bush, where we stepped from the drab street into an enchanted land of gleaming palaces and turquoise lakes in a plateau surrounded by mountainous country. Perhaps the deception was produced by a kind of aerial perspective in the painting of the lofty hoarding that enclosed the place, in the colours and shades that are associated with distance. My interest was shared between the wonderful exhibits of machinery and the scenic railway, which wound its way through fragments of our once far-flung Empire, inhabited by genuine natives. We were so engrossed that we lost the last train to Leicester that was connected with Syston, and my father was prepared to carry me on his back for the five miles from home, when we were met at the station by a chauffeur in a hired care that my mother had sent to meet us, having guessed what had happened when we failed to turn up at the right time.
The following year began sadly for Uncle Herbert died in March. My mother felt his loss deeply, but for Bobby and me the old life at Queniborough remained almost unchanged, for we hardly knew him, and Aunt Kitty continued, outwardly, in her old way of life, and I even remember standing with Brian and Christopher watching one of the gardeners tending the bonfire of withered wreaths without any show of emotion.
My father had changed his office from No. 33 Friar Lane to No. 2 New Walk, and although this was pleasant enough, I never took to the house, which was.as dead as mutton. It was the headquarters of the Leicestershire Boy Scouts, and it was there, I think, that my father first met Mr Hugh Goodacre, who was the County Commissioner. He was an extremely good and kind man and they soon became close friends, and it was not long before my father became interested in the Scout movement and became Assistant County Commissioner. This friendship soon became a family affair as Mrs Goodacre and my mother got on as well together and their son, John, was my age, though I did not see much of him as he was soon to go to Eton. By the autumn this new friendship had changed the whole pattern of our lives.
We had now lived at Newstead for eight years, though originally it was intended as a temporary measure, but we had grown fond of the place and it had several excellent features, including the invaluable long rooms, and, of course, our guardian angel in the disguise of a funny little man with a red nose, who was never known to forget anything but himself. But my parents were becoming increasingly aware that Bobby and I were growing up in the wrong environment, where we had no friends of our own age, except the Queniborough boys, who were only at home during the holidays, and having no sisters it could almost be said that we had never spoken to a girl.
We must now return to Mr Goodacre, who became our ‘Deus ex Machina’ – to use this absurd expression so appropriately for this once in my life. He was the Squire of Ullesthorpe, a village four miles from Lutterworth, and owned most of the property in the delightful village of Ashby Parva, a mile from his house, where and extremely attractive place called The Gables had just come on the market. Knowing that my father wanted to make a move, he told him that he would buy The Gables and let it to him for the rent that he was paying for Newstead, which was £45 a year, I think. The usual outside repairing rent was 5% of the value of the house so Mr Goodacre would probably have to pay about £900 or a house that anyone would now be lucky to get for £50,000, with its three acres of ground. My father went to see it and returned enthralled, and the deeds were drawn up and signed.
During the lengthening and chilly days of spring, we sometimes had our tea in the big greenhouse at Newstead, and I remember so well that it was on one of these afternoons that we watched my father making plans of our new house and garden, and when I saw that there was a duckpond in the orchard and that the house had three staircases – even though two of them were in the back premises – I felt that Windsor Castle itself could offer little else.
My parents went over to Asby Parva several times to take measurements and get the mood of the house before deciding on its interior decoration, and a huge book of wallpapers soon leaned against a chair in the drawing room at Newstead. For some time it had been the custom for the dining room to be papered with a dark red flock, that felt like close-cropped fur when rubbed, but they daringly chose a deep blue, having a formal pattern in a darker shade. Perhaps these sombre walls originated in the deception of sitting round a pool of candlelight in a room of unlimited dimensions. The hall, staircase and passages were to be distempered – another bold move – in the blood red shade of the old double peony.
On a lovely June day my father took Hugh, Bobby and me to Ashby Parva to see the new house. So far The Gables had been a delightful game of questions and answers, and daring decisions, but when I saw that the train to Ullesthorpe stood back to front and that in the near future going home would be the other way round, the impact of reality struck me for the first time with an odd sense of pleasure that I can still recapture sixty-five years later.
The train between Leicester and Syston never quite reached the country, for the short stretch between the commercial side of the town and the unattractive outskirts of the overgrown village was strewn with brickfields. But the little train to Ullesthorpe had scarcely got under way before we were passing through the pleasant farmlands with the slow progress of the true countryman. We left it at what has now become a period-piece, a country station, to hear the ringing sound of tall, conical milk churns being rolled on their reinforced bottoms, and the splendid sound and sight of a cloud of escaping steam, and crossing the rails at the dip in the platform and passing half a dozen cottages, we found ourselves in a narrow, tree-shaded road. A late cuckoo was calling to his wife and family to pack their bags, and a thrush thrice deriding him for leaving this green and pleasant land at the pride of the year. Or is this only the bouquet as I draw the cork from a bottle laid down in my mind in the vintage year of 1912?
In about a mile we turned left at the crossroads, with our backs to a grass track that joined the main road to Lutterworth, and presently came to a rather dilapidated cottage with the week’s washing on a line in the neglected garden, and I remember the look of dismay on Hugh’s face when my father said, “Well, here we are,” but the next moment we had turned a corner where our land met the elbow of the little village street, and we recognise our house at once form my father’s sketches and descriptons.
My first sight of The Gables is impressed on my mind like a coloured photograph, for a long border ran just behind the road and I can still name the flower that were in the full flush of their June splendour; the huge vermillion Oriental poppies, whose petals burst from their buds like wrinkled tissue paper; the deep red double peonies; and the innumerable slender spikes of the blue lupins – now almost extinct.
The summer term had ended well with me as I was easily top of the form in Latin, which was the only subject taken seriously in this crazy class. Our excellent young master used the old-fashioned method of marking us by where we sat. For instance, if a boy failed to translate “Balgus built a wall”, the next boy along the row to do so would change places with him, so that by the end of the week the class had arranged itself in order of merit, and the movement prevented our backsides from becoming too numb on the hard benches. On the other hand, the method led to a false impression in those subjects taken by our eccentric form master, when I remained in the seat of honour owing to the absence of any lesson to reshuffle us.
My success was short-lived, however, for I woke up at the beginning of the holidays with pain in both legs and by the following day I had a raging temperature. Dr Emms, who had a good reputation with children, came hurrying from Leicester and announced what was already obvious, that I had rheumatic fever, and my mother was recalled from the first day of a long overdue holiday. I remember hearing the doctor whisper to her, a few days later, that my heart had gone, but I managed to survive without it, and although, I suppose, the sun ran its usual course during the next five weeks, the days and nights merged into a continuity of agony of pain and thirst, for I was only allowed a teaspoonful of water at a time. Whatever I suffered, it was worse for my parents, who daily expected the inevitable that never came.
Then, one morning, I woke from deep sleep without a trace of pain and in the best of spirits, though as weak as a kitten, even being rude to Dr Emms to his great satisfaction, telling him that since his yellow medicine had done me no good I would greatly prefer a red one. Gravely agreeing with every word he returned the next day with a bottle of what appeared to be a red ink, which did me so much good that in a few days he asked me what I would like to eat. As I had taken nothing but milk and water for the last six weeks, I gave the matter my full attention and finally chose a baked apple for my lunch and a boiled egg in a china eggcup with flowers on it for my tea, and it was typical of father that he returned from Leicester with one to satisfy my whim, covered with forget-me-nots. We were due to move to Ashby Parva towards the end of September and as I was making rapid progress there was no need to postpone the date.
Dr Emms sometimes adopted the affectation among sportsmen in those days of dropping his aitches as well as his gees – as in ‘untin’ – and as he left Newstead for the last time, he turned to my mother and said in his warm-hearted manner, “Don’t make an ‘ot ‘ouse plant of ‘im, Mrs ‘all.”
It had been a very painful duty for my father when he had told Griff, some time ago, that we were leaving Syston for Ashby Parva. The old man had taken the news suspiciously calmly, merely saying that we could not find a nicer place to live, he knew it well seeing he was born and bred there, and he would as lief die there as anywhere else. When Uncle Will’s car came to take us to our new house, I was transferred from one bed to another, and Griff was not even at the gate to wave us off.
Chapter 13
Ashby Parva 1912
It was certainly not I who needed sympathy with my parents, who must have known that I would remain in the great lanes for some years to come, if not for the rest of my life, but for me there followed a period of such extraordinary happiness that I can still recall it with nostalgia. This was only natural, for happiness does not depend so much on circumstances as the rate at which they change, and it was as though I had taken a single step from the sharp flints of the parched and shadowed valley to the soft turf of the cool water meadows; while an event that had been anticipated with so much pleasure had actually come about. I grudged the passing of the days and tried, no doubt like others before me, to trap the illusive that must lie between the future and the past, and made it fly the faster.
I woke when the night was still young, and turning over in bed found that I was not alone, for the light from a low fire in a strange but rather beautiful little basket grate lit the face of an old woman sitting by it, and her expression – or lack of it – showed nothing but utter resignation. It was neither a dream nor the ghost of a Dutch artist's sitter, but our old laundry maid, Mrs Pick, who had come ahead to air the beds, and was to stay a few days to see us settled in.
I had been put in one of the front bedrooms, which faced a slight bend in the road so that I could see the comings and goings. Our front garden narrowed to a small, square enclosure, that had been the village pound for holding stray animals until they were claimed, and at its far corner there was a small tree whose leaves would tremble at the lightest breeze, which I was told was an aspen (populus tremula), whose bark, according to the observation of Linaeus, is the favourite food of beavers. Beyond this a high wall hid a small Tudor farmhouse before the road turned sharply to the left to Bitteswell and Lutterworth.
It was soon after our main load of furniture had arrived that our splendid Airedale, Wanda – one of Colonel Richardson's breed – leapt on my bed and licked my face, followed closely by a little man with a red nose, wearing his gardening leggings and green baize house apron. “Get off the bed with your dirty feet Wanda” – which is always pronounced to rhyme with gander – “or your mam will make a noise about it. Well, Major, not much like Hambulence’s ghost you aint, though Mrs Griffin says to me, Master Kimmy is agoing to leave his spoon in the wall, but I says not the Major he aint, for he’s not the sort to roll his marble as the saying goes. I’ve learned the Sergeant to whistle while you’ve been slaying in bed so I have.”
So Douglas had got his promotion, if not his commission. Apparently history had repeated itself after eight years and Griff had been the first to jump out of the van and direct the others, having first deposited his own furniture in temporary rooms in a farm at the end of the village. How could we have thought that he would be left behind?
