Bertie, May and Mrs Fish
Bertie, May and Mrs Fish
Xandra Bingley
A lyrical, evocative and wonderfully original wartime memoir about life on a farm in the Cotswolds, seen through the eyes of a child.‘Bertie, May and Mrs Fish’ is Xandra Bingley’s account of her childhood on a Cotswold farm, set against the backdrop of World War II and its aftermath. Bingley’s mother is left to farm the land, isolated in the landscape, whilst her husband is away at war. With its eccentric cast of characters, this book captures both the essence of a country childhood and the remarkable courage and resilience displayed by ordinary people during the war. The beauty and sensitivity of Bingley’s observation is artfully balanced by the harshness and grit of her reality.‘In the cowshed my mother ties her hair in a topknot scarf that lies on the feedbin lid. At five-thirty each morning and four o’clock in the afternoons she chases rats off the mangers. She measures cowcake and rolled oats and opens the bottom cowshed door. Thirty-one brown and white Ayrshires and one brindle Jersey tramp into their stalls…’‘Two thousand acres. A mile of valley. Horses cattle sheep pigs poultry. Snow above the lintels of the downstairs windows. Her fingers swelling. Chilblains. Her long white kid gloves wrapped around a leaky pipe in her bedroom. Knotted at the fingers. She has a lot to learn and no one to teach her. Accidents happen.'Bingley tells her tale in a startling voice which captures the universe of a child, the unforgiving landscape and the complicated adult world surrounding her. Her acute observation, and her gift for place, people, sound and touch make this a brilliantly authentic and evocative portrait.
BERTIE, MAY AND MRS FISH
Country Memories of Wartime
Xandra Bingley
Copyright (#ulink_1bda595f-ef45-5c60-9e10-c5db7c03e98b)
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
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This edition published by Harper Perennial 2006
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2005
Copyright © Xandra Bingley 2005
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Source ISBN: 9780007149513
Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2012 ISBN 9780007370917
Version: 2019-06-18
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Dedication (#ueba158e2-aa52-5dba-9cf9-f3cefe754096)
For my grandparents Elizabeth and Noel Bingley Eva and Hubert Lenox-Conyngham
Contents
Cover (#u774e0a13-4606-54fa-bd68-589e2b02d662)
Title Page (#ud3ace2de-1b22-504d-be63-83b9d3d63948)
Copyright (#uc248ff1f-b280-5407-be59-d3583f5746c6)
Note to Readers (#u59a78380-e103-5c33-946f-806ce96dcd6a)
Dedication (#ubdbcbaf3-a60c-5e5f-8744-49881a81303c)
Introductions (#ucf562553-f2b6-5413-9869-d0ea84c6e5fa)
1 HOMEFIELD (#u01ae1213-c6ff-5dd6-9cc3-649fd98ce824)
2 WARTIME (#u2b3ed762-8d9b-5bfa-b6b2-e8982fec65ec)
3 MRS FISH (#u1703bacc-2a6b-569c-9751-cd193ac4a7a8)
4 COWS (#litres_trial_promo)
5 YARD (#litres_trial_promo)
6 PATRICK (#litres_trial_promo)
7 NIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
8 BLESSINGS (#litres_trial_promo)
9 HUNTING (#litres_trial_promo)
10 KISS-ME-QUICK (#litres_trial_promo)
11 HORSE (#litres_trial_promo)
12 CHRISTMAS (#litres_trial_promo)
13 GALLOP AWAY (#litres_trial_promo)
P.S. Ideas, Interviews & Features … (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Q and A with Xandra Bingley
Life at a Glance (#litres_trial_promo)
Top Ten Favourite Books (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Book (#litres_trial_promo)
How My Memory Works (#litres_trial_promo)
Read On (#litres_trial_promo)
If You Loved This, You Might Like … (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Introductions (#ulink_cfea1067-4ea4-50ef-aa66-7d45bd5e6d28)
It never harms to exaggerate in the direction of truth.
Henri Matisse, to an art student
Across the snowy hills some galloping horsemen are chasing a single horseman. He is beating his horse and racing away downhill to escape. He reaches flat white land and gallops on and on, looking over his shoulder, beating his horse. The others do not follow him away from the hills.
At last he arrives at a village exhausted and people crowd around him and exclaim, ‘You are safe … it is wonderful … we never believed you would get here.’ He says, ‘I can tell you I was afraid, they got close to me up in the hills.’
The people say, ‘No – no – you do not understand … it is a miracle … you have ridden across the lake … underneath the ice is water a mile deep.’
Then he dies. From fear of a danger he did not know he was in.
German fable
1 HOMEFIELD (#ulink_45b24576-de6d-5d30-8c7e-cf7d341ecf67)
After wartime my father sends home bales of midnight-blue and plum-red velvet for downstairs curtains, a cinecamera and roll-down screen, two black bearskin coats, a touring Bentley and a dinner service for twelve of creamy rippling Copenhagen china hand-painted with wildflowers.
He writes to my mother … Now we’ll have some damned good fun.
And that’s what he says when he is home on leave and a thousand daffodil and narcissus bulbs arrive from Holland in plywood boxes. He spills whitewash from a blue speckled tin bucket in a half-moon arc from the coal shed oak to the damson tree by the bridge on the Rushy Brook stream and marks off half an acre of Homefield and shouts … Mind out of the way you bloody child … as I run over his white line. I am four years old and not afraid.
A post and rails goes up along the marker line. Joe Rummings slams the iron crowbar in the ground. Griff drops spiked ash stakes in the holes and swings an oak mallet. The Ayrshire milking herd chew cud in Homefield and watch nails hammered into split ash rails.
My father walks about with a box. He swings up one arm and throws a handful of bulbs that spray the pale blue autumn sky. Then he is gone.
My mother kneels for days in the grass and jabs a trowel where each bulb fell. Turf splits and she drops one in and smacks the trowel down once twice three times and shuts each grass lid.
Daffodils grow and flower and lean and break in the winds that blow across our farm in the Cotswold hills. In springtime I snap off stalks and my father arrives home and shouts … Pick the broken buggers first old girl … must experiment using your brain one of these fine days … bloody east wind.
Fifty years later I am by Juno beach on the French Normandy coast where his Inns of Court invasion troops landed in the Second World War. Dune grass blows east and my father’s wartime padre, code name Sunray, strides past in white cassock flapping in the breeze and a Hans Holbein black hat. Soldiers hold up embroidered flags on polished wooden poles tipped by fluted steel knives. The Union Jack and the French flag lie over a carved memorial stone beside a country road. War veterans wear medals and hold flags embroidered combatants. Four hundred of us stand with French families in the sun and the Inns of Court regimental band plays tunes from Cavalleria Rusticana.
An Inns of Court officer steps up to the dais and speaks. ‘For the sake of freedom – a suicidal mission – our men never gave up – covered a wider area than any other military unit – with this act of dedication we bridge the gap between this world and the next.’
Down go the flowers. Wreath after wreath. Poppies, marigolds, daisies, phlox, poppies, daisies.
A soldier at attention by the memorial stone falls forward on his face on the grass. Two others drag his body behind the loudspeaker van. From the ranks another steps forward to take his place. The regimental band play my father’s favourite hymn: ‘Praise My Soul the King of Heaven’ … and the padre reads, ‘We meet in the presence of Almighty God to commemorate this day.’
Nearly all of us weep. I remember my father, with his white hair round his bald head and wearing green corduroys and a navy-blue jersey, coming past the corner of top barn, arms held open wide saying … Fancy our meeting … when times are so fleeting … to what do I owe the great honour of your presence on this perfect summer morning … what say a small celebration is in order … a cup of Mr Bournville’s famous chocolate lightly stirred into fresh milk … agree … and I can hear my mother’s voice call … Any shopping wanted from Cheltenham … I’m taking a broken bridle down … I’ll be home by lunchtime.
The dedication of the Normandy landing regimental memorial stone is over. Soldiers march to a farm courtyard in the village of Graye-sur-Mer. Champagne and chocolate biscuits are handed out. Chocolate melts in my fingers and a French lady says to me, ‘I remember the war very well, madame, we were very hungry, oui ça c’est certain, mais …’ She shrugs and smiles. We look into each other’s eyes and down at the melting chocolate she offers me and we laugh and she says, ‘Il faut rire, madame, we must laugh savez-vous.’
I say, ‘Oui, merci, it is true.’
The mayor of Graye-sur-Mer says to me, ‘When I was a child I must go with no shoes. Certain things are not remembered. My family are going in the fields at night for food. It is food for cows. I do not know the names.’
I say, ‘Turnips, swedes, mangolds.’
He says, ‘C’est ça. If they see us the enemy shoot.’
I say, ‘Is there nothing left in the shops for you to buy?’
And he says, ‘Pour les collaborateurs … bien sûr, madame, there is everything.’
A Frenchman in a black beret reaches up and embraces me and says, ‘Madame, I live at Jerusalem Crossroads, a hamlet. The British soldiers come. We give them wine and flowers and tell them “Thank you.” We hear aeroplanes. A soldier calls, ‘It is Yanks, OK, OK, yellow – yellow.’ The soldier quickly spreads yellow silk squares on the two vehicles. A yellow smoke goes up into the sky. The driver says, ‘It is for the Yanks to see we are les amis.’ The American planes fly over firing. I run away with another boy. When I return, all Jerusalem Crossroads and all the soldiers are dead. I think I am lucky to be here with you today. It is a great honour and I say thank you, for your father. You are proud of him? I think so.’
British officer veterans drink French champagne and laugh and tell me, ‘We shouldn’t laugh, we oughtn’t to.’
I say, ‘Why not?’
They say, ‘We’re remembering hunting a Hun along Juno beach. Bloody hell he ran. We got him with the flail tank chains.’
I ask, ‘What are flail tank chains for?’
One says, ‘For mine-sweeping. Tank bars on the front swing the chains and find mines hidden under sand.’
Outside the farm courtyard I stand in wildflowers and lean on a sunny stone wall and look at a field of pale-cream Charolet cattle and hum ‘Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring’, and hear my father’s high tenor voice descant. I see him walk across our farmyard past a downstairs window and look in. I am piling up pennies and half-pennies on his desk and Gigi is playing on the radiogram. He shouts at the window … Turn that bloody man off … turn that man off … do you hear me … at once. Maurice Chevalier is singing … Thank ’eaven for leetle girls … for leetle girls grow bigger every day … thank ’eaven for leet-le girls … I open the window and he stammers … I w-will n-not … r-repeat n-not … h-have d-damned c-collaborateurs in m-my h-home.
I turn off the radiogram and he calls from the hall … That’s m-more like it … the so-and-so should be locked up by rights … one first-class slippery customer … or after the invasion we’d have caught him fair and square. Hey-ho … you keep an eagle eye out for cowardly types when your turn comes old girl … that’s my advice.
He closes the window and says … I hear the bastard’s filthy rich these days … three cheers for the ignorant hoi polloi … now who’s next on parade? What say we bring in the beloved horses and give them their tea … jump to it … enough fraternising with the enemy for you today. Did I tell you in confidence I risked the Lion of Judah over Dewpond sliprails … went at them like an Eleventh Hussar trooper … took off from his hocks … only had him in a rubber snaffle … mouth soft as a baby’s bottom.