My first sight of our new friends must have been through this well-placed window as I was to remain in bed for another week or two. Mr Sedgwick, the Rector, was a fine-looking old man with a big white beard who lived with his tall and handsome daughter. They both drove a four-wheeled dog cart, and those who might be sitting behind them would have their backs to the horse.
The Curate, Mr Fred Goodacre, was our landlord's uncle, and according to my way of reckoning, he was older than the Rector as his beard was that much bigger, and this time I think I was right. Both he and his charming wife road tricycles. Griff's cousins, Alf and Annie Waldron, kept the Post Office and only village shop, and they also propelled themselves on three wheels.
There is nothing funny about a bicycle, but add a second rider or a third wheel and it exceeds the bounds of humour as saccharin does to sweetness. One of the last of these tandem tricycles could still be seen at Fairford, in Gloucestershire, a few years ago when two old ladies went shopping, and it passed when an American airman happened to be standing near an old friend of mine. Shaking his head he turned to her and said in a rather sad voice, “Boy! I've seen the lot.”
The time was soon to come when I was out of bed and taking a few painful steps, heavily supported by my mother, the next day doubling the distance with less pain, and so on until I was downstairs and walking without help.
I could now begin to explore this fascinating house that had cast its spell over all of us, and not only on me during my enchanted autumn. It was neither large nor very small, nor old nor young, but had the ageless touch of country craftsmen who built as their fathers had taught them, without the guidance of an architect.
The dining room was on the left of the front door, and my parents’ bold break from convention in its dark blue paper gave it a very handsome appearance – or so I thought. Beyond this there was a fair-sized drawing room, and the single window at the end looked out on a raised flower bed, backed by shrubs, that stood in the middle of the stable yard. The length of the room made the other end rather dark where we sat round the fireplace, but this was soon put right by the addition of a second window.
Opposite the drawing room, the peony-coloured wall made two bites at a right-angle where it turned towards the kitchen, to make more room at the foot of the staircase, forming a slanting facet for the morning room door, which was opened by a beautifully hand-cut brass latch. My father had paid a visit to Mr Budworth’s little antique shop, that stood between the end of New Walk and the Midland Railway Station, and had made a couple of purchases that he considered bargains even in those days. The first was a fine 18th century, rosewood table to seat eight, for which he paid thirty shillings, as round tables were no longer in vogue, which was exactly what was needed for this room. The other was a very large-faced clock for the kitchen, which for some reason, my father called a sheep’s head, and for which he paid ten shillings. I think it might well have been one of the now rare and valuable ‘Parliamentary’ clocks that were set up in public places at the time of the watch tax, but what became of it I have no idea.
Just round the corner by the staircase the hall opened into a small square space with three doors, one leading into the stable yard and the others, facing each other, for the cellar and a lavatory. It then narrowed to a short passage to the green baize door.
I feel sure that if we were living at The Gables at the present time we would have our meals in this cheerful kitchen, but not with the old-fashioned range, that must have made it uncomfortably hot in the summer, and I doubt if we gave due credit to the cook, who had to adjust the temperature of the ovens and hot water system by means of dampers and careful stoking, yet never spoilt the cakes or pastry. We had not long given up using our old ‘’bottle-spit’, on which the joints were suspended between the open grate and a curved metal reflector, and the last one I saw was in a museum. They had the appearance of a brass magnum and the mechanism of an early ‘verge’ clock, the leg of mutton replacing the weighted balance or ‘foliot’.
Through the kitchen there was a scullery, and to one side of this a butler’s pantry, having all the usual accessories except the butler, for although we had been led to believe that Griff had served ‘Sir Harchdale’ in this capacity, the situation had not long endured, and to give him this title would have been presumptuous indeed, and we made shift very comfortably with a cook and house parlourmaid.
I have now come to the exciting part in my exploration for there was nothing in these back premises to account for a door in the kitchen, that was reached by a couple of steps, which would be unusual for a cupboard. It is an irrefutable fact, the quickest way of discovering what lies behind a closed door is to open it, and I still hold fast to the view that the efficient people only deny themselves the pleasure of contemplation and anticipation and then dissipate the time they have saved in preaching to the others, like myself, who have no intention to change their way of life. Perhaps this hypothesis could be expanded into a book entitled ‘Hall’s Law’. At any rate, having pondered the matter for a reasonable time, I opened the door and found myself, to my delight, at the meeting place of a pair of staircases rising in opposite directions.
The main staircase was simple and pleasing, with a window above the double bend halfway up, and during the chilly autumn evenings the peony walls reflected the warmth from the anthracite stove that stood in the hall like an inverted cornucopia. My parents’ bedroom was on the left of the landing, and through it a second door led down two steps into a long and narrow room with the two beds at one end where Bobby and I slept. This room also had another door, that led into a narrow passage at the head of one of the back staircases and ending at the servants’ bedroom. Halfway along it there was a boxroom that, like all others of its kind, soon appeared to breed boxes.
I have not yet mentioned the bathroom, which I did not include in my exploration, as I was still being tubbed like a baby. It came before my parents’ bedroom and, like it, had two doors, the second one leading to a WC and then to the head of the other back staircase. Thus, when Bobby and I lit our brass candlesticks, which in common with other young of our generation, we were compelled to do before our elders, we had a choice of two routes that met, eventually, from opposite directions, and I feel sure that the more devious one would have appealed to me more than the direct one.
This habit of doing things the difficult way was not entirely due to the conditions imposed on me for I often found that it gave me added interest and pleasure though it was regarded either as perseverance or contrariness according to the mood of my friends and relations. It had not left me over forty years later when I stepped out of Heathrow airport into a waiting bus and asked the clippy if I could get to London this way. After giving me her full attention she replied with a pleasant smile, “Well, I suppose you could, but it's just twenty-five thousand miles.” Perhaps this is rather an extreme example of ‘Hall’s Law’.
The autumn was at its full glory when I first ventured out of doors, and for this purpose the old bicycle trailer became my rickshaw with my father at the end of its long iron shaft. The whole of the little village was confined to the single narrow road, but was divided in the middle by the sharp elbow at the wall beyond our garden.
We turned to the right in the direction of Broughton Astley, my parents and Bobby striding out and Douglas alternately trotting by the side or sitting on my step to regain his breath. My father always carried a walking stick, made from a vine rod, as an essential part of his dress, and my mother was seldom seen in the country without a crooked stick for reaching down the dog roses or honeysuckle, or at this time of the year a string of red berries from the bryony that climbed all over the hedges.
Next to the gates that led to our stable yard came the Beresford’s farm, then the long hedge of the Rectory garden and finally another farm at the corner of the lane to Leire. On the other side of the road we passed the village hall, that had once been a chapel I think, but I cannot think with the Rector's approval. Next came a row of cottages, where Dimock, the roadman lived, who soon became a familiar figure with his red flag and wheelbarrow; the Shoulder of Mutton and finally the church. The village ended as abruptly as a picture in its frame, as they all did in those days, and here the frame was the more lovely of the two for we entered an endless avenue glowing with the sunlight through the russet leaves; a glorious sight if it were but half what my memory sees of it.
I think Gramma must have been our first visitor as I remember her taking the shaft with my mother on one of my early rickshaw tours when we took the road towards Bitteswell and passed through the other half of the village. The garden and orchard of the small Tudor house on the corner extended as far as the narrow lane to Ashby Magna on the left of the road and there was another similar house on the opposite side, which belonged to a tall and rather distinguished-looking old man called Mr Yorke, who, believe it or not, turned out to be Griff’s uncle. Unfortunately, we never got to know him as it was not long before Griff told us, with unaffected grief, that he had died in the night. After Mr Yorke’s house came the large farm where the Griffins were lodged, and after this the village ended with a small house of no interest. Returning to the other side again, the little shop with a cottage attached, both belonging to Alf and Annie Waldron, stood at the corner of the Ashby Magna lane, after which we passed a row of almshouses and finally the small house where the Fred Goodacres lived.
The open road might have seemed rather dull if it had not soon run beside Bitteswell Park, where, in the background, we could see the strange topiary surrounding the house, which reminded my mother and me of the mimsy Borogroves and outgrabing Mome Raths of ‘Alice in Wonderland’. We turned into one of those private roads that were open to the public but whose upkeep fell to the landowner, and soon found ourselves in an open space where we saw cultivated shrubs and clipped yews, and my carriage halted for a breather. It was not quite balanced about its wheels for there was a tendency for the shaft to lift, and when my mother and Gramma released it simultaneously, neither guessing the intention of the other, I found myself standing on my head. After the short time taken to discover that I had not broken my neck, any slight anxiety was turned to uncontrolled laughter, in which I joined when I saw them dangling from the end of the shaft, to no avail, which will be appreciated by anyone with a knowledge of the principle of the lever. I suppose the problem must have been solved or I would not be here to record it.
Chapter 14
Ashby Parva 1913
My first intimation of spring came with the winter aconites (eranthis) with their Elizabethan ruffs and golden heads, that filled a small bed between the front door and the gate. They were new to me and I have seldom seen them since.
My strength had now outgrown my rickshaw and I spent much of my time in exploring every corner of our two or three acres. There were two large Portugal laurels (prunus lusitanica) in front of the house, that filled half the village with their scent in the early summer, and between them there stood a fine specimen of that hideous curiosity, a Monkey Puzzle, which was the outdoor equivalent of the aspidistra during a period of doubtful taste. I can only describe the shape of this part of our garden as a right-angled triangle with a concave hypotenuse following the curve of the road, with the far corner snipped off to join the small square pound; which, of course, every mathematician will instantly understand, however much he shudders at my abuse of his sacred terms. The gabled end of the house was joined to a plain, straight part, perhaps rather older, that stood back enough for a side window in the morning room to overlook the length of the garden. This wing was followed by a wall that ended in a circular bend where there was a bench that I connect in my mind with Sundays, as we sometimes sat there between matins and lunch, perhaps discussing the sermon, which my father always timed with his huge stopwatch. There was a flower border in front of the wall where white and purple rockets seeded themselves, which were the descendants of Shakespeare's Ladies Smocks “That paint the meadows with delight”.
Where the end of the house joined the wall, a door opened to a path that ran between the tennis court and the back of the stable buildings where Victoria plums were trained against the wall, then meandered between the flower beds and Bobby’s garden to end at an iron gate. I used to stand here and gaze over the vast and slightly undulating field whose foreshortened horizon marked the edge of my once more diminished world. Yet what endless pleasures my long memory can recall from this confinement, and I believe the epicures would agree that the finest flavour is concentrated in the smallest fruit.
A stream – no more than a trickle in the summer – found its way between the trunks of a group of tall elms by the side of Bobby’s garden, and flowed into the pond in our orchard without making any apparent difference to its level, but on posing this unusual phenomenon to Griff, he dismissed it as only to be expected, seeing as how the entire village could tell you that the pond was bottomless.
The orchard was full of old and neglected apple trees that gave an abundance of useful fruit, which it was impossible to name, and was, of course, far below show standard. There was one excellent cooker, however, that we were told was a ‘Cat's Head’. I cannot remember a single pear but there were a few young quince trees for making jelly. I shall never forget looking out of a back window over the stable buildings to a sea of pink and white blossom; one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen in my life.
Then there was the little world of the stable yard to be explored. A gate from the road took one between the house and a railed-in row of Cox’s Orange Pippins in their prime. Making a circular tour of the buildings that I remember, the coach house came first, with Wanda’s brick kennel built onto one side. A fiv- barred gate led into the orchard at the first corner, followed by my father's workshop and the apple room, where the wooden slats were not emptied until after Christmas. Next came the cow byre, which had a second door leading into the orchard past the pigsties, which backed onto Bobby's garden. At the second corner there was a woodshed stacked with the previous owner's empty wine bottles, which was a slight embarrassment to my parents as there was no refuse collection in the country in those days. I think the looseboxes and saddle room followed, but as we did not keep a horse I have no clear picture in my mind. Next, a small dairy with thick slabs of slate for shelves, which was followed by a passage to the tennis court. The next door became out of bounds after my discovery that its opening disclosed another passage, narrow, dark and secretive, that turned abruptly into a bright little white-washed room; a period piece that Griff might have described as being as pretty as a picture – a two-seated earth closet.
To a generation born into an age of enforced hygiene it might come as a shock to learn that midway between the privy and the stable drain, a long-handled pump stood over a wall from which it drew an inexhaustible supply of deliciously cool and sparkling water, and once, I remember, a lizard emerging from its curved lead spout. This was our only source, and a tank in the roof was filled by means of another pump in the pantry.
One fine morning I took a stroll through the village to visit my friends Alf and Annie Waldron. I had the accumulation of three weeks pocket money – threepence – and was prepared to spend lavishly as I did not believe in hoarding. I noticed that along with the usual penny bottles of fizzy drinks, that were opened by pushing your thumb against a glass marble, there was one called “Tonic”, which was new to me as I thought this was the stuff you were given after an illness, so I asked Alf to expound. He was a seedy looking little man with a wisp of beard, and was a martyr to indigestion, and he told me that a tablespoonful after meals was an excellent remedy for the sick bout. I felt that this was carrying economy beyond what was reasonable, besides, I did not suffer from this disagreeable complaint, but to quaff the whole in one gulp, even though it proved to be nectar, was too transient a pleasure on which to squander a third of my savings. Looking round the shop for some longer term investment, my eyes skimmed over the pots of ink and gum, the clothes pegs and ‘Dolly Dyes’, the clay pipes and babies’ comforters, and even Professor somebody's Patent Moustache Trainer, with its attractive reproduction of the Kaiser on the packet. Then I saw all that I needed, for clipped onto a large wooden board were dozens of penny packets of seeds, each having a rather optimistic artist's impression of the reward to be expected. This was sixty-five years ago yet I remember more clearly than if it had been last week that I chose mixed, dwarf nasturtiums, balsams (impatiens balsamina) and tomatoes. Thus, for three pence I was initiated into one of the major pleasures of life, the choosing and sowing of seeds, and watching for the first appearance and unfurling of their offspring, which is something separate, I think, from the love of the flowers that follow.
Hurrying home to consult Griff I soon had my first lesson in the meaning of ‘ardy, ‘alf-ardy and ‘ot-‘ouse. The balsams were potted up and stood on the windowsill in my father's workshop, and the pale green stems eventually resembled ancient little trees for the roots grew in a tangle above the surface of the soil. The single straight stems were covered with small double flowers that had the luminous quality of red and salmon begonias, and it is sad that such easy and charming cottage plants are almost extinct. Judged by modern standards my tomatoes were not successful as I put the entire crop in my mouth at once, but it had an excellent flavour.
With the help of a farm cart and willing hands the Griffins moved into the Waldron’s cottage next to the shop where they lived, and since Griff would not have been happy without somewhere to grow his own flowers, they gave him the use of their own strip of walled garden, which had a door into the lane. I suppose a fair rent for all this would have been one shilling a week, to which I am sure Griff would have thrown in a few voluntary services, such as chopping the sticks when Alf had a sick bout. An old friend of mine once showed me a copy of a letter he had sent to his tenants before the first war, in which he told them, with great reluctance, that he was forced to raise their rents by a penny a week. When they were nicely settled in, Bobby and I were invited to have tea with them, which I was prepared to enjoy more than the parties whose formal invitations ended with ‘Nurses at six-thirty’. Griff was apt to be rather subdued under the influence of his eminently respectable wife, but today he was in a truculent mood, and while she was wetting the tea he sang – or rather rumbled – a few lines of his rendering of a very old music hall song which seemed suitable for a housewarming party:
“I wouldn't leave my little wooden ‘ut for you-oo, I've got one lover and I could have two-oo-oo.”
Our outraged hostess turned round and exclaimed, “Mr Griffin, not in front of Master Kimmy, if you please.”
“That's quite all right,” was the reply, “the Colonel has it all on his gramophone – or mostly all the saying is.” To Mrs Griffin’s pure mind there was nothing wrong with ‘lover’, which suggested no more than a little ‘waisting’ in a shady lane and a shy kiss under the crimson rambler at parting, but what mortified her sensibility was the very idea of having more than one at the same time.
It was soon after our visit that Griff began to affect an air of mystery, and throw out hints that anyone who dropped into his house now would be rewarded by a sight beside which the Mona Lisa would appear commonplace, and since none of us would have much peace of mind until our curiosity was satisfied, a date was fixed for a private view. Over the mantlepiece there was a life-size, hand-coloured enlargement of my father sitting in a deck chair with a tennis racket on his knees. The Griffin’s son-in-law was a professional photographer and had spared no pains. The hair and rather large moustache were eighteen-carat gold and the cheekbones were that hectic shade that indicated a galloping consumption, but the most striking feature of all was the pale blue stripes on his white-flannel trousers. My father was badly shaken and my mother, in far from her usual firm voice, muttered, “Quite, quite remarkable,” but when they had recovered from the shock I am sure they were both touched by Griff’s pride and devotion.
In April my father, Bobby and I spent another delightful visit at Keith Marischal where life continued to revolve in its peerless orbit. Cousin Char had invited David Macanse, a boy of Bobby's age, to spend a fortnight of his holidays with us. He was a grandson of Dr Bell, Conan Doyle's inspiration for Sherlock Holmes, and joined the Royal Scots with Bobby three years later. I think I must have made a much quicker recovery than had been expected as I remember walking the course of a paper-chase at a good rate with my father without getting tired.
This happy state of affairs did not last long, however, for we had only been home for a week before I developed pneumonia and remained in bed for a month. I don't remember feeling desperately ill, but it was to set me back another two years. Once again, it was my parents who deserved the sympathy for I soon regained my exuberant spirits, and whether this should be regarded as an admirable example of fortitude or a deplorable lack of anxiety on my part over an unpromising future was debatable; I rather favour the latter opinion.
Bobby was now a well-developed boy of fifteen, nearly six feet in height, and as advanced physically and academically as I was retarded, while Douglas had the usual precocity of the much younger brother. I cannot find a word in our language that does not imply a rather unpleasant bumptiousness, which would be quite misleading, but if he had been a plant he would have had the specific name ‘praecox’, meaning ‘blooming early’. Thus I, as the stationary object, was being approached from one direction as rapidly as I was receding in the other, and I was gaining a companion in Douglas as I was losing one in Bobby, through no fault of his own. We still had one point of contact, however, in our mutual love of flowers and gardens, and one of my happiest memories is of the period before blowing out our bedroom candle, when we discussed Ryder’s seed catalogue together, in which every possible variety of flower was tabulated, with the number of seeds that might be expected for tuppence. I never told Bobby that there was a lift in the large cupboard by my bed, and that after the candle had been extinguished I would descend in it to an underground station where my private coach – propelled by steam of course – would be waiting to take me to Ashby Magna. This regally luxurious conveyance had been built for me at enormous expense on the design favoured by the Shah of Persia, which was illustrated in colour on a picture postcard that I had received from a kind friend. But owing to the warmth and softness of its upholstery, I always fell asleep before reaching the destination.
Following Dr Emm’s advice I had been given no lessons for a year, but my mind was fully occupied. I was an avid reader of far too advanced technical books and articles in ‘Harmsworth’s Self Educator’, half understanding the creamier parts, and I continued my untutored chemical experiments in the morning room. There were times when these must have been a great trial to my mother, for I once generated a large quantity of poisonous sulphurated hydrogen, filling the house with the stench of rotten eggs at the time when some new callers were entering the drawing room. I was fascinated by colour and invented a magnificent scarlet dye by steeping logwood in methylated spirits and adding a drop of acid, and I discovered that a tincture of any blue or purple flower acted as an indicator like litmus.
My guardian angel must have worked overtime for I had bottles of concentrated sulfuric and nitric acids, which I used with appalling nonchalance, even applying the latter to an ugly wart on my thumb. My Godmother, cousin Maggie, our distant Scottish relative Margaret Kerr, was staying with us, and when she saw this blemish she exclaimed, “What a dreadful wart!, but I'll soon get rid of it.” She bound a slice of lemon to the horrid thing with a waterproof bandage, and before the week was over it had vanished.
One of my inventions in another field knew led to a nasty accident. I had made a kind of blow-lamp out of a coffee tin and I was raising the pressure with a bicycle pump when the whole thing blew up in my face, blackening my eyebrows and singeing off the hair above my forehead. The only thing to my credit was that I put out the fire before calling for help. I am afraid that the result of this accident gave Douglas the idea that what I could do he could do at least as well and painlessly, for when he retired for his afternoon's rest he secreted a pair of scissors to bed with him. Normally he was only too ready to get up before he had settled down, but his undue absence about the house sent my mother upstairs to investigate. She had kept a stiff upper lip after my accident, but she was reduced to tears when she found Douglas under the counterpane surrounded by hair, for how could she show off her most beautiful child in the drawing room when one side of his head was covered with golden locks and the other side was bald? Wigs did not come in children's sizes and Roland’s Macassar Oil, which was rubbed into our scalps every Sunday, would not perform a miracle. There was only one thing to do – finish off the job that he had started.