His brilliant blue eyes look my way and his finger taps his lips … Mum’s the word … shh-hh … if I am called upon to make a confession I shall simply say to your mother … not a hope in hell of stopping a young horse who’s made up his mind to jump a fence … you’ll know that as well as I do. He and I walk up the yard and he sings … Chirri-birri-bin … chirri-birri-bin … I love you so-o …
At Five Acre gate he calls the horses … Come on … come on, girls and boys … teatime … teatime …
I climb the elmwood bars and say … What is a collaborateur …
He says … Not now … not now … keep your mind on one thing at a time … look out … here they come … a fine sight if ever I saw one … open the damned gate … get a move on … don’t stand there coffee-housing like the bloody French … off the bars … I am in no mood to pay for new hinges … that’s more like it … have a leg up onto Glory Boy … then lead on. The rest will follow … if we’re lucky.
I ride bareback up Rickyard Lane astride my father’s tall chestnut and look over the Cotswold grey-stone wall built on Calfpen bank to our hills and woods. He pulls fistfuls of linseed barrel nuts out of his green corduroy trouser pockets. Loose horses follow and push and shove to nuzzle his pockets. We pass the twin stone barns tall as churches and turn down into the farmyard.
My mother’s Irish money buys our Elizabethan farm in 1941, the second summer of World War Two. My father’s Inns of Court regiment is fighting a mock battle on the Cotswold hills and from a high point he looks down and sees what he thinks is a small village or a hamlet in a hollow. He tells his armoured car driver … Head downhill … we’ll make a quick recce … His car roars down Homefield and he finds the deserted farm.
A doll’s house face under triple gables looks at a farmyard circle of stone barns and stables spreading to cattle sheds and lanes. A front door path is between two green squares of lawn edged by sprawling pink roses on a drystone wall. The garden swerves away past a cherry tree and south around two apple trees to the wicket gate at the damson tree by the Rushy Brook stream. The house faces north because Elizabethans believe flies spread the plague and sun shining on windows attracts flies. They are wrong. Xenopsylla cheopsis, the rat flea carries the plague and fleas are brought to England by black rat hosts from China.
He telephones my mother at her Corps headquarters at Camberley south-west of London and says … God willing I’ve found the Bears a home.
My mother has joined the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry – FANYs – created in 1907 to train English girls to gallop on horseback onto battlefields and give first aid to wounded soldiers and carry the injured to field hospitals in horse-drawn ambulances. In the 1930s FANYs become a mechanised Women’s Transport Service. Upper class girls drive and service transport lorries and motorbikes and chauffeur army personnel and chant:
I wish my mother could see me now,With a grease gun under my car,Filling the differentialEre I start for the sea afar,A-top a sheet of frozen iron, in cold that would make you cry.
I used to be in Society once,Danced and hunted and flirted once,Had white hands and complexions once,Now I am a FANY.
She says to me when she is an old lady … I was never lost or behind schedule driving my brigadier-general … even in the blackout on the very long journeys with no car lights, when we went from the north of England all the way down south to Devon.
My father telephones her FANY HQ in summer 1941 and tells her … Steal a tank of petrol and concoct some excuse to drive down here p.d.q. This is a land of milk and honey. I give you my word. Take the London – Oxford A40 road past Burford and Northleach. On the ridge look left-handed across open country. A single clump of trees on the far horizon is the farm boundary. Stay on the A40. Look for a red iron gate in a line of beeches. If you fetch up at Seven Springs crossroads you’ve gone too far. The drive is half a mile of bloody awful potholes. If I’m right – and I’m damned sure I am – this is a home for us for ever. Those old boys knew how to build to last. No flies on the Elizabethans … and no flies on us. We’ll be sheltered on all sides. The Almighty had his eye carefully on our future when the War Office boffins planned today’s regimental exercise.
In their khaki uniforms in his armoured car they dash across the farm. My mother says … It all looks so terribly neglected … could there be something wrong with the land … I wish I knew more about these things … the Valley is nicely sheltered for horses … and the house does have lovely proportions.
White stones scatter the hilly land. Fences are broken walls or cut and laid hedges grown wild into tall bullfinch thorns. Gaps in walls are wide enough to drive a tank through. Gates and stable doors hang off hinges. Water is pumped by a windmill reservoir two miles away at Needlehole at the far end of the farm. Purple thistles and yellow poisonous charlock flower on grassland. Nettles spread inside barn doorways. Wild cats stare from stable drains. Rats run along house walls. In the drawing room a soldiers’ campfire has burnt a hole in the ceiling.
My father says … We will rise above any minor problems … we’re not about to start playing windy buggers. Not now we’ve found this heavenly place … quite right we’re not … no siree. We’ll invite your bank manager to a slap-up lunch at the Cavalry Club. A bank manager lunching with a bloody colonel in Piccadilly … he will think he is going up in the world. We’ll never look back … you mark my words.
In September 1940 the Blitz begins and a year later my mother’s Irish Georgian furniture arrives at the farm in a horsebox with her motorbike-sidecar. My father has gone north to Yorkshire to train his Inns of Court lawyer soldiers – the Devil’s Own – to fight like hell when their time comes.
Her lights are paraffin oil lamps and she cooks on a knee-high coal range with a hot iron square over one oven. Her heating is paraffin stoves until she hammers a nail into a wall to hang a picture in the drawing room. My father comes home and says … Who’d have thought a nail going through a wall like butter would produce a magnificent Elizabethan open fireplace … and he sings … Praise my soul the King of heaven …
She sells her blue Rover and her motorbike and buys a Ford van painted British racing green and has her initials stencilled in gold on both doors and her Pytchley Hunt Point-to-Point Ladies Race silver fox leaping through a horseshoe is screwed on the bonnet.
My father is frustrated soldiering in England between 1940 and 1944. His Eleventh Hussar cavalry brother officers are fighting on the North African front. He is a colonel training lawyers to be soldiers. He writes home from Yorkshire barracks:
I can’t tell you how much I miss you and our lovely home and wish I was there to help … and then I can’t help wishing I was out there in the hunt for the Boche … so I don’t know what I want. I worry all the time you have too much to do and work too hard. Find some woman to help in the kitchen … or else it’s no fun when I come home on leave.
Never thought you would get the rye and the beans planted. A week with fair weather and the land warm with no frost and our seeds and wheat will all germinate and we shall be established for the winter. The new saw bench means you will be warm. Get lots of wood cut up. Did I remind you no one must touch the machine until covered under the Workman’s Compensation Act in our insurance policy. If someone cuts their hand off it is liable to be expensive!
I miss you and everything so very much and long to be home doing something useful. Have been on a damned badly run armoured battle. Sent up by the General on to the enemy’s position to view the attack and give an opinion. Such a bad show that I am at a loss what to say or do. Came back before the end in disgust cold and disheartened. All my love from your own lonely Big Bear.
She props a prayer written in Gothic script and illuminated gold and blue capitals on the kitchen dresser – May He support us all the Day long … Until the Shadows lengthen and Evening comes – and reads his next letter:
… As it was my birthday I was allowed by the Priest to choose hymns for our Regimental Armistice Day Service. We sang ‘New Every Morning Is the Love’, ‘Lead Us Heavenly Father Lead Us’, ‘Now Thank We All Our God’. I had the ‘Nunc Dimittis’ put in … the best of all those things and never heard unless one goes in the evening. I wished my Bear was with me at this time.
She learns to farm. Two thousand acres. A mile of valley. Horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, poultry. Snow in winter above the lintels of the downstairs windows. Her fingers swell. Chilblains. Long white kid gloves are wrapped round a leaky pipe in her bedroom knotted at the fingers. She has a lot to learn that no one has taught her. Accidents happen.
2 WARTIME (#ulink_183fc3fa-4edf-5e76-94c9-4c7e0dfa8601)
After two days leave at Christmas my father writes
… thank you for my very lovely and never to be forgotten first holiday in our new home and for all the happiness you have brought me. A terrible anticlimax coming back. I miss you and home as much as I used to as a small boy sent away to school. Our home is our own most perfect special Bears’ castle for ever and always.
His regiment moves further north to a barracks in Northumberland.
… your farmyard is a ballroom compared to my car parks up here. I am having cement roads built by charming German Jew refugees. A Sergeant in charge is Czech and was in an Austrian concentration camp with 20,000 others. A number were ordered to be hanged or shot by Hess for no reason at all. He has written three times to the Home Secretary to ask to be allowed to look after Hess for one night!!!
No more news now darling Bear except to send you all my love and to say how I long to be with you. How splendid about the big new Esse kitchen range stove. The perfection of our lovely home.
In the Pittville Nursing Home in Cheltenham, in snow, in February 1942, she endures a difficult birth and I am born … their Little Bear. My mother writes in her diary … I did not know it would hurt so much.
In springtime my father sends
… coupons for the calf with the usual unanswerable form. Here I am very lonely and far from my Bears and home. What a lovely Easter it was. Our first with our Little Bear and our new home. Both equally lovely. It is heaven and we are so lucky to be so happy. I’m sure few other people are as happy as we are. It all seems to be too good to be true. I have bought you a lovely birthday present Ralli-cart with yellow wheels and good tyres that will look brand new with a coat of varnish. I hope you will like it. When we find a nice pony and borrow a harness it will be a topper and very smart.
A pony is tied to an apple tree on a rope to graze the lawn in circles and I am placed in a wicker basket on the pony’s back. I have an eighty-year-old nanny – Annie Nannie – my mother’s Irish cousins’ nanny forty years before. I must have looked up at branches and apple blossom and warplanes.
Joe Rummings and Mr Griff and Mr Munday are farm labourers too old for call-up. Landgirls are seconded from their work at the Wills Tobacco cigarette factory in Birmingham. A lorry load of Italian prisoners of war is driven in for daily threshing and hoeing and fencing and stone collecting.
Mrs Griffin walks two miles from Kilkenny three times a week and cleans. She squeezes water out of used tea leaves and scatters handfuls on carpets and kneels and bristle-brushes up dirt stuck to the leaves into a red dented tin dustpan. She dusts and wax-polishes Georgian furniture and scours iron saucepans and changes linen sheets and talks and talks all the time to my mother and Mrs Fish and to herself. Mrs Fish walks two miles over the fields from Needlehole to wash and iron bedsheets and clothes two days a week.
He writes
… so pleased to hear you are fixed up with Italian prisoners. Worrying about it on the train I didn’t know how you’d manage. Have been thinking about you all day looking after our Little Bear and keeping the threshing going. Only wish I could be there to help instead of leaving it all on your shoulders. I know we are going to make a success. One always does if one’s heart is really in it and both our hearts are. All my love my darlingest. Soon a lovely holiday together.
The prisoners of war are forbidden to speak. Lined up in the yard in dark-blue jackets and trousers, they call out to me … Che bella bambina … cara … io te adoro … veni … veni qui. A man in dark-blue uniform has a gun in a holster and shouts … No talky … allez … skeddadle … go-go … follow lady on horsy. My mother rides into Homefield leading the line. Each prisoner carries a long-handled hoe over his shoulder. They walk to fields of kale and mangolds and turnips and swedes to hoe out weeds along the rows. In winter the Italians rub their hands and call out … È fredo in Inghilterra … molto molto fredo … è terribile … and my mother smiles and says … Yes … cold … molto coldo.
Landgirls live in the house on the top floor. They sit in the kitchen and smoke cigarettes and cry and turn the battery wireless onto the Light Programme when my mother is not there. A landgirl called Jannie is my nanny after old Annie Nannie goes back to Ireland. My mother barters cigarettes for herself and the girls on the black market in Cheltenham. She drives Merrylegs the dock-tailed Welsh cob seven miles down and seven back uphill every fortnight in the Ralli-cart, and trades homemade butter and fresh eggs and dead rabbits. Until the day she says to the landgirls … Getting us all cigarettes takes up too much time … I am stopping smoking … I shan’t be buying cigarettes in Cheltenham any more for anyone.