The ‘Feast’ took place at the beginning of July and started with sports in a field behind the village hall. Douglas was lined up for the under sixes and made a very good pace, but unfortunately in the opposite direction to the ribbon, for he had turned round to wave to his mother at the word “Go”. For the second heat she stood in a more strategic position, and he won easily, and is still prepared to show off a nicely framed little landscape inscribed on the back ‘Douglas Hall aged, aged 4 1/2.
At noon the men – including Douglas and me – but not the ladies, were settled at a long table in front of huge plates of cold ham and pickled onions, and the lull in the conversation continued after grace until a contented voice was heard to murmur, “Ah, it's a comfortable thing to have a full belly.”
The next item on the programme was the cricket match, and I cannot remember how the teams were arranged as my father, Bobby and I found ourselves playing against other members of the village. Our side won the toss and decided to go in first, and while the captain of the other side was arranging his field, the Curate, Mr. Ford, rode up to the pitch on his tricycle and was put in the slips, looking like a reincarnation of WG Grace. The Hall family did not do very well. My father was soon run out despite Griff’s loyalty to his master, for in those days of village cricket no one in their senses took any notice of the umpire. I did nothing more than keeping a straight bat, but Bobby was the hope of our side. He was a death or glory player with the right idea of hitting out at every ball to give the other side time for a good innings. But he was the victim of misfortune, for the first ball bowled to him he drove to leg with tremendous force and took Old Fred squarely in the beard, knocking him flat on his back. The whole field rushed to his assistance and Bobby was profuse in his apologies, but the game old man insisted on being set on his feet again, saying that the fault was all his for failing to catch the ball. Bobby, however, had lost his drive.
Though Kruger was my first bogeyman, who, according to Dashy, would be sure to get me if I were naughty, he was soon changed to Kaiser William, and there had been light-hearted talk of the German invasion ever since I could remember. But now the more sinister rumour of impending war was reaching the backwaters like Ashby Parva, for a Mr Seymour had visited us several times to help my mother to start a branch of the Voluntary Aid Detachment. He was a man of unusual interests, including wireless telegraphy in the days when ‘cohere detectors’ were used, in which the minute high frequency currents picked up from the aerial were passed through silver dust, causing it to coagulate and conduct a larger, detectable flow. He lent me some magazines on the subject which I found most interesting.
Mr Seymour was also a knowledgeable motorist of long standing, and when he learned that my father longed to own an old one himself, he told him that his 1903 Rex fore-car was for sale for twelve pounds. If my father were agreeable he would arrange for it to be driven to the house for his inspection and trial for as long as he liked before making a decision. But, he added, as it was capable of tremendous speed great caution had to be taken at corners. This seemed to be fair enough and he readily accepted the offer. Thus it was only a few days before a grotesque vehicle was towed to the house behind an overheated motor bicycle by two dejected looking young men and pushed into the stable yard. It consisted of a large and heavy kind of motor-tricycle with an enormous basket-chair fixed in front of the handlebars. As my father raised his monocle, a look of revulsion passed over his usually tranquil expression, and he said, “Doesn't this thing go by itself?” After a pause, one of the young men replied, “Ran out of petrol.” But this was easily disproved by a glance into the capacious tank. After a more prolonged inspection, in which my father searched for one favourable feature, he shook his head and just said, “No.” Turning to tell the mechanics to take the monster back to its den, we found that they had already left, and the last we heard of them was the roar of their motor bicycle as they hurried from the place.
Rex was pushed into the coach house but was soon transferred to the woodshed, where he seemed to be more at home amongst the empty bottles, becoming a favourite plaything for Douglas and me. I have no doubt that we took many imaginary journeys in him, enthralled by his tremendous speed and silent power as we sped through the unexplored and winding Leicestershire lanes, but taking the utmost care in any cornering, and I am sure I would have taken as much pleasure in these childish games as Douglas even though I persuaded myself that I was only indulging my small brother. Sometimes we tinkered with the engine and once it emitted a short burst of horrifying noise that woke the village with alarm. Many years later I saw an advertisement of this very model under the heading ‘Once a Rex, always a Rex’, and this nearly proved to be true, for Mr Seymour seemed most reluctant to remove it. Though he was not himself a common man, I now see Rex as the embodiment of honest vulgarity, with waxed-moustached and brown-bowlered gents propelling their over-buxom beauties along the Brighton Road on Saturdays, and bottled beer taken without a glass. But, I suppose, time lends a kind of enchantment, and if Rex were still in existence he would be in the upper ten of the Sotherby class.
Chapter 15
Ashby Parva 1913
I suppose our family has produced its fair share of eccentrics since Great-great-great-great Uncle Willie of Whitehall forgot his wedding day, and my father's elder brother and his wife, Uncle Basil and Aunt Cecil, moved in a path that could be noticeably elliptical, so that a visit from them, though bracing as a sea breeze, could give my mother a breath or two of anxiety. It was the 18th of July, my father's birthday, and we were expecting their arrival anytime, preferably before midnight, as they were coming by road; and for every ten miles in our direction, Uncle Basil might go off course to call on an old friend, who was as likely to be found in the village shop or lodge as at the big house. Then there was the ever-present hazard of flat tyres before the days of spare wheels, and temperamental mechanism, to be considered. Thus we were surprised when, at a time acceptable to the pundits of etiquette – too late for afternoon tea but not for the unhurried preparation for dinner – we heard a clarion call for the raising of our portcullis, and hurrying to the gate we saw Aunt Cecil with a long coach horn to her lips sitting on the top of the luggage piled up in a Model T Ford, known as a ‘Tin Lizzie’, with Uncle Basil writing up his log in a large leather pocket book.
It would have been difficult to find two brothers less alike. My father was a big, uncomplicated man, more interested in things than people outside his own circle, and he would have been in his element looking after a large country estate. Uncle Basil was small and intricate, though never devious. What I saw in him then, and can so easily still recall, was the uncommon sharpness of outline in every part of him: mind, voice and bone structure, and his beautiful handwriting in dead straight and evenly spaced lines. He was more interested in people than things, particularly if they were unconventional, and was a member of the Sesame Club, which was the stronghold of the Fabian society, where he would meet the Webbs and their following, disguising his clear blue principles under a pinkish exterior.
He had joined the Britannia in the days of sail and had watched the bombardment of Alexandria from the masthead, but resigned as a Lieutenant rather than be parted from his wife for years on end; a dreadful decision to have to make but pointing to Uncle Billy's dictum that no Naval Officer should marry under the rank of Captain in those days. He had then become an inspector of lifeboats.
I soon transferred my interest from Rex to the Ford, for although imagination can sometimes transcend the pleasure of reality, there is much to be said for a motor car that actually propels itself. I soon learned to start the engine for Uncle Basil, but if he had not applied the handbrake hard enough the car would come at me when it burst into life, which called for nimble sidestepping on my part and a sprint on his to catch it before it had crossed the yard. In a day or two he told me that he was taking the car to our nearest garage, at Broughton Astley, at 7 o’clock the following morning and that I was going to drive him. Two things now strike me as remarkable: that a country garage would be willing to undertake some small repair at this hour without warning; and the assumption that I would be capable of driving, but I suppose it was typical of his Naval training that he should assume that everyone could do what they were told to.
Thus at half past six the next morning Uncle Basil took the long route through the bathroom, along a narrow passage, down one staircase and up another, so that my parents would not be disturbed. Then, entering Bobby's and my bedroom I heard his crisp voice saying, “Show a leg Kimbo, we start in fifteen minutes.” I was wide awake already. I had watched him drive and was familiar with the controls, so I had no difficulty in driving at all. I suppose the Model T Ford was one of the most successful and brilliantly designed cars that was ever produced. It was reliable, economical, foolproof and absurdly easy to drive, having a simple form of uncrashable two-speed gearbox. There were three pedals in a row. The left one replaced the normal clutch, giving the low gear when depressed and the high gear when released, with neutral between the two, which was held in this position when the handbrake was applied. The middle pedal gently engaged the reverse, and the right hand one was the foot brake. The accelerator was conveniently placed under the steering wheel, and a similar lever on the opposite side adjusted the ignition – now always done automatically – which had to be retarded before turning the starting handle, to ensure that your wrist would not be broken. How simple it all was!
At the modest price of £125 it is easy to see why the Model T swamped the British market until 1921, when the government, on the advice of the RAC, introduced a new form of road tax in which £1 was charged per ‘horsepower’ arbitrarily calculated from the bore of the cylinders. This raised the tax on the Ford from £6 to £23 – that of the newly introduced small Rolls Royce – while the Morris Cowley paid only £11.
We were all sorry when Uncle Basil and Aunt Cecil left, despite their habit of appearing to be quarrelling loudly in public, rearranging their bedroom furniture and setting out for a walk five minutes before a meal, and if my mother had been compelled to murder them both she would have done so with reluctance and much love in her heart. Uncle Basil gave Bobby and me a year's subscription to the Times and the Autocar respectively, which were delivered by a man on a Rudge Multi motor bicycle. I forget how much the Times cost, but the Autocar was three pennies and the Daily Mail a halfpenny, which included a £1000 insurance policy if you were lucky enough to be killed while clutching a copy at the time.
Before leaving they gave us the address of a farmhouse where they had been staying in a little place called Corton, on the Norfolk coast, and my father booked rooms there for a few weeks in September. They were pleasant people and it was a fine old house, but the place had none of the magic of Cley. There was, however, a good beach within a few minutes’ walk which we shared with a lively schoolgirl called Adelaide. I was quite impervious to feminine charms, though I may have felt a moment’s calf-love for the Rector's handsome daughter, who was 20 years older than me, and Bobby had already explained to me the merits of platonic friendship, whose salient points had failed to impress me. But it was Douglas who became besotted with love, and was found one day standing opposite the cottage where she and her mother were staying and muttering her name when he should have been washing his hands for lunch.
I had been back at school for a short time at the end of the summer term and returned after the holidays, where I was promoted to the top class of boys of my age, but having done no work for over a year I was hopelessly out of my depth. They were well into one of the Latin writers, Livy I think, for which I had neither the grammar nor vocabulary, and I hardly knew the meaning of algebra. I think I became apathetic rather than unhappy through frustration, and might have remained at home for all the good it did me.