A landgirl says … We’ll have to get ours off the Yanks then, won’t we … American airmen are billeted at Guiting Grange. Our landgirls walk down the lane to the pub at Kilkenny in the evenings in gumboots and flowered cotton dresses and mackintoshes. They carry high-heeled shoes and get picked up in US jeeps.
Sometimes a girl comes home in the morning late for milking. One girl cries to my mother … I can’t have a Yankee baby … I told him … I swear I did … and my mother says … we’ll have to get you back home to Birmingham somehow. She writes in her diary … New landgirl up the spout.
My mother is pregnant again and has an abortion in the Pittville Nursing Home in Cheltenham. She does not tell my father. After a first difficult birth she is advised she must not risk having another child.
January and February and March are terribly cold months. One March an east wind blows and the weathervane fox above the granary gallops east for a week. My mother walks out of the house carrying her shotgun and loads two cartridges and aims at the fox. She fires both barrels and says … That should change things … We’ve had enough of this cold east wind. Grey tumbler pigeons fly off the barns and circle high in the sky and the copper fox pirouettes all morning. Joe and Mr Griff and the landgirls stop in the yard and watch the twirling fox. One by one tumblers fall wings closed to a barn and glide to a window ledge. By afternoon the fox slows down facing north.
Her diary says … Why can’t I be happy … I have everything I want … dear God …
He writes
… Eric Bates is having a bad turn. He has had a skin disease for months and that plus the fact that his wife is having a baby seems to have got him down. He sits by the hour with an ashen white face looking straight in front of him refusing to do anything. I try to knock some sense into him but it’s pretty tricky. His wife is in Scotland and due to foal next week.
Last night we played billiards after dinner and everyone got foxed. I broke several very old gramophone records over Basil’s head and he walked round the billiard table saying ‘I’ve never had that done to me before in my whole life’ as if it happens to everyone every day. We all laughed a great deal and it does a lot of good. I get very depressed and feel almost like Eric at times.
No more now my very special Bear. Not so very long to wait now till we see each other again after this lifetime apart. Soon now I shall be with you and we will be happy Bears together with all the spring flowers and sunshine and trees coming out and so much to look at and see with you. Keep your tail up. All my love my darlingest. Your one and only Big Bear.
In the kitchen my mother hears aeroplanes and says … Listen … listen … are they ours … out we run … quick … look … look up … and black wide-winged aeroplanes fly over in lines. At milking time one afternoon a single big grey plane roars low across the barns and clears Fishpond Wood and then the sky gets smoky over Top Field. My mother calls to Jannie my landgirl nanny and me … Stay put in the milking shed … and she and Joe Rummings and Griff pick up pitchforks and run up Homefield.
They walk back down and my mother milks and says … One of theirs crashed … you can’t see properly inside … what’s left is on fire … if they were alive it was not for long … I’ll change Top Field name to Airplane … in memory.
When a white smoke cross is in the sky after two planes pass she says … I hope the cross means those two are protected.
In daytime small planes rattle through the sky and at night slow heavy engines drone over. I sleep in my mother’s bedroom and in the dark she says … Poor pilots have a long way to go … I suppose they get lost sometimes … I hope this lot aren’t for Birmingham.
At breakfast a landgirl comes in the kitchen and unpicks sticky muddy bootlaces listening to the news on the wireless and cries and says to my mother … It isn’t fair … it isn’t sodding fair … it’s all on them … I’m going back home … I won’t sodding stay here … Birmingham is my sisters … you don’t know a sodding thing … you don’t … I don’t darn well care … sodding cows.
My mother says … I will ride down to Andoversford and send a reply-paid telegram to find out how they are … the west did have bad luck last night … I am sorry to say. In the milking shed she says to Joe Rummings … Very likely we’ll be a girl less by afternoon …
And Joe says … She’ll go back where she’s from …
And my mother says … It’s hard on girls sent here from a big town … no news so far if the tobacco factory’s gone.
A small plane flies nearer and she picks me up and runs to the yard. A cloud of silver tinsel falls from the sky onto my mother’s green topknot scarf. Silver hangs on my arms and on her pink linen blouse and her blue dungarees and sticks to my blonde curls. Tangled silver lands on stables and house gables and on barn roof moss. White pigs and brown hens and the one black hen and the grey Chinese geese are all silvery. Her black-and-white spaniel’s floppy ears sparkle. Three horses in Homefield gallop away under falling silver tinsel. Brown apple tree branches and blue delphinium flowers and red and pink and yellow roses and the green lawn and white yard stones are sparkling.
I pick up silver. The plane flies off. Griff freewheels down the yard and silver hangs from his bicycle handles and on his flat brown cap and my mother says … What do you suppose it is all for Griff … it must be all right … or why would they let it out over us … as long as it has nothing to do with mercury … what on earth are they dropping it on us for … so far I can’t see anything that’s fallen down dead … will you help Joe and the girls … I’m going in to turn the wireless on … you never know … we may get information.
In the kitchen she lifts me onto the dresser between the varnished wood wireless and glass butter churn. She turns the brown Bakelite wireless knob clockwise and behind the peacock tail material fan cut into wood a man’s voice fades in crackles … An announcement follows … reception … repeat … will … repeat … expect … and the voice disappears. My mother leans on the dresser and puts her cheek close to the wireless and twiddles the knob and I twist silver in my fingers. She says … Nothing … Düsseldorf … Brussels … Paris … London … nothing from anywhere … I don’t want to waste batteries … you can help me make butter while we listen … and Jannie can come indoors and stay with you while I ride round and make sure everywhere is safe.
She hugs the glass butter churn on the high red dresser top in one arm and untwists the tin screw lid and pours in cream from a wide white tin bowl and dips in wood paddles on a rod fixed into the lid … Thank heavens the cream is nicely cold … or we’d be here all day … it goes quicker since the Baroness calved … her Jersey cream is thicker than Ayrshire … I’ll hold the jar tight and you can turn … stand up on the chair … keep your elbow level with the handle … or you won’t get going fast enough.
The wood handle turns a cogwheel and the cogwheel ratchet teeth bite a small flat wheel that bites a third upright wheel that bites and turns the fourth wheel fixed round the paddle rod. I wind and cream swirls against glass and my mother says … That is going a good gallop … let’s pray it separates.
I watch the glass for butter flecks and my shoulder aches and she says … I’ll take a turn … you watch and see if I have good luck … that’s nice … music. The wireless plays and she holds the churn steady with one hand and turns with the other. The music stops and a woman’s voice says … We interrupt Workers’ Playtime this morning with an announcement for listeners in the West Midlands.
She says … That’s us … sshh … keep quiet and listen …
This is an announcement … there will be interference throughout today … allied radar operations are expected to continue … I repeat … expect interference … for the time being we return you to Workers’ Playtime with the BBC Light Orchestra.
My mother says … That must be our silver … I wish they told us whether anything to do with it is dangerous … can you see butter beginning … it’s time this cream hurried up.
I say … Yellow bits are coming.
She says … And they’re sticking together … in summertime cream can get too warm … three cheers.
I say … I see a lump … can I churn … and you watch?
She says … No … I’ll keep going … it won’t be long now …
She lifts out the butter on wood paddles and drops the lump into a white cooking bowl and rinses it under the cold tap and paddle-squeezes the lump so the water clouds. On a wet board on the kitchen table she breaks the lump into six and slaps and rolls. I lift grooved pats with two silver spoons onto white greaseproof paper laid on a blue willow pattern plate and my mother carries the plate into the larder and says … That’s done … one each for Griff and Joe and Mrs Fish and for us and two for sale now I’m not getting cigarettes … the coal shed cats can drink up leftover buttermilk.
In the afternoon rain begins. The cows tramp across the yard to milking and back again and my mother says … You can keep all the silver you’ve already collected in your room … do not touch any more.
My father writes
… I had such a lovely holiday with my Bear and seem to hate coming back here more every time. And now it is so horrid here into the bargain with the whole thing getting worse and worse and more and more officers and men going away. I have just got a further demand in for another ten officers making a total of twenty-seven now gone. I really don’t know how I am going to carry on and keep the spirit of the Regiment up.
All my love, my darlingest. Take care of your special self and keep the home fires burning. Shall be home again soon. God bless you my Bear and our little Bear.
Someone sends my mother an anonymous note: … Your husband behaves as if he has forgotten he has a wife. She reaches him by telephone and says … If you prefer someone else then I do not want to be married … that’s all I shall ever say … it is your choice and always will be.
He writes
… how could you say such horrible things on the telephone … I have never been unfaithful to you. Don’t do that again. Ever.
He signs the letter … Bertie.
I sleep in her bedroom and in the dark I hear her say … Alec … Alec … is that you?
A man’s voice calls … May … May … are you awake? She lights her candle and he walks in the bedroom and sits on her pink eiderdown. Gold braid rings shine on his sleeves. He opens a leather suitcase and hands her a cellophane packet. She pulls out stockings and waves transparent legs and says … Nylons … Alec thank you … have you really been in New York …
And he says … That Mecca for synthetic goods designed to keep the female of the species in good heart.
He opens a square tin box full of pale-brown square and oval shapes. In some centres is red jam. My mother points thick chilblain fingers and takes one and says to me … Biscuits … have a bite … lovely … mm-mmm.
Uncle Alec is my father’s brother. A captain in the Royal Navy on Atlantic Convoy duty. He says … The milking herd all in good heart I trust … particularly my beloved Baroness … and the garden … it is very nice indeed to be here … I shall indulge in a first-class kip and join you a.m. … good night my dear … good night monkey face.
His footsteps criss-cross the floor above and my mother’s eyes grow big and dark eating sugary biscuits in candlelight. She falls asleep on her white pillows. Her nightdress is turquoise silk. Mine is yellow cotton. I shift my legs in bed and things scratch and prickle. I call out … Quick … I’ve got wasps … quick … in the sheets … quick …
My mother sits up and says … It’s only biscuit crumbs … kneel up on the pillow. She leans over and her hands sweep the sheets and I can see her hands in the Dutch oval dressing-table mirror across the room.
My father writes
I wonder if one day we could introduce Rhododendrons to grow at home. They would look so lovely. A clump or two near the big beech trees in Fishpond Wood looking down at the house. All the new kinds. Pink and crimson.
On our latest exercise Wyndham surpassed himself by capturing a Brigadier on the enemy side and holding him prisoner … the poor man was driving peaceably to his brigade HQ from his house! He was needless to say furious.
I hear the great ‘Monty’ is fairly going wild visiting all his troops. Nobody is safe! We shall have him here shortly and you will probably have me back farming for good the week after!!
No more now, but to send all my love. It is a long time since I had one of your nice letters with all the news of home and I do look forward to them.
In the kitchen she stands me on a padded horsehair seat and shakes soil off carrots on newspaper on the table and says … One … two … three … four carrots. She tugs the oven door and pulls at a black iron pot and says … Listen to him growl. She pours water from the black kettle into the rabbit stew and prods pieces of pale haunch with a silver fork and screws up her nose and shoves the pot back in the oven and opens a letter.
15 March 1944. I have been on what the fortune tellers call ‘a long journey’. Sent for suddenly in London and then onto the Isle of Wight. Back here very tired. Have to memorise difficult orders and maps without any notes. It is all very very interesting. Difficult and rather important problems. I am inclined to feel tired in mind and brain.