From what I remember of the Rector and Curate had both been vigorous men's men, who understood life and could enjoy their pint of beer yet knew their vintages. They were middle-churchmen, neither wearing a moustache nor biretta, so my parents were a little surprised when they learned that a missioner had been invited to spend a week at the Rectory, and presumed it was with the intention of adding a few candles to our method of worship and of hearing private confessions. I remember hearing Aunt Kit say to my mother, on returning from the early service, “It's no good Janey, I can't say that the burden of my sins is intolerable because it simply isn't.” I doubt if there was much wrong with Ashby Parva. We had our drunkard of course, but he never missed church and on Good Friday genuine tears of sorrow rolled down his cheeks.
It was announced that the missioner would be available to give council in the Rector’s study every morning. My parents had no intention of availing themselves of this offer, but raised no objection to Bobby and me paying a call. Bobby came home after his ordeal, looking much the same as ever, so I plucked up courage and, walking to the Rectory, was shown into the study. I was not sure what to expect. Not, perhaps, the rack, thumbscrew and red-hot gouging irons of the inquisition, nor quite the cheerful and pleasant looking man who greeted me. I got down to business straight away by saying, “I'm much worse than Bobby.” Apart from giving a short whistle and raising his eyebrows, he did not look at all shocked and even went so far as to tell me not to worry about that. This was getting us nowhere and I felt I was giving him a poor run for his money, so I added, “But you see Sir, I don't even want to be good.” This only made him laugh, and he replied, “Who does, dear fellow, who does?” I gave up, and walking home with me we talked on any subject under the sun but sin. A very decent chap, I thought.
The next time we met I was with my mother and Douglas, who was giving my friend a detailed account of his daily routine. Partly, perhaps, to stem the flow, the missioner asked him which of these varied days was his favourite. I had not lived with Douglas for nearly five years without knowing the signs and tokens that preceded one of his funny turns, and I had not been mistaken, for, assuming a repulsively pious expression he answered, without any hesitation, “Oh, Sunday.” When he was asked, in rather a surprised voice, what was so special about Sunday, he did a lightning character change to an underprivileged waif as he mustered up enough stamina to mutter, “Because we have a hot dinner.” Luckily the joke was accepted and my mother murmured, “How our young let us down!”
It was our hitherto impeccable Airedale, Wanda, who fell from grace. Her first offence was forgiven, for though it was extremely embarrassing, it could be argued that it was a labour of love. It was my mother's habit to take what she called a spin on her bicycle every morning, with Wanda bounding along at her side with the beautifully light motion that gave the impression that she had left contact with the ground. Dogs are the only animals I have come across that have human eyes, and when, one day, she dropped the Beresford’s perfectly roasted sirloin at my mother's feet and then looked up at her with adoration, it was surely no more than a generous token of gratitude.
Her second offence was far more serious and sadly led to her banishment from our household, where she had become so much a part of the family, but even this time it could not be forgiven on the plea of misguided duty. She had accompanied Bobby and me for a walk when we saw, some way off, that a disreputable looking tramp was approaching us, which was a common enough sight in those days. Wanda immediately left what she was investigating in the hedge and came to heel, emitting a low and continuous growl. Like all his kind he was quite harmless, but as he passed us he opened a clasp knife to cut off a wad of chewing tobacco and our bodyguard flew at him and remained in a menacing attitude until she considered that we were out of danger. This devotion was commended by all who heard of it, but from that day Wanda took an indiscriminant and abandoned antipathy for anyone who wore a beard, and it was extremely unfortunate that both the Rector and Curate had such luxuriant specimens.
Those of us brought up to village life soon learn to be amused rather than appalled by the more lurid versions of gossip, so that if we had heard that Wanda had torn these venerable gentleman limb from limb we should still expect to see them both in church the following Sunday looking as hale as ever. But there was reliable evidence that she had driven old Fred through the village on his tricycle at a speed more appropriate to a racing model than his sedate machine, and had then leapt over the Rectory gate and chased Mr Sedgwick round his garden. What she had done once she might repeat with serious results, and, tragic though it was, she had to go, but my father found a good home for her with a beardless family in Ireland, where such frolics might even be regarded as an asset.
A well-meaning friend gave us a gun-shy spaniel, inappropriately called Shot. He was a most unpleasant dog and we could find no affection for him at all, nor he for us. He had nothing but bad habits and used to pick our best Victoria plums by working his way along the wall on his hind legs.
Very different, however, was the charming little donkey that was lent to us by a kinder friend. The cart that came with her would hold only Douglas and me, and since she had been trained as a kind of nursemaid, reins were not included in her harness, though if they had been she would have disregarded their urge. Like all animals – apart from poor Shot – she soon became devoted to my mother, who walked with an arm around her neck while Douglas and I sat in the little tub. Our first excursion was down the lane that had so enthralled me in its autumn glory a year ago, and was still my favourite walk, and when my mother thought we had gone far enough she heaved on the donkey's head and turned it towards home. After this first outing the donkey would take no other route and always turned at the same place on her own volition.
Oddly enough I cannot find any reference to the donkey in my father's diary, and Douglas, whose accurate memory reaches back into this period, can recall nothing of her. I have never had the Highlander’s gift of second sight, but on one or two occasions I have suffered the equally peculiar phenomenon of remembering what never happened. But though I freely confess that I never actually descended to an underground station by a lift in the cupboard by my bedside, I cannot believe that my donkey friend was just ‘one of Master Kimmy’s figments’.
My father had the rather rare quality of listening more than he talked – perhaps the main ingredient of charm – and he always gave his full attention to every childish question, never brushing it off with a silly answer. No doubt this is why I so much enjoyed following him into his workshop and doubling the time that he took over the job in hand. My father had completed the construction of a small punt, which was now lying upside down on the cobbles outside the workshop door while he was caulking the seams with pitch. I think that the only thing that he missed at Ashby Parva was a river or canal, so failing this, the punt was launched into the restricted waters of our orchard pond. My father stepped on board and Griff handed him a long pole, but to my horror and Griff’s prophetic fulfilment it never met the ground; but had he not told us that the pond was bottomless?
Chapter 16
Ashby Parva 1914-15
Mildred Hughes had now left us and my mother had found an excellent nurse for Douglas called Dorothy Thorne, who came from Loughborough. She was cheerful, efficient and minute and she and Douglas got on with each other at once.
At this time Douglas was fully occupied in organising a small principality called Doubledutch, of which he was supreme ruler, and he had given me the high appointment of lawmaker, until, in a fit of exasperation, I had decreed that the country should be dissolved, which led to my instant dismissal. They were an English-speaking people with a peculiar pronunciation in which most of the letters were given their initial sounds – h, as ay, for example – so that Douglas assumed the rather alarming name of Doe-you-gee-lace Base-ile Ale. His little nurse entered wholeheartedly into the enterprise and they were soon chattering fluently in this strange dialect. Perhaps Douglas was even now sowing the seed that finally grew into his highly successful colonial administration.
Before the beginning of the Easter term I was taken to see Dr Marshal in Nottingham and, although I was feeling perfectly fit, he said I was not to return to school for a year nor ride my bicycle, which, to me, was by far the greater blow as the second-hand lady was now in retirement and Bobby had generously given me his beautiful lightweight Raleigh, which he had grown out of.
It may have been partly owing to this setback that my parents decided to buy a pony and trap. A suitable pony was for sale in Lutterworth, and I see from my father's diary that it was ten years old, 10 to 11 hands and was offered for £10, so Griff was sent to bring it home. Though perfectly reliable he could never resist an opportunity to play the clown, and it was not long before we heard what had taken place. Apparently, the groom had asked him if he could ride bareback, as a saddle was not included. He replied that he had not been born on horseback for nothing, and vaulting nimbly onto the pony he rode out of the stable yard facing back to front. The trap took a little longer to find as my father insisted on having rubber-shod wheels – which now seems a reasonable enough request – but eventually our kind friend and landlord, Mr Hugo Goodacre, let us have a neat little governess cart, in new condition, for £12, which must have been a loss to himself even in those days.
My mother was very anxious that Bobby and I should learn to play the piano, but not on her beautiful Lipp in the drawing room, so a second-hand one was bought for the morning room and a music mistress was engaged from Leicester to give us lessons once a week. She had been trained to teach by a method known as the Sepping system, in which one read and played entirely by intervals. She was not only a remarkably good teacher but it was a simple logical idea, and as soon as we could play an easy piece of music we could transpose it from the key in which it was written to any other without difficulty. I always regret that circumstances curtailed our lessons. She was a prim middle-aged woman of such extreme modesty that she prefaced every remark by saying “Pardon me”. Bobby and I soon learned that she had a horror of alcohol and no sense of humour, and when we drove her to Ullesthorp station we used to draw up at the pub and ask her if she would care to take half a pint and she would reply that it was tragic that we should already be victims of the bottle. Boys are not always kind creatures.
Bobby was now going through the normal stage of youth when the greatest compliment that could be paid him was to suppose he was five years older than he was. He was going to his first grown up dance at Lutterworth, and Charlie Hassel, the tall and handsome elder brother of the boy whom I had locked into the long room at Newstead, was spending the night with us to attend the same party. Miss Sedgwick took the two boys with her in the brougham and rather tactlessly asked Charlie where he was at school, to which he rather haughtily replied that he was in his last term at Rossell. She should, of course, have said that she could see at a glance that he was in the Brigade of Guards.
Miss Sedgwick was a knowledgeable gardener and she and Bobby had developed a companionship over this common interest despite the disparity in their ages. Under her advice and with Griff’s help he had built a pergola, and as well as the lovely old Crimson Rambler and Dorothy Perkins, he had branched out into some of the newer varieties, of which I still remember the shocking pink American Pillar and Aviateur Bleriot with its neat little yellow flowers and dark green, shiny leaves. My father had plans for taking in the corner of the field where the stream wound its way between the boles of the tall elms into the bottomless pond.
I was confirmed on the 18th of March at Bitteswell by the Bishop of Leicester and took my first communion on the following Easter Sunday. Our kind rector had given me private preparation and was quite content to prompt me, word for word, in my catechism.
My lack of academic knowledge was inevitable, and I would not have been able to compete with a boy at his first term at a prep school. My father was not a scholar and had failed to pass into Winchester through a lack of Greek, but he was trilingual and had received a normal, if undistinguished, education at Radley. One day he suggested that I might like to run a through a few of Euclid’s theorems with him, which might have seemed an odd choice for a backward boy, but in his simple and patient way he sparked off my interest in its beautiful logic, which few schoolmasters would have done. I remember when we proudly crossed the ‘pons asinorum’ where the donkeys got stuck. I wonder how many modern common unprofessional fathers could get as far themselves.