My new teeth were finished last week and now I have a dazzling smile with a complete set fixed more than firmly in my mouth. I can’t get accustomed to it at all after so long playing with my loose plate. So it is hell and almost requires a spanner to get it out at night.
Your threshing results are very good. The Cotswolds may not be arable country but by good cultivations you seem to knock jolly fine crops out of that light land. Don’t forget Nitro-chalk. If we get the results using it that I see up here it will give you valuable early feed for the herd while other pastures come on.
Sunday, 19 March 1944. I think I have found you a better more reliable wireless set and a carthorse. Will let you know. Have roughed off my three young horses up here and they graze out in the park by day.
In June 1944 he is in a wire pen on the Isle of Wight with his soldiers and armoured cars. On 6 June the Allied invasion of France starts and he fights ashore on Juno beach with instructions to destroy bridges on the River Orne behind the enemy lines.
In summer 1945 he comes home on leave and for the rest of his life he shouts in his dreams at night. After wartime he sleeps mostly in his dressing room next door to me. I go in and see him thrash and wave his arms in the light of my torch. He yells … For Christ’s sake … Sunray … Sunray … come in … come in … dear God … you bloody Yanks … do you read … do you read … and he weeps … Goddam you all.
(Sung to the tune ‘D’ye ken John Peel’ – eighteenth-century ballad)
D’ye ken Bertie Bingley with his face so red?
D’ye ken Bertie Bingley with no hair upon his head?
D’ye ken Bertie Bingley when he’s just got out of bed
And he can’t find his teeth in the morning?
T’was the crack of his two-pounder brought me from my bed
And the roar of the Daimlers which he oft-times led
For the rattle of his coax would awaken the dead,
Or Jerry in his lager in the morning.
Chorus
Ay, I ken Bertie Bingley and the rest of them too,
From the majors to the troopers they’re the Devil’s Own crew
And they live on porridge, whisky and stew
And they’re randy as a stallion in the morning.
Chorus (repeat)
So here’s to Bertie Bingley and his men the Inns of Court
For they know all the Devilry and tricks that he has taught
And here’s to the day when to victory they’ve fought
And they’re up on the Rhine in the morning.
Chorus (repeat)
I keep the torch under my pillow to light the way across my carpet and up the back passage steps into his room. I put the torch down on his chest of drawers … Words aren’t any use … my mother says … It’s only hitting him hard on the chest that wakes him up … there’s no knowing why … I lean forward towards him on tiptoe. He swipes with an open hand and knocks me backwards. I fall over on the bronze-and-yellow Afghan rug in my nightdress and get up and rush at him and punch his chest.
Then his arms drop on the bed and lie still in blue-striped pyjama sleeves and his eyes open and he looks at me and says … Hello-hello … what’s up … not asleep … off you go back to bed … into the arms of Morpheus … we’ll have a first-rate jolly in the morning.
Sometimes I hear him shout and I stay in my bed and lean over the side and wind up the gramophone and play my four 78 r.p.m. records: ‘Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line’ with ‘Run Rabbit Run’. ‘You’ll Take the High Road and I’ll Take the Low Road’ with ‘Speed Bonny Boat’. ‘Sounds from the Hunting Field’ – side one and side two. When I put on ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’ I sing along with a man … If you go down to the woods today … you’re sure of a big surprise … today’s the day the teddy bears have their picnic … picnic time for teddy bears …
3 MRS FISH (#ulink_10fab35a-b328-56be-9e8f-acf6d715b26c)
I put my fingers in my ears and run up the yard to the woodsaw that is screaming in the cart shed. Mr Munday pushes apple branches at circular whirling teeth spinning in and out of a slit in an iron table. A running tractor engine powers a long wide-webbed belt looped on the saw arm. As each slit log opens sawdust flies and a sawn log tumbles off the table. The saw whines until Munday feeds the branches to the spinning teeth again. I run back down the yard and unblock my ears going indoors.
In the kitchen jodhpur sweat is boiling out in a black cauldron before Mrs Fish scrubs the legs. My mother says … Shall we make a cake or meringues … I’ve got eggs to use up and enough sugar. I twiddle the wireless knob and see Mr Munday’s knuckles knock at glass in the kitchen door. My mother says … Open it for him … there must be something he wants.
Mr Munday comes in and one hand holds the other and his brown hand-knitted vest has wet patches and he says … The saw had my fingers off.
My mother pushes a black saucepan off a hot Esse plate and closes the chrome mushroom lid. She picks up a tumbler off the drainer and turns a tap and fills the glass and pushes the rim at Munday’s mouth and says … Drink some water … I can hold it for you … water will help … well done … that is enough … lift your hands up higher … up near your shoulder … keep as still as you can.
She tears a roller towel down the seam and tips two silver safety pins out of a jam jar by the wireless and says to me … Get cotton wool out of the dresser drawer. She wraps a sling round Munday’s chest and sticks in a pin at the back of his collarless shirt and a pin at the back of his elbow and looks in the sling and says … Give me the roll … and stuffs in all the cotton wool. She rinses blood off her hand under the tap and says … Come on … hurry … in the van … quickly … I’ll get the saddle room cotton wool … you jump in … Mr Munday in the front.
I run ahead and open the van door and clamber between the front seats onto the corrugated tin floor and pull a blue-and-yellow-checked horse rug flat. Mr Munday sits down sideways in the passenger seat and faces the house and I say … Put your feet in Mr Munday … I’ll do your door.
I clamber out of the van and run round the bonnet past the silver fox galloping in a horseshoe and slam his door and run back round and climb in again over the driver’s seat and my mother races down the yard in her blue dungarees and blue canvas lace-ups with hard jelly soles and says … Good girl.
She leans over the gearstick and unrolls the white cotton wool pad in royal-blue paper and stuffs a handful inside the blue-and-white-striped towel sling. Her hands get wet and she wipes cotton wool up her fingers and drops the red-and-white sticky lump by her feet. She starts the van. She backs past pigsties and swerves by the barn. The van roars up through the gateway past granary steps and the tractor shed’s dark-green corrugated door in bottom gear and stops at the cart shed by the tractor.
The saw whines and whirls and my mother leans over the spinning belt to the tractor and the blade slows down. She looks at the sawdust and kneels on one knee and reaches under the table and picks up – once and twice – and runs to the van and says … Don’t look … look away … both of you … and I see a fingernail black round the rim and cuticle and cut skin end and a second finger.
She puts Mr Munday’s cut-off fingers in cotton wool and wraps them in dirty green velvet she keeps for cleaning the windscreen and pushes the bundle onto the glove ledge in front of her knees beside a torch and a spanner and says … All right in the back … well done … sit on the rug … you made a good start on the wood, Munday … it is bad luck … they will take you in right away at the hospital … I will make sure you are seen to … then I can drive home and find Mrs Munday and bring her down … does she do up at Foxcote today … am I right? … until Jimmy comes home from school.
Mr Munday doesn’t speak. The van hits potholes by Sheep Dip hump and uphill by Five Acre and Triangle Field. My mother steers zigzags to miss the bumps and at the red gate on the main road she corners and changes gear up to top on the level past Wistley Common. At Chatcombe Hill brow she goes down into second and accelerates through the double bend along the rim of the steep drop to Chatcombe Wood edge and at Seven Springs she says … Look left Mr Munday … if you are well enough … anything coming on the Cirencester road … and he stares ahead.
She brakes and looks left to Cirencester and straight across towards Gloucester and right to Cheltenham. She takes her chance and accelerates right and freewheels down Leckhampton Hill and says … Now we are moving … it is good luck the road is clear for us … the dry wood left from last winter is enough for you Munday … and for us … plus two loads for Joe … and for Mrs Fish … we can use any old there is and add the new when you are well enough to carry on … there is plenty to creosote for now … that will be easier for you … larch posts for Grindstone fencing … and stable doors … the creosoting will keep you going … I will make sure there is work for you … Joe can take on things that need shifting … how are you holding up … not far now.
In Charlton Kings suburbs she says … Shall I risk it … thirty miles an hour will not get us there in a hurry … I am going to hope for the best. She cuts the red lights at the Prestbury Gymkhana field crossroads and says … Needs must … and she and I chant … When the devil drives … and the van corners right hard and right again onto gravel and stops and she looks back at me and says … You stay there … I won’t be long … I promise … if I have to be I will come to get you … out you get Munday … we will have those fingers stitched on again in no time … if that is at all possible.
She walks up the hospital steps and opens the door for Mr Munday and holds the velvet bundle in her other hand.
Mr Munday’s bloody vest comes home in brown paper and my mother hands it to Mrs Fish and says … Mr Munday had a bad time … two fingers lost on the circular saw … will you soak his vest … if it dries he will have it when he comes back from hospital … which hopefully will be before tonight.
She says to me … You stay here with Mrs Fish … I don’t know what time I will be back … have a hunt for eggs in the top barns … I see one hen going in and out … she may be thinking of sitting … if you count six or more in a nest we will move her into a coop … thank you Mrs Fish … the wireless says afternoon weather is uncertain … good luck with the drying.
Mrs Fish drops Mr Munday’s vest in a white enamel bucket of cold water and colours thicken from pale pink swirls to crimson. She turns back to the white china sink and her Woodbine ash falls and powders my mother’s pink brassieres and silk peach camiknickers and linen blouses and blue dungarees piled on the flagstone floor. Her orange ringlets bounce under a bright-green crocheted beret she keeps on indoors and she leans forward in hot water steam. Her splashed crossover cotton apron has flower faces and the black plimsoles she keeps in the coal shed and changes into from white rubber boots have no laces.
I go in the larder and scoop up food in my fingers. Pastry crust on rabbit pie and rice pudding from under brown skin and pale-pink rhubarb fool. I watch Mrs Fish through larder door hinges. She dangles jodhpurs on a thick wooden spoon. Dirty water trickles in the sink and she dumps the sopping wet lump on the drainer and spreads the legs and scrubs at buckskin thighs with yellow Sunlight soap.
I tip up a glass bottle of Kia-Ora orange squash and the bottle mouth knocks my front teeth and I lick hurt nerves. Three chrome thermoses for harvest teas stand in a row and under the slate shelf cider and ginger beer and Guinness brown glass bottles fill a cardboard box and a note says … Brown bottles – keep out of light.
I stand beside Mrs Fish at the sink and run cold water in a glass of orange squash. She hisses … Get me a gin then … go on … you heard. She grins and the Woodbine sticks to a lip and her teeth close on the little cigarette.
I can hear my father saying when he was home on leave … Here’s to mother’s ruin … and see him lift a cut-glass tumbler of gin and fizzy tonic … Shall we celebrate our beloved home by getting nicely foxed … what say you … how’s that for the best idea the Colonel has had all day … and he sips from the glass and says … That washerwoman has been at the gin again … she damned well has … taste this … it’s simply awful … watered down to cat’s piss … she will simply have to go … I will not tolerate petty thieving in my house … I most certainly will not.
Mrs Fish puts her face close to mine … If I don’t get my gin I’ll tie these sodding jodhpurs round your neck … I am telling you.
Her wet red fingers open and the soap bar slips underwater. She pulls a blue-and-white stained tea towel off the Esse chrome rail and twists the linen in her hands and shoves the tea towel back and walks down the long white dining room her black plimsoles squeaking.