I spent much of the day with Griff, from the time of seed sowing in the new kitchen garden in the orchard to the sweeping of autumn leaves from the paths with what he called his besom. He was a fund of general knowledge and filled in the gaps from a lively inventiveness. I once asked him, for instance, how streaky bacon was produced, and he replied, without a moment's hesitation, “Now that's easy Major. You feeds the pig one day and starves him the next.”
My parents engaged a French governess, but we did not like each other and were all glad when she left after a fortnight. I think she was under the impression that she had come with the sole purpose of improving her English as she never spoke a word of French; not that it would have made much difference to me. Perhaps the best solution would have been for me to have a residential tutor, but they were not easy to find during the term time, and I was not supposed to be in a condition to do prolonged lessons. As a last resort my father called Mr Smith, the headmaster of the village school at Bitteswell, if he would be willing to give me an hour's tuition a few times a week after he had finished his work, and he readily agreed to do so. He was a rotund little man with a charming smile and we took to each other at first sight. I so well remember our first session when we sat at the round table in the morning room and Mr Smith opened an illustrated history book, written for children aged eight, and told me that William the Conqueror had built the Tower of London. I had heard of him long before ‘1066 and All That’ had been published.
It so happened that the time chosen for my tuition was when my mother always played the piano and sang to herself in the drawing room, so that the Norman conquest had hardly got underway before the gentle sound of her contralto voice filtered to us through the two doors. Mr Smith promptly shut the book and, folding his hands on his convex waistband, closed his eyes and said it would be an insult to work during this lovely song. My mother was no Melba or Destin but she had a well-trained and very pleasant voice. The last cadence ended and as the book was reopened, with a sigh of rapture, my mother began to play one of Chopin’s nocturnes, and the pattern was repeated, so that by the time my first lesson had ended we had not turned over the first page of history. The Edwardian way of life was still with us, when it was considered proper to have a fixed routine, thus the coincidence – or what Douglas referred to, in his large but often original vocabulary, as a ‘go-inside-ance’ – continued week after week, and apart from the building of the Tower of London, I cannot remember being given another word of instruction. But I was always happy in this placid man's company and I should like to think he found some rest during these leisurely hours after a long day's work.
The war-clouds were gathering rapidly and my father hurried to Berlin, where Aunt Kit was visiting musical friends, to fetch her home before it was too late; and regular meetings were being held in our house, where the VAD ladies practised their bandages. My father had already booked rooms at Cley for our summer holidays and had invited Hugh to stay with us, but war was declared about a week before we were due to go and my parents considered that it would be unwise to leave home. The expected invasion never came, however, and in a fortnight we set off for Norfolk after all, and had an enjoyable holiday. Everything seemed to be as peaceful as ever, though once or twice we thought we heard the sound of distant gunfire out to sea.
There was, of course, the widespread wishful thinking and it came as a shock when Lord Roberts issued his recruitment for four years or the duration, which proved to be so prophetic. My father had retired from the militia before his marriage, and it was not long before he applied for a Commission in one of the Leicestershire regiments and was soon gazetted as a captain. Much of the training of the men was in taking long route marches, and the exercise and fresh air cured a sinus problem that he had been suffering from in a very short time. It was a proud day for me when he marched his company from Leicester to Ashby Parva, and the whole village turned out to see them. The two sergeants had their dinner in the kitchen and our cook told us, with some amusement, that she had put a large jar of pickled onions on the table, which she thought they might fancy, and they were so much appreciated that they finished the lot with their suet pudding in preference to golden syrup.
Part of the Goodacre’s house, Ullesthorpe court, had been converted into a convalescent hospital with my mother as commandant, and i remember that we were invited to a garden party with the cheerful and charming soldiers, in their light blue uniforms.
My war work was to toll the tenor bell in the church at noon for five minutes as a call to prayers. In tolling, the rope is pulled until the bell is just in contact with the clapper, after which a little jerk of a few inches will produce a rather subdued sound. To ‘ring’ the bell it is swung nearly full-circle and the rope moves ten feet or more, so that it is dangerous to hold onto it, for it is possible to be lifted to the ceiling to receive a crack on the head and a fall to the floor. I regret to say that one day I was overcome by the temptation to ring, and the cheerful sound soon brought the Rector hurrying to the church from his garden across the road. I am still ashamed at the shocking sight that he witnessed for I was already leaving the ground and Douglas was holding his sides with laughter, but I think the Rector's gentle rebuke was more effective than a fit of rage for I never repeated this delightful exercise.
The time came when my father's regiment was sent to Hertfordshire to dig trenches, and I lived for the weekends when I met him at Ullesthorpe station with the pony and trap. My mother had to spend much of her time at the hospital and Bobby was at school, but Douglas was now becoming an amusing companion and I was not lonely. I must have been a great problem to my parents as I was now fifteen and had made no academic progress since I was twelve. I was not unintelligent and in some ways I was rather mature for my age as I had acquired a philosophy of life which had saved me from any kind of inferiority complex. This was largely due to the sensible attitude of my parents, who were kind without being over sympathetic or indulgent.
There was an excellent technical college in Leicester which combined a little ordinary school teaching with workshop practise and was intended for boys entering a technical trade. It was decided to send me there for a term as I was always happy with a tool in my hand, and my mother took me to see the headmaster, Mr Hawthorne. I remember him as a very pleasant man with a trimly pointed beard, and after chatting in a friendly way to my mother he turned to me, with a smile, and put me through my entrance examination, which consisted of one question. “What is an isosceles triangle?” “I think it is a long, thin one, Sir.” “Well, yes, I suppose it might be.” I had passed, though without distinction. As we were leaving he turned to my mother and made a remark that was to alter the trend of my life, for he said, “That boy should go to Oundle.” This was a shrewd suggestion in more ways than one, for not only was Oundle one of the few public schools with a bias towards science and engineering, both of which interested me, but Sanderson was probably the only headmaster who would be willing to accept me in the circumstances. The situation was put to him and he agreed to keep a place for me in a year's time.
I completed my term at the technical college, where I came under two very likeable masters, and once a week I used to umpire with one of them at the school cricket matches, but for some reason I was totally ignored by the boys, though I was willing to be friendly with them.
We had now been at war for a year and the wishful thinking was over. My father had been transferred to his old 4th South Staffordshire Regiment, and was living in Whittington Barracks, near Lichfield. So it came about that my parents made the sad but sensible decision to leave Ashby Parva and find a house near enough to the barracks for my father to live at home again.
Chapter 17
Lichfield and Scotland 1915
My father had found a furnished house in the small and pretty village of Longden Green, a few miles out of Lichfield on the way to Cannock Chase. It belonged to a colonel whose name i have forgotten, who was willing to let it on a short lease at a very reasonable rent while we looked for something more permanent. It was a most pleasant house with something of the character and charm of The Gables, and we were all prepared to move into it, and had invited Miss Sedgwick to spend a fortnight with us, when the house agent rang up my father to say that there had been an unfortunate mistake and the rent was considerably more than had been quoted. We are warned to beware of the wrath of a patient man and my father replied in a scorching voice that in that case the deal was off, but as he was replacing the receiver on its hook he heard an agonised request to wait a minute, which he ignored. In a few days he met the owner of the house and there was a marked lack of cordiality between them until it was discovered that the colonel knew nothing of the matter, which was a little trick of the agent, who thought he could force our hand when it was too late to make other arrangements and we were almost stepping through the front door. It was a great disappointment to us all, but my mother had already found suitable rooms in Litchfield over a shop in Market Street, where I think we stayed for a few weeks.
Mr Barlow had kept livery stables in Lichfield when my father was a young man and had since raised a large family of boys, and was later to suffer one of the most heartbreaking tragedies of the war in losing his eldest son a few hours before the Armistice was signed. The younger ones were top-hatted almost as soon as they were breeched and drove the cabs and carriages as perfectly reliable coachmen. There were times when we yearned for the country, and then my mother would order an open carriage and when the diminutive driver asked her where she wished to go she would reply, “Anywhere you like.” The so-called march of progress has denied the last two generations of many delights. I can think of few pleasanter ways of spending an hour than in an open carriage, where the only sounds come from the clip-clop of the hooves and the song of blackbirds and thrushes. During the time we were out the Concord could now fly a thousand miles and a single strip of fluorescent lighting can replace a thousand candles, but to those with a long memory it is an exchange of quantity for quality. It was on one of these drives that we came to crossroads at the centre of a curiously attractive huddle of bridges, where the road crossed two canals and the railway crossed the road twice. The place was appropriately called Huddlesford. There was a small inn for the watermen and a few pleasant little houses by the side of the towpath. Mr Capper, who kept a small antique shop in Lichfield, lived in one of them with his two pretty daughters, and one of them worked in the Cash Chemists, and was always known as ‘Puss in boots’. I heard last year that the two sisters were still living in the same house. It was here that the road from Lichfield narrowed to become Park Lane, which led straight into the 18th century, for in half a mile one came to Fisherwick, which had the laid out by Capability Brown and was once owned by the Marquis of Donegal, who lost it all after a night's gambling.
Our next move was to a dreary furnished house in Trent Valley Road on the outskirts of Lichfield, which supplied no more than our bodily needs, but fortunately it was only a temporary measure. Living next door to us was a colonel and his wife and a small boy of about the same age as Douglas, but they had no common interests and were of little use to each other, which was a great pity.
It was my godmother, Cousin Maggie Kerr, who came to Bobby's and my rescue by inviting us to stay for a month with her in Scotland. Although this was her country, she had been living in England for some years so we were all to stay in rooms. This was the last time that Bobby and I were boys together for he was soon to go to Sandhurst, and although we both enjoyed ourselves my memories of the holiday are very sketchy. Perhaps too much had happened in too short a time.
We spent the first fortnight at Biggar where we stayed in a house outside the town and had a splendid view of the rolling hills. One day Cousin Maggie suggested that Bobby and I should take a train to Tinto and climb the steep little mountain, from the top of which it was possible to see the entire coastline of Scotland on a clear day. As we reached the summit we were suddenly enveloped in a dense cloud which might have been very unpleasant, but it left us as quickly as it had come. Unfortunately, there was a distant mist and we did not see any part of the coast at all. By now I must have been in pretty good shape to be able to climb mountains, however small, but it was Bobby who arrived home exhausted as he had towed me up the steepest parts on the end of a strap.
On Sunday we were sent off to the Presbytarian church where we caused a slight embarrassment, though quite unintentionally, for after the Minister had given his text for his long and erudite sermon there was so long a pause that I began to think that the poor man had left his notes at home, but I soon learned that his eloquence needed no such assistance. For some reason Bobby and I had been ushered into the place of honour under the pulpit – perhaps because we were strangers – and eventually the Minister leaned over the edge and fixing us with his eyes he tapped his Bible. We had failed to follow the text in ours and he was not going to begin until we had done so.