The dining room has a rosewood sideboard spinette. The keyboard has been sawed out and there it stands ruined and pretty at the end of the dining room and along the polished top stands Dutch and Irish and English silver. A rosebowl engraved with my mother’s maiden name – ‘May Lenox-Conyngham – 1936 Pytchley Hunt Ladies’ Race’. Two silver cock pheasants … one pecking and one peering sideways. Two filigree jam pots with silver coolie hat lids and blue glass jars and a silver filigree pattern of tigers climbing flowers. Four glass decanters line up in grooved oak coasters with circular silver miniature picket fences. An Irish Waterford crystal decanter pair hold dark-crimson port and brown sherry. Two square Dutch ship’s decanters hold transparent gin and tawny whisky.
Mrs Fish pours three fingers of gin and carries the tumbler and decanter to the kitchen and runs cold water in the decanter and holds the glass neck out to me and says … You put it back … go on … I’m telling you. Her soapy fingers slip and I catch and hug the cut-glass and tiptoe to the sideboard and say under my breath … Don’t drop … don’t drop … and think I can hear my father’s voice shout … What the bloody hell is going on in here … I damned well want to know … speak up.
Mrs Fish drinks half a glass of gin and leans on the kitchen table and coughs. Her coughs are rough and brittle. I go out of the kitchen door and run up the yard slopping orange squash on dandelions and stones.
Outside the harness room the mounting block is a two-step concrete throne in sunshine. Behind a creosoted stable door horses’ shoes scratch cement and straw shifts under a pony’s feet. A crow flies over to Fishpond Wood. My father’s horse kicks a pine partition plank and splinters break. A horsefly comes at my face and swerves. My black pony hangs his head over a half-door and sighs and pricks his ears. I see creosote blister on stable doors facing south. Mrs Fish carries a clothes basket out of the kitchen door and weaves up coal shed cinder path and drops the basket. A forked ash pole props the washing line and Mrs Fish gives the pole a slap so the fork slides down the wire and the line sinks. She flings wet clothes up over the wire and clips stripped bark hazel pegs on overlaps of jodhpurs … knickers … blouses … brassieres … nightdresses … vests … dungarees. She stands on two sawn-off logs and throws white sheets up and over and steps down and tugs the sheets flat along the wire. Under the oak branches she does a dance with the forked ash pole to hoist the line and the wet clothes rise up and flap between the tree and coal shed roof.
I go in the stable and dandy-brush dust out of the black pony’s silky summer coat and finger yellow wavy dandy bristles and hold up my hand in sunlight strips of dust. I hear Mrs Fish’s gumboots flap up the stable path and she looks in over the half-door … You can take me back home now … get him out …
I say … No thanks …
And she says … Get him out here … I’m telling you.
She slams back the barrel bolt and the pony’s head jerks up and I push his face in a webbing halter and lead the pony. Mrs Fish steps up on the mounting block under swallows playing in the blue sky. She lifts one white gumboot and hops a circle on her other foot and says … Come on then … bring him close … And I say … I’ve got to get on first.
I vault on off the ground and ride past the mounting block and she steps behind me across the pony’s broad back. We turn out of the yard and start down Rickyard Lane. White elder flowers big as saucers lean over stone walls on either side. Mrs Fish begins to sing … If you were the only boy in the world, and I was the only girl … in a sweet, husky treble and I groan.
At Fiveacre gate the stream parts clumps of gold kingcups and goes under the lane and oak and ash and larch grow along steep slopes either side and the path gets darker. Low branches stretch across and meet. The pony walks in hardly any light. Mrs Fish finishes singing ‘God Save the King’ and begins … If you walk through a storm hold your head up high and don’t be afraid of the dark … and we come to the wide-open Valley gate. The pony trots across baked mud ruts and starts to canter on the grass and I yell … I can’t stop him … and Mrs Fish shouts close to my ear … Let him go then.
Her bony arms are tight round my waist and her fingers hold a butcher’s grip. The galloping pony rocks. I pull up my knees and crouch and grip mane hair in both hands and hold the halter rope. Mrs Fish leans her chest on my back.
The pony gallops flat out over Valley cowslips and thistles. Rabbits run past bluebells and disappear down warrens in trees. Hoofbeats rumble and jays scream. A pigeon swerves above us as we race down the long bright-green strip. Where the woods end a chaotic plan of anthills circles Alexandra’s Gorse hillside. Green tumps bulge high as the pony’s knees and at a tall one the pony swerves downhill. Gravity pulls Mrs Fish sideways and she hugs me tightly. Her thighs slip. Our bodies cling and wobble and our legs stick out sideways and wave.
Mrs Fish and I fall … rolling over gorse twigs … stuck by green gorse needles … squashing yellow gorse flowers … red ants scurry … lucky for us ancient grass is spongy. We sit up side by side between anthills puffing hard. Downhill the pony pulls couch grass and mows small brilliant blue speedwell flowers and Mrs Fish says … Go on then … fetch him up here.
A rabbit skims a gorse bush and scuds uphill to the wicket gate and the flowering horse-chestnut tree and the pony’s head comes up and his ears prick.
I say to Mrs Fish … Stand on an anthill … and I tug the pony up close and say … Bend your knee … one two three … and I lift her foot and she lands astride. I jump off the bouncy anthill behind her.
The pony walks to the Valley end and I see smoke from Mrs Fish’s cottage and above Windmill blackthorn spinney grey windmill blades spin on a frame of legs and bars. Mrs Fish sings hymns – ‘For Those in Peril on the Sea’ and ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ and ‘And Did Those Feet in Ancient Times’ – up to Needlehole Cottages. In the paddock the scent of dead lilac and cow-parsley and wood and stone blow past and I slide off and Mrs Fish swings her gumboot across the pony’s neck. She sits side-saddle and slips down and I pull the pony round the way we came. Mrs Fish says … I’ll have a ride back after Betty comes in for tea.
She hauls a split elm rail across the paddock track and pokes it in a horseshoe nailed on the gatepost and says … I’ll fetch water … you let him go.
Dog roses grow up broken walls and stick through empty pigsty windows. Orange marigolds flower against a dark-green water-butt. Mrs Fish drops in a wooden bucket for water. The pony pulls at roses. Mrs Fish shouts … Get him off the flowers.
She throws a stone so the wall rings. The pony backs away. She lugs the bucket up the garden path and water slips inside her white rubber boot. The pony drinks and huffs. His breathing starts a whirlpool in the bucket. He sucks and gulps and his long top hairstar lip wipes inside the rim and the bucket falls over and rolls and rattles. His front legs rear up towards Halfmoon Spinney and he prances along the trees with his nostrils flared and his tail crooked high. He halts and his knees and hocks fold and he sinks on the grass and rolls and chucks his body side to side and gallops his legs upside down. He sits front legs straight and stands and shakes his skin and starts to graze.
Mrs Fish says … You come along indoors.
I cross my legs and stand still. She opens the blue front door and looks round and shouts … The privy’s round the back.
I hear water pour and wood fall inside the cottage. I can’t see past geranium flowers and green leaves clambering up smeared window-panes. I go along a grass strip between carrot rows and peas twined in hazel sticks to a corrugated-iron hut. I shove my finger in an opening and lift a wire hook. Inside the hut torn newspaper hangs on mouldy green string and a circle is cut in board on a box and down the hole is black water and floating brown lumps and the smell’s sweet rotted muck. I hunch off dungaree straps with my thumbs and shove down white cotton knickers and sit on the damp wood ring and shut my eyes tight. I can hear piss splash and see pink garden worms and shiny grey slugs crawl on my skin.
I don’t touch the paper flaps. I hoist up knicker elastic and trouser bib and one strap and lift the hook and run along the grass path strip.
Mrs Fish’s lovely daughter Betty comes in the garden gate. She is taller than Mrs Fish. Her auburn hair shines in the sun. She wears a white cotton puff-sleeve blouse and daffodil-yellow full gathered skirt and white ankle socks and slip-on black elastic plimsoles. Her blue eyes look my way. She smiles my father’s smile and says … You coming in?
I don’t follow her. In the paddock the backs of my legs press the drystone wall. I pick off yellow lichen cushions and hear chair legs scratch brick floor. The sun goes in. Swallows fly low over the two cottage chimneys. The cold breeze raises goose bumps on my skin. I lean on the pony’s withers and fold my arms and put my cheek on my hands and when he steps I step.
Rain begins. I turn over the water bucket and step up and spring off onto the pony and whack his neck with the halter rope knot.
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Xandra Bingley
A lyrical, evocative and wonderfully original wartime memoir about life on a farm in the Cotswolds, seen through the eyes of a child.‘Bertie, May and Mrs Fish’ is Xandra Bingley’s account of her childhood on a Cotswold farm, set against the backdrop of World War II and its aftermath. Bingley’s mother is left to farm the land, isolated in the landscape, whilst her husband is away at war. With its eccentric cast of characters, this book captures both the essence of a country childhood and the remarkable courage and resilience displayed by ordinary people during the war. The beauty and sensitivity of Bingley’s observation is artfully balanced by the harshness and grit of her reality.‘In the cowshed my mother ties her hair in a topknot scarf that lies on the feedbin lid. At five-thirty each morning and four o’clock in the afternoons she chases rats off the mangers. She measures cowcake and rolled oats and opens the bottom cowshed door. Thirty-one brown and white Ayrshires and one brindle Jersey tramp into their stalls…’‘Two thousand acres. A mile of valley. Horses cattle sheep pigs poultry. Snow above the lintels of the downstairs windows. Her fingers swelling. Chilblains. Her long white kid gloves wrapped around a leaky pipe in her bedroom. Knotted at the fingers. She has a lot to learn and no one to teach her. Accidents happen.'Bingley tells her tale in a startling voice which captures the universe of a child, the unforgiving landscape and the complicated adult world surrounding her. Her acute observation, and her gift for place, people, sound and touch make this a brilliantly authentic and evocative portrait.
BERTIE, MAY AND MRS FISH
Country Memories of Wartime
Xandra Bingley
Copyright (#ulink_1bda595f-ef45-5c60-9e10-c5db7c03e98b)
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
This edition published by Harper Perennial 2006
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2005
Copyright © Xandra Bingley 2005
PS Section © Xandra Bingley 2006
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Xandra Bingley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007149513
Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2012 ISBN 9780007370917
Version: 2019-06-18
Note to Readers (#ulink_80ca5f67-c4d9-52b9-902a-4db3e7648f61)
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Dedication (#ueba158e2-aa52-5dba-9cf9-f3cefe754096)
For my grandparents Elizabeth and Noel Bingley Eva and Hubert Lenox-Conyngham
Contents
Cover (#u774e0a13-4606-54fa-bd68-589e2b02d662)
Title Page (#ud3ace2de-1b22-504d-be63-83b9d3d63948)
Copyright (#uc248ff1f-b280-5407-be59-d3583f5746c6)
Note to Readers (#u59a78380-e103-5c33-946f-806ce96dcd6a)
Dedication (#ubdbcbaf3-a60c-5e5f-8744-49881a81303c)
Introductions (#ucf562553-f2b6-5413-9869-d0ea84c6e5fa)
1 HOMEFIELD (#u01ae1213-c6ff-5dd6-9cc3-649fd98ce824)
2 WARTIME (#u2b3ed762-8d9b-5bfa-b6b2-e8982fec65ec)
3 MRS FISH (#u1703bacc-2a6b-569c-9751-cd193ac4a7a8)
4 COWS (#litres_trial_promo)
5 YARD (#litres_trial_promo)
6 PATRICK (#litres_trial_promo)
7 NIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
8 BLESSINGS (#litres_trial_promo)
9 HUNTING (#litres_trial_promo)
10 KISS-ME-QUICK (#litres_trial_promo)
11 HORSE (#litres_trial_promo)
12 CHRISTMAS (#litres_trial_promo)
13 GALLOP AWAY (#litres_trial_promo)
P.S. Ideas, Interviews & Features … (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Q and A with Xandra Bingley
Life at a Glance (#litres_trial_promo)
Top Ten Favourite Books (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Book (#litres_trial_promo)
How My Memory Works (#litres_trial_promo)
Read On (#litres_trial_promo)
If You Loved This, You Might Like … (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Introductions (#ulink_cfea1067-4ea4-50ef-aa66-7d45bd5e6d28)
It never harms to exaggerate in the direction of truth.