This excellent and kind man bore us no grudge, however, for in a few days he called and asked if we would care for a round of golf with him, and when we told him that we had never played he generously offered to teach us. We walked to the beautiful golf course, which was free, like most of them in Scotland at this time I think, and Mr Wotherspoon – his real name – having teed his ball, told us to watch him carefully. He made a nice clean drive and then handed his club to Bobby, who having addressed the ball in the proper manner clenched his teeth, shut his eyes and struck it fair and square so that it soared into the air with a superb trajectory that landed it far beyond the first ball. This was bad enough, but when I repeated Bobby's performance our instructor looked at us rather sadly for it was difficult to believe that we had never played before. It was, of course, nothing but beginner's luck, for Bobby and I often had a round together but did little then remove divots.
In a fortnight we moved up to Pitlochry and once again stayed in rooms outside the town, which was then, as now, a favourite centre for tourists.
Bobby and I took long walks together, often by the side of the Tummel, whose black peaty water and white foam, stirred up by the small rocks, looked exactly like stout. We sometimes made use of the old single line Highland Railway, with its mixture of different coloured coaches. Cousin Maggie entertained us well and took us to the magnificent grounds of Blair Athol, and to the famous pass of Killiecrankie, where Graham of Claverhouse routed a superior force of English before losing his own life in 1689. One day a carriage and pair was ordered to take us to Loch Tummel, and when it arrived I remember our landlady announcing that the ‘double machine’ was at the door. The lovely loch had not yet been developed and I think we were the only visitors.
While we were staying in Scotland a very old and distant relative invited Bobby and me to stay with her at Ashiestiel, the house that Sir Walter Scott had rented before building Abbottsford for his son-in-law Lockhart, who later wrote his life, and I think that our old relation was a member of this family. But we regretfully declined the invitation as we felt it would be discourteous to Cousin Maggie to leave her. My father was disappointed that we could not see the house that he had known well as a young man but agreed with our decision.
When he was a boy my father and his mother used to stay with these distant relations, for in Scotland a cousin is a cousin however remote the common ancestor. He sometimes told me strange stories of these visits and I have only lately realised that anyone 17 years older than his mother would have been born in the time of George the third, and I think in this period people continued in the way of life to which they were brought up longer than they do at the present day. I never got tired of hearing stories of my father's and mother's childhood and only wish that some of them had been recorded.
One of my father's earliest recollections was a visit to his remote relation Barclay-Field and his way wife Lady Georgiana in a vast Scottish house called Ranagulian. I believe he was a millionaire but there was always one egg short for nursery tea so that the children had to take it in turns to go without, and when my father dined in the house as a young man he was offered ‘some quail’ at dinner. I cannot think that saving eggs, at two a penny, can have added much to the fortune, nor can I understand how they could have put up with such a parsimonious housekeeper.
When my father was a schoolboy he was invited with his mother to stay at a house called Falcon Hall, in Morningside, on the outskirts of Edinburgh, with another distant relative who was certainly born before the Regency, and was already three quarters of the way round the bend. I base this assumption on the fact that in anticipation of a young boy's visit she had ordered the marble goddesses in the entrance hall to be draped in her discarded nightdresses, and when they were ushered into her presence she cast a disapproving eye over my father and told him that she had the greatest dislike of his habit of carrying his head under his arm. I have it in my mind that the footman who stood behind the old lady's chair was in the full regalia of knee-breeches and powdered wig, and when she had said grace but continued with her private and intimate prayers he split open his carved wooden mouth to say in a voice audible to the whole table, “That's quite enough.” The old Hall, with its Falcons standing on the gateposts has long since being swallowed by the city and the chaste goddesses whose slender feet once trod the marble floor have been turned into a row of petrol pumps standing on a concrete forecourt; surely a fate worse than that of Lot's wife. But I must leave this little glimpse of elegant imbecility for the unimaginative sanity of the Trent Valley Road, where things were beginning to look up for us. My parents had heard, probably through our juvenile coachman, that his father, Mr Barlow, had bought a small place called Huddlesford house, in which to retire, but had to postpone the day until the war was over. He was willing to let us have the house at a very reasonable rent on the understanding that we would move out when he wished to move in. It was halfway between the meeting place of the bridges and the village of Whittington and about a mile’s pleasant walk from the barracks, and seemed to be exactly what we were looking for. It was being completely redecorated and would not be ready for us for a few weeks so we moved into very comfortable rooms nearby in Huddlesford Grange, a rather fine old farmhouse, owned then, as now, by the Wheeltons, who looked after us very well.
A few days before we were due to move into the Grange my father saw an advertisement for a 1911 Morgan Runabout for sale at Cambridge. He was too busy to inspect it himself so he arranged with the owner of the garage at Broughton Astley, who was a good friend of ours, to accompany me and if we approved of it to bring it straight to the Grange as there was no room in Trent Valley Road. I think we paid £50 for it and I drove most of the way home, our friend sitting beside me with a stiff upper lip. One learned in those days by trial and error.
This hideous little three-wheeler had none of the Edwardian grace of the AC sociable, with its beautiful coach built body, but it was not to be despised as its present offspring is one of the most sought after cars, with a waiting list so long that the second-hand value is often higher than the new price. It had an air-cooled, twin cylinder JAP engine overhanging the front, two speeds, driven by separate chains and no reverse. But even our well-worn model was quite capable of a speed of 50 miles an hour with a firm hold on the road owing to the brilliantly designed independent front suspension, which was years ahead of its day.
Petrol was rationed to the dealer, who used his own discretion in distributing it to his customers, and I think we were allowed about two gallons a month. To this we added an equal quantity of paraffin which did nothing to sweeten the running and added greatly to the difficulty of starting up from cold. I suppose only the veteran motorist appreciates the luxury of merely turning a key. The procedure with the Morgan was to pour a little neat petrol into each cylinder through what were called compression taps. A huge iron handle was then thrust into the side of the car and after treading on it three or four times there was generally, but not always, an appalling but welcome eruption of noise, smoke and vibration.
The Wheeltons’ farmhouse and its country surroundings made a pleasant contrast to the last house and we had a beautiful sitting room. Douglas had already been taken to the barracks where he had made friends with Sergeant Major Burke and Quartermaster Sergeant Dorman and he asked my mother if he might send them both an invitation to have tea with him in the Grange, and his invitations were both accepted with pleasure. Instead of using the drive they had taken a shortcut across the field, and arrived, as would be expected from old soldiers, as the clock struck the appointed hour, but both impeccably mannered veterans were behaving in a most unusual fashion. Dorman, who was a large and stout man, was panting for breath and his eyes were rolling from side to side, while Burke, a small neat man with a waxed moustache, could hardly control his laughter. The mystery was soon solved, however, for Burke told us that although he had served in the army with his old friend since they were boys this was the first time he had seen him turn his back on the enemy and run for his life. Dorman had been chased across the field by the Wheeltons’ goat, which had butted him from behind every time he slackened speed. I think they may have put on a little act to amuse Douglas, which it certainly did. After all, it was his party.
Chapter 18
Huddlesford House 1915
There would have been nothing about Huddlesford House to attract the eye of anyone walking past it on the Whittington lane even if he could have seen it, but Mr Barlow had put up a high wooden fence along the front which had been given a preliminary coat of red lead, and when my father, rather anxiously, asked him when this effulgent vermilion was likely to be hidden he replied that he had decided to leave it as it was as he rather fancied a nice oxo, but he had no objection to our painting any colour we liked. A door in the fence led into a yard with ample outbuildings adjoining the back of the house, including a big coach house and room for my father's workshop. Beyond these buildings there was a small rickyard with the remains of a haystack, which was just the right place for my mother to keep a few hens and Indian Runner ducks, which did not require water and were prolific layers.
The front door was reached through a passage between the house and the outbuildings, but since our visitors never found it they came to the kitchen door, which faced the yard. As we entered the house we were greeted by the pleasant resinous smell of newly planed wood and fresh paint that had lost the first flush of turpentine, and I remember my mother's exclamation of surprise and pleasure when she saw what appeared to be an Adam fireplace in the drawing room. As the little house had neither the age nor importance to warrant this in the first place, we came to the conclusion that it must have been brought from Fisherwick when the mansion was demolished. The windows looked over a small rectangular garden given up entirely to vegetables. The canal ran along the far side of a flat field, still busy with its horse-towed barges, and backed by the high railway bank that carried the main line from London to the north. It was a simple country view and not without interest.
We were soon comfortably established and had sent for Douglas’ nurse, Dorothy, and our cook, Flora who did not remain with us very long for the postman soon discovered that she came from Ullesthorpe, which he knew well, and the pleasant round of gossip that followed led to a happy marriage at Whittington, where their grandchildren are still living. She was followed by a terrible mistake who told us that her husband was an officer in the Guards, and naturally assumed that she would have her meals with us. Fortunately, however, she discovered that we were not up to her class and gave in her notice, to our infinite relief.
But we were soon to be comfortable again under the able and kindly administration of Mrs Buxton, a spinster using the courtesy title of a cook who knew her onions. She was a very tall and upright woman, rather distinguished looking, and she always appeared to be wearing a freshly starched cap and apron. As a younger woman she had been an ardent member of the Salvation Army, in which I feel sure she must have held field rank, and one evening, while we were sitting in the drawing room, a joyful shout of praise and thanksgiving filtered up to us through the floorboards: “Alleluia! Nothing's broken.” She had fallen all the way down the cellar stairs. To add still further to our well-being my father's elderly batman, Bailey, had asked permission to live in and had turned a loft over the stables into a comfortable bedroom. On rejoining the army he had recorded his trade as a ‘hot dropper’ – if anyone is the wiser – but I think it had something to do with the casting of steel. He waited on us at table and looked over the house and garden. He was an excellent servant and I only remember one little shock that he gave my mother when she walked into the pantry while he was drying the dishes and found him mopping his big red face with the tea cloth. Her youngest brother, Uncle Leetham, who was in the IMS told me that he had once made the mistake of inspecting his kitchen and had found his cook rolling the rissoles on his bare chest. The proverb writers must have had these little problems.