Henri Matisse, to an art student
Across the snowy hills some galloping horsemen are chasing a single horseman. He is beating his horse and racing away downhill to escape. He reaches flat white land and gallops on and on, looking over his shoulder, beating his horse. The others do not follow him away from the hills.
At last he arrives at a village exhausted and people crowd around him and exclaim, ‘You are safe … it is wonderful … we never believed you would get here.’ He says, ‘I can tell you I was afraid, they got close to me up in the hills.’
The people say, ‘No – no – you do not understand … it is a miracle … you have ridden across the lake … underneath the ice is water a mile deep.’
Then he dies. From fear of a danger he did not know he was in.
German fable
1 HOMEFIELD (#ulink_45b24576-de6d-5d30-8c7e-cf7d341ecf67)
After wartime my father sends home bales of midnight-blue and plum-red velvet for downstairs curtains, a cinecamera and roll-down screen, two black bearskin coats, a touring Bentley and a dinner service for twelve of creamy rippling Copenhagen china hand-painted with wildflowers.
He writes to my mother … Now we’ll have some damned good fun.
And that’s what he says when he is home on leave and a thousand daffodil and narcissus bulbs arrive from Holland in plywood boxes. He spills whitewash from a blue speckled tin bucket in a half-moon arc from the coal shed oak to the damson tree by the bridge on the Rushy Brook stream and marks off half an acre of Homefield and shouts … Mind out of the way you bloody child … as I run over his white line. I am four years old and not afraid.
A post and rails goes up along the marker line. Joe Rummings slams the iron crowbar in the ground. Griff drops spiked ash stakes in the holes and swings an oak mallet. The Ayrshire milking herd chew cud in Homefield and watch nails hammered into split ash rails.
My father walks about with a box. He swings up one arm and throws a handful of bulbs that spray the pale blue autumn sky. Then he is gone.
My mother kneels for days in the grass and jabs a trowel where each bulb fell. Turf splits and she drops one in and smacks the trowel down once twice three times and shuts each grass lid.
Daffodils grow and flower and lean and break in the winds that blow across our farm in the Cotswold hills. In springtime I snap off stalks and my father arrives home and shouts … Pick the broken buggers first old girl … must experiment using your brain one of these fine days … bloody east wind.
Fifty years later I am by Juno beach on the French Normandy coast where his Inns of Court invasion troops landed in the Second World War. Dune grass blows east and my father’s wartime padre, code name Sunray, strides past in white cassock flapping in the breeze and a Hans Holbein black hat. Soldiers hold up embroidered flags on polished wooden poles tipped by fluted steel knives. The Union Jack and the French flag lie over a carved memorial stone beside a country road. War veterans wear medals and hold flags embroidered combatants. Four hundred of us stand with French families in the sun and the Inns of Court regimental band plays tunes from Cavalleria Rusticana.
An Inns of Court officer steps up to the dais and speaks. ‘For the sake of freedom – a suicidal mission – our men never gave up – covered a wider area than any other military unit – with this act of dedication we bridge the gap between this world and the next.’
Down go the flowers. Wreath after wreath. Poppies, marigolds, daisies, phlox, poppies, daisies.
A soldier at attention by the memorial stone falls forward on his face on the grass. Two others drag his body behind the loudspeaker van. From the ranks another steps forward to take his place. The regimental band play my father’s favourite hymn: ‘Praise My Soul the King of Heaven’ … and the padre reads, ‘We meet in the presence of Almighty God to commemorate this day.’
Nearly all of us weep. I remember my father, with his white hair round his bald head and wearing green corduroys and a navy-blue jersey, coming past the corner of top barn, arms held open wide saying … Fancy our meeting … when times are so fleeting … to what do I owe the great honour of your presence on this perfect summer morning … what say a small celebration is in order … a cup of Mr Bournville’s famous chocolate lightly stirred into fresh milk … agree … and I can hear my mother’s voice call … Any shopping wanted from Cheltenham … I’m taking a broken bridle down … I’ll be home by lunchtime.
The dedication of the Normandy landing regimental memorial stone is over. Soldiers march to a farm courtyard in the village of Graye-sur-Mer. Champagne and chocolate biscuits are handed out. Chocolate melts in my fingers and a French lady says to me, ‘I remember the war very well, madame, we were very hungry, oui ça c’est certain, mais …’ She shrugs and smiles. We look into each other’s eyes and down at the melting chocolate she offers me and we laugh and she says, ‘Il faut rire, madame, we must laugh savez-vous.’
I say, ‘Oui, merci, it is true.’
The mayor of Graye-sur-Mer says to me, ‘When I was a child I must go with no shoes. Certain things are not remembered. My family are going in the fields at night for food. It is food for cows. I do not know the names.’
I say, ‘Turnips, swedes, mangolds.’
He says, ‘C’est ça. If they see us the enemy shoot.’
I say, ‘Is there nothing left in the shops for you to buy?’
And he says, ‘Pour les collaborateurs … bien sûr, madame, there is everything.’
A Frenchman in a black beret reaches up and embraces me and says, ‘Madame, I live at Jerusalem Crossroads, a hamlet. The British soldiers come. We give them wine and flowers and tell them “Thank you.” We hear aeroplanes. A soldier calls, ‘It is Yanks, OK, OK, yellow – yellow.’ The soldier quickly spreads yellow silk squares on the two vehicles. A yellow smoke goes up into the sky. The driver says, ‘It is for the Yanks to see we are les amis.’ The American planes fly over firing. I run away with another boy. When I return, all Jerusalem Crossroads and all the soldiers are dead. I think I am lucky to be here with you today. It is a great honour and I say thank you, for your father. You are proud of him? I think so.’
British officer veterans drink French champagne and laugh and tell me, ‘We shouldn’t laugh, we oughtn’t to.’
I say, ‘Why not?’
They say, ‘We’re remembering hunting a Hun along Juno beach. Bloody hell he ran. We got him with the flail tank chains.’
I ask, ‘What are flail tank chains for?’
One says, ‘For mine-sweeping. Tank bars on the front swing the chains and find mines hidden under sand.’
Outside the farm courtyard I stand in wildflowers and lean on a sunny stone wall and look at a field of pale-cream Charolet cattle and hum ‘Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring’, and hear my father’s high tenor voice descant. I see him walk across our farmyard past a downstairs window and look in. I am piling up pennies and half-pennies on his desk and Gigi is playing on the radiogram. He shouts at the window … Turn that bloody man off … turn that man off … do you hear me … at once. Maurice Chevalier is singing … Thank ’eaven for leetle girls … for leetle girls grow bigger every day … thank ’eaven for leet-le girls … I open the window and he stammers … I w-will n-not … r-repeat n-not … h-have d-damned c-collaborateurs in m-my h-home.
I turn off the radiogram and he calls from the hall … That’s m-more like it … the so-and-so should be locked up by rights … one first-class slippery customer … or after the invasion we’d have caught him fair and square. Hey-ho … you keep an eagle eye out for cowardly types when your turn comes old girl … that’s my advice.
He closes the window and says … I hear the bastard’s filthy rich these days … three cheers for the ignorant hoi polloi … now who’s next on parade? What say we bring in the beloved horses and give them their tea … jump to it … enough fraternising with the enemy for you today. Did I tell you in confidence I risked the Lion of Judah over Dewpond sliprails … went at them like an Eleventh Hussar trooper … took off from his hocks … only had him in a rubber snaffle … mouth soft as a baby’s bottom.
His brilliant blue eyes look my way and his finger taps his lips … Mum’s the word … shh-hh … if I am called upon to make a confession I shall simply say to your mother … not a hope in hell of stopping a young horse who’s made up his mind to jump a fence … you’ll know that as well as I do. He and I walk up the yard and he sings … Chirri-birri-bin … chirri-birri-bin … I love you so-o …
At Five Acre gate he calls the horses … Come on … come on, girls and boys … teatime … teatime …
I climb the elmwood bars and say … What is a collaborateur …
He says … Not now … not now … keep your mind on one thing at a time … look out … here they come … a fine sight if ever I saw one … open the damned gate … get a move on … don’t stand there coffee-housing like the bloody French … off the bars … I am in no mood to pay for new hinges … that’s more like it … have a leg up onto Glory Boy … then lead on. The rest will follow … if we’re lucky.
I ride bareback up Rickyard Lane astride my father’s tall chestnut and look over the Cotswold grey-stone wall built on Calfpen bank to our hills and woods. He pulls fistfuls of linseed barrel nuts out of his green corduroy trouser pockets. Loose horses follow and push and shove to nuzzle his pockets. We pass the twin stone barns tall as churches and turn down into the farmyard.
My mother’s Irish money buys our Elizabethan farm in 1941, the second summer of World War Two. My father’s Inns of Court regiment is fighting a mock battle on the Cotswold hills and from a high point he looks down and sees what he thinks is a small village or a hamlet in a hollow. He tells his armoured car driver … Head downhill … we’ll make a quick recce … His car roars down Homefield and he finds the deserted farm.
A doll’s house face under triple gables looks at a farmyard circle of stone barns and stables spreading to cattle sheds and lanes. A front door path is between two green squares of lawn edged by sprawling pink roses on a drystone wall. The garden swerves away past a cherry tree and south around two apple trees to the wicket gate at the damson tree by the Rushy Brook stream. The house faces north because Elizabethans believe flies spread the plague and sun shining on windows attracts flies. They are wrong. Xenopsylla cheopsis, the rat flea carries the plague and fleas are brought to England by black rat hosts from China.
He telephones my mother at her Corps headquarters at Camberley south-west of London and says … God willing I’ve found the Bears a home.
My mother has joined the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry – FANYs – created in 1907 to train English girls to gallop on horseback onto battlefields and give first aid to wounded soldiers and carry the injured to field hospitals in horse-drawn ambulances. In the 1930s FANYs become a mechanised Women’s Transport Service. Upper class girls drive and service transport lorries and motorbikes and chauffeur army personnel and chant:
I wish my mother could see me now,With a grease gun under my car,Filling the differentialEre I start for the sea afar,A-top a sheet of frozen iron, in cold that would make you cry.
I used to be in Society once,Danced and hunted and flirted once,Had white hands and complexions once,Now I am a FANY.
She says to me when she is an old lady … I was never lost or behind schedule driving my brigadier-general … even in the blackout on the very long journeys with no car lights, when we went from the north of England all the way down south to Devon.
My father telephones her FANY HQ in summer 1941 and tells her … Steal a tank of petrol and concoct some excuse to drive down here p.d.q. This is a land of milk and honey. I give you my word. Take the London – Oxford A40 road past Burford and Northleach. On the ridge look left-handed across open country. A single clump of trees on the far horizon is the farm boundary. Stay on the A40. Look for a red iron gate in a line of beeches. If you fetch up at Seven Springs crossroads you’ve gone too far. The drive is half a mile of bloody awful potholes. If I’m right – and I’m damned sure I am – this is a home for us for ever. Those old boys knew how to build to last. No flies on the Elizabethans … and no flies on us. We’ll be sheltered on all sides. The Almighty had his eye carefully on our future when the War Office boffins planned today’s regimental exercise.
In their khaki uniforms in his armoured car they dash across the farm. My mother says … It all looks so terribly neglected … could there be something wrong with the land … I wish I knew more about these things … the Valley is nicely sheltered for horses … and the house does have lovely proportions.
White stones scatter the hilly land. Fences are broken walls or cut and laid hedges grown wild into tall bullfinch thorns. Gaps in walls are wide enough to drive a tank through. Gates and stable doors hang off hinges. Water is pumped by a windmill reservoir two miles away at Needlehole at the far end of the farm. Purple thistles and yellow poisonous charlock flower on grassland. Nettles spread inside barn doorways. Wild cats stare from stable drains. Rats run along house walls. In the drawing room a soldiers’ campfire has burnt a hole in the ceiling.
My father says … We will rise above any minor problems … we’re not about to start playing windy buggers. Not now we’ve found this heavenly place … quite right we’re not … no siree. We’ll invite your bank manager to a slap-up lunch at the Cavalry Club. A bank manager lunching with a bloody colonel in Piccadilly … he will think he is going up in the world. We’ll never look back … you mark my words.
In September 1940 the Blitz begins and a year later my mother’s Irish Georgian furniture arrives at the farm in a horsebox with her motorbike-sidecar. My father has gone north to Yorkshire to train his Inns of Court lawyer soldiers – the Devil’s Own – to fight like hell when their time comes.
Her lights are paraffin oil lamps and she cooks on a knee-high coal range with a hot iron square over one oven. Her heating is paraffin stoves until she hammers a nail into a wall to hang a picture in the drawing room. My father comes home and says … Who’d have thought a nail going through a wall like butter would produce a magnificent Elizabethan open fireplace … and he sings … Praise my soul the King of heaven …
She sells her blue Rover and her motorbike and buys a Ford van painted British racing green and has her initials stencilled in gold on both doors and her Pytchley Hunt Point-to-Point Ladies Race silver fox leaping through a horseshoe is screwed on the bonnet.
My father is frustrated soldiering in England between 1940 and 1944. His Eleventh Hussar cavalry brother officers are fighting on the North African front. He is a colonel training lawyers to be soldiers. He writes home from Yorkshire barracks:
I can’t tell you how much I miss you and our lovely home and wish I was there to help … and then I can’t help wishing I was out there in the hunt for the Boche … so I don’t know what I want. I worry all the time you have too much to do and work too hard. Find some woman to help in the kitchen … or else it’s no fun when I come home on leave.
Never thought you would get the rye and the beans planted. A week with fair weather and the land warm with no frost and our seeds and wheat will all germinate and we shall be established for the winter. The new saw bench means you will be warm. Get lots of wood cut up. Did I remind you no one must touch the machine until covered under the Workman’s Compensation Act in our insurance policy. If someone cuts their hand off it is liable to be expensive!
I miss you and everything so very much and long to be home doing something useful. Have been on a damned badly run armoured battle. Sent up by the General on to the enemy’s position to view the attack and give an opinion. Such a bad show that I am at a loss what to say or do. Came back before the end in disgust cold and disheartened. All my love from your own lonely Big Bear.
She props a prayer written in Gothic script and illuminated gold and blue capitals on the kitchen dresser – May He support us all the Day long … Until the Shadows lengthen and Evening comes – and reads his next letter:
… As it was my birthday I was allowed by the Priest to choose hymns for our Regimental Armistice Day Service. We sang ‘New Every Morning Is the Love’, ‘Lead Us Heavenly Father Lead Us’, ‘Now Thank We All Our God’. I had the ‘Nunc Dimittis’ put in … the best of all those things and never heard unless one goes in the evening. I wished my Bear was with me at this time.
She learns to farm. Two thousand acres. A mile of valley. Horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, poultry. Snow in winter above the lintels of the downstairs windows. Her fingers swell. Chilblains. Long white kid gloves are wrapped round a leaky pipe in her bedroom knotted at the fingers. She has a lot to learn that no one has taught her. Accidents happen.
2 WARTIME (#ulink_183fc3fa-4edf-5e76-94c9-4c7e0dfa8601)
After two days leave at Christmas my father writes
… thank you for my very lovely and never to be forgotten first holiday in our new home and for all the happiness you have brought me. A terrible anticlimax coming back. I miss you and home as much as I used to as a small boy sent away to school. Our home is our own most perfect special Bears’ castle for ever and always.
His regiment moves further north to a barracks in Northumberland.
… your farmyard is a ballroom compared to my car parks up here. I am having cement roads built by charming German Jew refugees. A Sergeant in charge is Czech and was in an Austrian concentration camp with 20,000 others. A number were ordered to be hanged or shot by Hess for no reason at all. He has written three times to the Home Secretary to ask to be allowed to look after Hess for one night!!!
No more news now darling Bear except to send you all my love and to say how I long to be with you. How splendid about the big new Esse kitchen range stove. The perfection of our lovely home.
In the Pittville Nursing Home in Cheltenham, in snow, in February 1942, she endures a difficult birth and I am born … their Little Bear. My mother writes in her diary … I did not know it would hurt so much.
In springtime my father sends
… coupons for the calf with the usual unanswerable form. Here I am very lonely and far from my Bears and home. What a lovely Easter it was. Our first with our Little Bear and our new home. Both equally lovely. It is heaven and we are so lucky to be so happy. I’m sure few other people are as happy as we are. It all seems to be too good to be true. I have bought you a lovely birthday present Ralli-cart with yellow wheels and good tyres that will look brand new with a coat of varnish. I hope you will like it. When we find a nice pony and borrow a harness it will be a topper and very smart.
A pony is tied to an apple tree on a rope to graze the lawn in circles and I am placed in a wicker basket on the pony’s back. I have an eighty-year-old nanny – Annie Nannie – my mother’s Irish cousins’ nanny forty years before. I must have looked up at branches and apple blossom and warplanes.
Joe Rummings and Mr Griff and Mr Munday are farm labourers too old for call-up. Landgirls are seconded from their work at the Wills Tobacco cigarette factory in Birmingham. A lorry load of Italian prisoners of war is driven in for daily threshing and hoeing and fencing and stone collecting.
Mrs Griffin walks two miles from Kilkenny three times a week and cleans. She squeezes water out of used tea leaves and scatters handfuls on carpets and kneels and bristle-brushes up dirt stuck to the leaves into a red dented tin dustpan. She dusts and wax-polishes Georgian furniture and scours iron saucepans and changes linen sheets and talks and talks all the time to my mother and Mrs Fish and to herself. Mrs Fish walks two miles over the fields from Needlehole to wash and iron bedsheets and clothes two days a week.
He writes
… so pleased to hear you are fixed up with Italian prisoners. Worrying about it on the train I didn’t know how you’d manage. Have been thinking about you all day looking after our Little Bear and keeping the threshing going. Only wish I could be there to help instead of leaving it all on your shoulders. I know we are going to make a success. One always does if one’s heart is really in it and both our hearts are. All my love my darlingest. Soon a lovely holiday together.
The prisoners of war are forbidden to speak. Lined up in the yard in dark-blue jackets and trousers, they call out to me … Che bella bambina … cara … io te adoro … veni … veni qui. A man in dark-blue uniform has a gun in a holster and shouts … No talky … allez … skeddadle … go-go … follow lady on horsy. My mother rides into Homefield leading the line. Each prisoner carries a long-handled hoe over his shoulder. They walk to fields of kale and mangolds and turnips and swedes to hoe out weeds along the rows. In winter the Italians rub their hands and call out … È fredo in Inghilterra … molto molto fredo … è terribile … and my mother smiles and says … Yes … cold … molto coldo.
Landgirls live in the house on the top floor. They sit in the kitchen and smoke cigarettes and cry and turn the battery wireless onto the Light Programme when my mother is not there. A landgirl called Jannie is my nanny after old Annie Nannie goes back to Ireland. My mother barters cigarettes for herself and the girls on the black market in Cheltenham. She drives Merrylegs the dock-tailed Welsh cob seven miles down and seven back uphill every fortnight in the Ralli-cart, and trades homemade butter and fresh eggs and dead rabbits. Until the day she says to the landgirls … Getting us all cigarettes takes up too much time … I am stopping smoking … I shan’t be buying cigarettes in Cheltenham any more for anyone.
A landgirl says … We’ll have to get ours off the Yanks then, won’t we … American airmen are billeted at Guiting Grange. Our landgirls walk down the lane to the pub at Kilkenny in the evenings in gumboots and flowered cotton dresses and mackintoshes. They carry high-heeled shoes and get picked up in US jeeps.
Sometimes a girl comes home in the morning late for milking. One girl cries to my mother … I can’t have a Yankee baby … I told him … I swear I did … and my mother says … we’ll have to get you back home to Birmingham somehow. She writes in her diary … New landgirl up the spout.
My mother is pregnant again and has an abortion in the Pittville Nursing Home in Cheltenham. She does not tell my father. After a first difficult birth she is advised she must not risk having another child.
January and February and March are terribly cold months. One March an east wind blows and the weathervane fox above the granary gallops east for a week. My mother walks out of the house carrying her shotgun and loads two cartridges and aims at the fox. She fires both barrels and says … That should change things … We’ve had enough of this cold east wind. Grey tumbler pigeons fly off the barns and circle high in the sky and the copper fox pirouettes all morning. Joe and Mr Griff and the landgirls stop in the yard and watch the twirling fox. One by one tumblers fall wings closed to a barn and glide to a window ledge. By afternoon the fox slows down facing north.
Her diary says … Why can’t I be happy … I have everything I want … dear God …
He writes
… Eric Bates is having a bad turn. He has had a skin disease for months and that plus the fact that his wife is having a baby seems to have got him down. He sits by the hour with an ashen white face looking straight in front of him refusing to do anything. I try to knock some sense into him but it’s pretty tricky. His wife is in Scotland and due to foal next week.
Last night we played billiards after dinner and everyone got foxed. I broke several very old gramophone records over Basil’s head and he walked round the billiard table saying ‘I’ve never had that done to me before in my whole life’ as if it happens to everyone every day. We all laughed a great deal and it does a lot of good. I get very depressed and feel almost like Eric at times.
No more now my very special Bear. Not so very long to wait now till we see each other again after this lifetime apart. Soon now I shall be with you and we will be happy Bears together with all the spring flowers and sunshine and trees coming out and so much to look at and see with you. Keep your tail up. All my love my darlingest. Your one and only Big Bear.
In the kitchen my mother hears aeroplanes and says … Listen … listen … are they ours … out we run … quick … look … look up … and black wide-winged aeroplanes fly over in lines. At milking time one afternoon a single big grey plane roars low across the barns and clears Fishpond Wood and then the sky gets smoky over Top Field. My mother calls to Jannie my landgirl nanny and me … Stay put in the milking shed … and she and Joe Rummings and Griff pick up pitchforks and run up Homefield.
They walk back down and my mother milks and says … One of theirs crashed … you can’t see properly inside … what’s left is on fire … if they were alive it was not for long … I’ll change Top Field name to Airplane … in memory.
When a white smoke cross is in the sky after two planes pass she says … I hope the cross means those two are protected.