Our old house at Ashby Parva will always remain in my mind as a jewel in a rare setting, so soon to have become obsolete, and even now its facets can give a little glow that leaves me with a strange feeling of nostalgia. Yet I believe we gained more than we lost in leaving it, for in a very short time we made more good and lasting friends than I had previously known in the 15 years of my life. My father's four rather elderly brother officers were very friendly. Major Tennant went back to his old Militia days and was always known as ‘Daddy’ owing to his gentle manner and kindness to children, and he was a frequent visitor, sometimes taking Douglas for a walk to teach him the name of butterflies. Major Wood of Bishton I remember for his extreme but quite unaffected air of courtesy, which stood out even in this period when good manners were the normal thing. Then there was Major Colburn, who became Lord Seton, and Major Broome, whose much younger wife stayed with us for some time to be near her husband and became a great friend of my mother's. We had many introductions from our kind but very distant cousins, the Bathers, a family that had lived at Meole Brace, Shropshire, for many generations. Herbert had become an ironmaster with a foundry in the district and lived in a nice old house called Moat Bank, near Lichfield, with his sister Nelly since his wife had died. He had four children, Mary, Herbert, Dorothy and George, whose ages ranged between Bobby’s and Douglas’. Perhaps we were passed through the fine-meshed sieve of the older inhabitants of a cathedral city by our connection through marriage with their beloved Bishop Lonsdale and his son-in-law Lord Grimthorpe, the irascible genius who designed the Westminster clock as an amateur and supervised the casting of Big Ben. According to one version – not his – the crack in the bell was caused by his insistence in raising the weight of the hammer against the better judgement of the Whitechapel founders.
We were greatly taken with the appearance of two little girls who frequently passed our house with their governess and it was not long before Douglas and Dorothy met them on the road and got into conversation with them. They were Mary and Eleanor (always known, for some reason, as ‘Derdy), the daughters of Major and Mrs Dyott of Freeford Manor now being used as a hospital. They were now living in a small house called The Crossroads between our house and Whittington, while the Major was serving in France. Mrs Dyott soon called on my mother and asked her if she would like Douglas to share her children's transport to Lichfield once a week to attend dancing lessons held in the ballroom of the George Hotel. Thus began a friendship that has now run into five generations, for we soon got to know their grandparents, the Pagets of Elford Hall – now demolished – and now Derdy is herself a grandmother. Then followed the still more generous suggestion that Douglas should do his lessons with Mary and Derdy under the guidance of Miss Hodges, a sister of the Admiral. The three children soon became inseparable companions which was very good for Douglas who had never before had anyone of his own age to play with. There was not much of a garden at either of our houses but at the back of The Crossroads there was a small plantation of young trees that they called the forest, where they seemed to use their imaginations very successfully.
I think the children must have been rather older when one of the Dyott’s houses in Whittington, called the Hawthorns, became empty – the house where Mary is now living. They often went to play there and one day I walked over to see what they were up to and overheard a funny little conversation. They were evidently preparing to set up house and Douglas had just asked Mary if she would marry him and she had said, in the same casual tone, that she supposed she could. He then turned to Derdy and, with a singular want of tact, told her that she could be their cook, to which he replied, with some hauteur, “Wife or nothing.” I suppose Major Dyott was home on leave when he discovered the three children sitting astride the ridge of the high-pitched room and gave them all the dressing down of their lives.
As well as the standard belief in the deadly peril of damp socks and the detriment to health that followed a failure ‘to go’, my mother had an unusual foible for which I may have been responsible, for the necessity for growing boys to rest their legs. One day, when she was taking a walk with a friend, she was telling her how fortunate we were in having such an excellent person to look after Douglas, and that she always took the mail-cart with them when they went out in case he was overtaken with exhaustion. This surprising statement had hardly been absorbed before the couple rounded a bend in the road, but it was Douglas who was pushing his little nurse at a sturdy pace.
So far Douglas had seen more of the war than any of us. He had already heard a German bomb explode while he and my mother were staying at Lowestoft with Uncle Basil and Aunt Cecil. They were at the morning service one Sunday when a bomb dropped in the churchyard. They were not in the Town when it was bombarded from the sea, but for many years he had kept a piece of shrapnel that had been embedded in the wall of my uncle’s house. And it was Douglas who saw one of our own aeroplanes crash in a small field on the edge of Whittington. The pilot jumped clear of the machine when it was about twenty feet from the ground and landed with no more than a slightly strained ankle. Douglas ran to him and offered help, and the young man asked him to stand guard over the wreckage while he went to report the accident.
Bobby passed into Sandhurst as a King’s cadet and the time was drawing short before I was to go to Oundle. I was still appallingly backward for my age, but I had learned a little from one of the masters called Mr Prideaux, of Lichfield Grammar School who came to Huddlesford House on his bicycle two or three times a week. I must have picked up a little algebra as he taught me how to learn the basis of the branch of mechanics known as kinematics, which deals with velocity, acceleration and that sort of thing, which I understood and enjoyed. He taught me well for the simple reason that it was not his subject and he was able to appreciate my difficulties.
Chapter 19
Oundle 1916
My mother took me to Oundle at the beginning of the Easter term dressed in my short black coat, striped trousers and bowler, and carrying a small leather case containing my night things; I must have looked like a city gent who had not yet achieved a tall-hatted status.
We crossed the long bridge over the river Nene and made for the tall steeple that is a landmark for many miles, and which a boy once climbed, to receive a sound thrashing on his return to ground. I never appreciated the beautiful little town until long after I left school, which we walked through on our way to call on the Sandersons, where we met another new boy with his mother, Lady Maud Warrender, whom I seem to associate with a well-known singing voice: Clara Butt’s son was up at the School, I believe.
From there we went to see my House Master, Major Nightingale, at ‘Sidney’, which was one of the four ‘field houses’ built in two blocks of two, and the only houses in those days that were not in the town.
My mother spent the night at the Talbot Hotel, a lovely Tudor house whose staircase had come from Fotheringhay Castle, and had brought its ghost with it. I was allowed to have breakfast at the Talbot, and then for the first time in my life found myself alone in the world, a very common experience for everyone.
I spent my first evening getting to know the other five new boys in the house, all, as I remember, very pleasant, and I soon made friends with one who was my nearest in age and lack of qualifications than the others, having spent a year or two in the training ship HMS Conway. We were mercifully ignored by the rest of the prep-room, which was our living quarters, though our testing time was to come later, and at 9 o’clock we found that we had been allotted two bright little bedrooms, which was a great relief to me as I had never slept in a dormitory.
The following day we were tested for various subjects so that we could be put in suitable forms, and I doubt if my papers afforded any problems. This even included our voices, and I rather remember Mr Spurling, the director of music, playing a scale and asking me to sing it, which I did, but at a lower octave. I think he was the first Master that I had met so far who belonged to the human species, for he actually smiled as he said, “Bass: Choir: Choral Society.” This was no feather in my cap, however, as I soon discovered that only the tone deaf were exempt.
It would have been a poor school if life in the house had been a bed of roses and meals out, but there were aspects of it that would not be tolerated in a modern prison. For instance, there was hardly enough room on the backless benches for everyone to sit, so the new boys were made to stand with their backs to the lockers for hours on end on Sundays. This was just a way of seeing that the senior boys had been juniors themselves, and we did not resent it. There were two kinds of fagging, neither very arduous. We each had a locker in the prep-room and pinned our timetables on the doors, and the new boys were chosen by senior members to collect their requirements for the day and place them in neat piles on the table. I remember doing this little task for a giant called Butler, already, I should think, over 6 feet in height, who always treated me very well.
The studies were on each side of the corridor that led to the backyard and the protection of roofless enclosures, where we attended lessons in the daytime, but the seniors did not have their own personal fags; if they needed attention they blew a shrill blast on a whistle and the junior members of the prep-room rushed to their assistance, the last boy being given the job. Discipline, which was absolutely rigid, was almost entirely the responsibility of the Prefects who were brutally fair-minded, and the only form of punishment was a thrashing, which of course, did no one any harm. The penalty for being late for breakfast was to call Major Nightingale at 6 o’clock for a week, but I cannot remember this crime being committed.
I should think the food was the same usual standard of the day. I was always ravenous, but boys have insatiable appetites and it was wartime. We always had a good roast joint for lunch on Sundays, but this had to last till bedtime, except for a mouthful of cheese on a cream cracker before going to bed.
Major Nightingale and the matron always dined with us and had far more substantial meals than the boys. There was nothing unusual in this, and I am not suggesting that it should not have been so, but I believe Nightingale was a goat, but he knew he was regarded as one of the best housemasters; and I do not want to be misunderstood in either of the little stories that explain what I was subjected to, which may have been speeded up as I only had a short time at Oundle to earn his full treatment.
One day I was cutting a slice of bread when I noticed that it had been dropped in the mud, so I cut a thin slice and put it aside. Perhaps Nightingale thought I was being wasteful, for he came over to me and crammed it into my mouth and made me swallow it, mud and all.
The second instance was at an examination in French. My French was not good and I soon came to the end of all that I could manage of the paper. Nightingale came and looked over my shoulder and asked me if I had finished. “Yes,” I replied. He furiously took my paper and tore it up. “Now boy, you will do that again.” This I refused to do, and was hauled up before Sanderson, the Headmaster, who was a fair and kind man. He was obviously disturbed that the paper had been torn up, yet had to uphold his staff and persuade me to rewrite it. I still refused, but we came to some compromise eventually since we both knew that in any case my marks would not be high.
Something puzzles me far more now than when I was a boy. I have taught at Winchester for a short time and for many years at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, and I have the happiest memories of the healthy and friendly relationship between the boys and the men, often reaching a second generation, but this attitude, as far as I was concerned, was totally absent at Oundle. The only conversation I ever had with a master out of school was on my first day when a young man asked me if I had damaged my leg, and then chatted on this and that for a few minutes. It turned out that, like me, he had just arrived, so he had not yet been briefed, for he never spoke to me again. But oddest of all, the Chaplain never spoke a word to me during the time I was at school. I have sometimes wondered if they were afraid of being suspected of an unnatural tendency if they so much as offered a smile or a greeting.
I have sometimes thought, too, that the person who claimed that the happiest days of his life were spent at school was either suffering from a short memory or a very dreary existence in after life. On the other hand, I equally distrust those who can find nothing but fault about their schools and can only remember the miseries they suffered and probably deserved. I don't think I was very sorry for myself and I certainly require no sympathy for I have had my fair share of pleasures, when, like the law of the waves, the crests have risen as high as the troughs were low.
It is only natural, however, that the lot of a boy of sixteen entering a rather tough school with a reputation for scholarships, and who could play no games, and could barely keep up with the Lower Fourth Form when he should have been in the sixth, was not an entirely happy one.
But there is no doubt that the short time that I spent at Oundle was my salvation, and I have always been grateful for the fortitude of my parents who led me, at last, from the shelter of my green lanes.
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