In daytime small planes rattle through the sky and at night slow heavy engines drone over. I sleep in my mother’s bedroom and in the dark she says … Poor pilots have a long way to go … I suppose they get lost sometimes … I hope this lot aren’t for Birmingham.
At breakfast a landgirl comes in the kitchen and unpicks sticky muddy bootlaces listening to the news on the wireless and cries and says to my mother … It isn’t fair … it isn’t sodding fair … it’s all on them … I’m going back home … I won’t sodding stay here … Birmingham is my sisters … you don’t know a sodding thing … you don’t … I don’t darn well care … sodding cows.
My mother says … I will ride down to Andoversford and send a reply-paid telegram to find out how they are … the west did have bad luck last night … I am sorry to say. In the milking shed she says to Joe Rummings … Very likely we’ll be a girl less by afternoon …
And Joe says … She’ll go back where she’s from …
And my mother says … It’s hard on girls sent here from a big town … no news so far if the tobacco factory’s gone.
A small plane flies nearer and she picks me up and runs to the yard. A cloud of silver tinsel falls from the sky onto my mother’s green topknot scarf. Silver hangs on my arms and on her pink linen blouse and her blue dungarees and sticks to my blonde curls. Tangled silver lands on stables and house gables and on barn roof moss. White pigs and brown hens and the one black hen and the grey Chinese geese are all silvery. Her black-and-white spaniel’s floppy ears sparkle. Three horses in Homefield gallop away under falling silver tinsel. Brown apple tree branches and blue delphinium flowers and red and pink and yellow roses and the green lawn and white yard stones are sparkling.
I pick up silver. The plane flies off. Griff freewheels down the yard and silver hangs from his bicycle handles and on his flat brown cap and my mother says … What do you suppose it is all for Griff … it must be all right … or why would they let it out over us … as long as it has nothing to do with mercury … what on earth are they dropping it on us for … so far I can’t see anything that’s fallen down dead … will you help Joe and the girls … I’m going in to turn the wireless on … you never know … we may get information.
In the kitchen she lifts me onto the dresser between the varnished wood wireless and glass butter churn. She turns the brown Bakelite wireless knob clockwise and behind the peacock tail material fan cut into wood a man’s voice fades in crackles … An announcement follows … reception … repeat … will … repeat … expect … and the voice disappears. My mother leans on the dresser and puts her cheek close to the wireless and twiddles the knob and I twist silver in my fingers. She says … Nothing … Düsseldorf … Brussels … Paris … London … nothing from anywhere … I don’t want to waste batteries … you can help me make butter while we listen … and Jannie can come indoors and stay with you while I ride round and make sure everywhere is safe.
She hugs the glass butter churn on the high red dresser top in one arm and untwists the tin screw lid and pours in cream from a wide white tin bowl and dips in wood paddles on a rod fixed into the lid … Thank heavens the cream is nicely cold … or we’d be here all day … it goes quicker since the Baroness calved … her Jersey cream is thicker than Ayrshire … I’ll hold the jar tight and you can turn … stand up on the chair … keep your elbow level with the handle … or you won’t get going fast enough.
The wood handle turns a cogwheel and the cogwheel ratchet teeth bite a small flat wheel that bites a third upright wheel that bites and turns the fourth wheel fixed round the paddle rod. I wind and cream swirls against glass and my mother says … That is going a good gallop … let’s pray it separates.
I watch the glass for butter flecks and my shoulder aches and she says … I’ll take a turn … you watch and see if I have good luck … that’s nice … music. The wireless plays and she holds the churn steady with one hand and turns with the other. The music stops and a woman’s voice says … We interrupt Workers’ Playtime this morning with an announcement for listeners in the West Midlands.
She says … That’s us … sshh … keep quiet and listen …
This is an announcement … there will be interference throughout today … allied radar operations are expected to continue … I repeat … expect interference … for the time being we return you to Workers’ Playtime with the BBC Light Orchestra.
My mother says … That must be our silver … I wish they told us whether anything to do with it is dangerous … can you see butter beginning … it’s time this cream hurried up.
I say … Yellow bits are coming.
She says … And they’re sticking together … in summertime cream can get too warm … three cheers.
I say … I see a lump … can I churn … and you watch?
She says … No … I’ll keep going … it won’t be long now …
She lifts out the butter on wood paddles and drops the lump into a white cooking bowl and rinses it under the cold tap and paddle-squeezes the lump so the water clouds. On a wet board on the kitchen table she breaks the lump into six and slaps and rolls. I lift grooved pats with two silver spoons onto white greaseproof paper laid on a blue willow pattern plate and my mother carries the plate into the larder and says … That’s done … one each for Griff and Joe and Mrs Fish and for us and two for sale now I’m not getting cigarettes … the coal shed cats can drink up leftover buttermilk.
In the afternoon rain begins. The cows tramp across the yard to milking and back again and my mother says … You can keep all the silver you’ve already collected in your room … do not touch any more.
My father writes
… I had such a lovely holiday with my Bear and seem to hate coming back here more every time. And now it is so horrid here into the bargain with the whole thing getting worse and worse and more and more officers and men going away. I have just got a further demand in for another ten officers making a total of twenty-seven now gone. I really don’t know how I am going to carry on and keep the spirit of the Regiment up.
All my love, my darlingest. Take care of your special self and keep the home fires burning. Shall be home again soon. God bless you my Bear and our little Bear.
Someone sends my mother an anonymous note: … Your husband behaves as if he has forgotten he has a wife. She reaches him by telephone and says … If you prefer someone else then I do not want to be married … that’s all I shall ever say … it is your choice and always will be.
He writes
… how could you say such horrible things on the telephone … I have never been unfaithful to you. Don’t do that again. Ever.
He signs the letter … Bertie.
I sleep in her bedroom and in the dark I hear her say … Alec … Alec … is that you?
A man’s voice calls … May … May … are you awake? She lights her candle and he walks in the bedroom and sits on her pink eiderdown. Gold braid rings shine on his sleeves. He opens a leather suitcase and hands her a cellophane packet. She pulls out stockings and waves transparent legs and says … Nylons … Alec thank you … have you really been in New York …
And he says … That Mecca for synthetic goods designed to keep the female of the species in good heart.
He opens a square tin box full of pale-brown square and oval shapes. In some centres is red jam. My mother points thick chilblain fingers and takes one and says to me … Biscuits … have a bite … lovely … mm-mmm.
Uncle Alec is my father’s brother. A captain in the Royal Navy on Atlantic Convoy duty. He says … The milking herd all in good heart I trust … particularly my beloved Baroness … and the garden … it is very nice indeed to be here … I shall indulge in a first-class kip and join you a.m. … good night my dear … good night monkey face.
His footsteps criss-cross the floor above and my mother’s eyes grow big and dark eating sugary biscuits in candlelight. She falls asleep on her white pillows. Her nightdress is turquoise silk. Mine is yellow cotton. I shift my legs in bed and things scratch and prickle. I call out … Quick … I’ve got wasps … quick … in the sheets … quick …
My mother sits up and says … It’s only biscuit crumbs … kneel up on the pillow. She leans over and her hands sweep the sheets and I can see her hands in the Dutch oval dressing-table mirror across the room.
My father writes
I wonder if one day we could introduce Rhododendrons to grow at home. They would look so lovely. A clump or two near the big beech trees in Fishpond Wood looking down at the house. All the new kinds. Pink and crimson.
On our latest exercise Wyndham surpassed himself by capturing a Brigadier on the enemy side and holding him prisoner … the poor man was driving peaceably to his brigade HQ from his house! He was needless to say furious.
I hear the great ‘Monty’ is fairly going wild visiting all his troops. Nobody is safe! We shall have him here shortly and you will probably have me back farming for good the week after!!
No more now, but to send all my love. It is a long time since I had one of your nice letters with all the news of home and I do look forward to them.
In the kitchen she stands me on a padded horsehair seat and shakes soil off carrots on newspaper on the table and says … One … two … three … four carrots. She tugs the oven door and pulls at a black iron pot and says … Listen to him growl. She pours water from the black kettle into the rabbit stew and prods pieces of pale haunch with a silver fork and screws up her nose and shoves the pot back in the oven and opens a letter.
15 March 1944. I have been on what the fortune tellers call ‘a long journey’. Sent for suddenly in London and then onto the Isle of Wight. Back here very tired. Have to memorise difficult orders and maps without any notes. It is all very very interesting. Difficult and rather important problems. I am inclined to feel tired in mind and brain.
My new teeth were finished last week and now I have a dazzling smile with a complete set fixed more than firmly in my mouth. I can’t get accustomed to it at all after so long playing with my loose plate. So it is hell and almost requires a spanner to get it out at night.
Your threshing results are very good. The Cotswolds may not be arable country but by good cultivations you seem to knock jolly fine crops out of that light land. Don’t forget Nitro-chalk. If we get the results using it that I see up here it will give you valuable early feed for the herd while other pastures come on.
Sunday, 19 March 1944. I think I have found you a better more reliable wireless set and a carthorse. Will let you know. Have roughed off my three young horses up here and they graze out in the park by day.
In June 1944 he is in a wire pen on the Isle of Wight with his soldiers and armoured cars. On 6 June the Allied invasion of France starts and he fights ashore on Juno beach with instructions to destroy bridges on the River Orne behind the enemy lines.
In summer 1945 he comes home on leave and for the rest of his life he shouts in his dreams at night. After wartime he sleeps mostly in his dressing room next door to me. I go in and see him thrash and wave his arms in the light of my torch. He yells … For Christ’s sake … Sunray … Sunray … come in … come in … dear God … you bloody Yanks … do you read … do you read … and he weeps … Goddam you all.
(Sung to the tune ‘D’ye ken John Peel’ – eighteenth-century ballad)
D’ye ken Bertie Bingley with his face so red?
D’ye ken Bertie Bingley with no hair upon his head?
D’ye ken Bertie Bingley when he’s just got out of bed
And he can’t find his teeth in the morning?
T’was the crack of his two-pounder brought me from my bed
And the roar of the Daimlers which he oft-times led
For the rattle of his coax would awaken the dead,
Or Jerry in his lager in the morning.
Chorus
Ay, I ken Bertie Bingley and the rest of them too,
From the majors to the troopers they’re the Devil’s Own crew
And they live on porridge, whisky and stew
And they’re randy as a stallion in the morning.
Chorus (repeat)
So here’s to Bertie Bingley and his men the Inns of Court
For they know all the Devilry and tricks that he has taught
And here’s to the day when to victory they’ve fought
And they’re up on the Rhine in the morning.
Chorus (repeat)
I keep the torch under my pillow to light the way across my carpet and up the back passage steps into his room. I put the torch down on his chest of drawers … Words aren’t any use … my mother says … It’s only hitting him hard on the chest that wakes him up … there’s no knowing why … I lean forward towards him on tiptoe. He swipes with an open hand and knocks me backwards. I fall over on the bronze-and-yellow Afghan rug in my nightdress and get up and rush at him and punch his chest.
Then his arms drop on the bed and lie still in blue-striped pyjama sleeves and his eyes open and he looks at me and says … Hello-hello … what’s up … not asleep … off you go back to bed … into the arms of Morpheus … we’ll have a first-rate jolly in the morning.
Sometimes I hear him shout and I stay in my bed and lean over the side and wind up the gramophone and play my four 78 r.p.m. records: ‘Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line’ with ‘Run Rabbit Run’. ‘You’ll Take the High Road and I’ll Take the Low Road’ with ‘Speed Bonny Boat’. ‘Sounds from the Hunting Field’ – side one and side two. When I put on ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’ I sing along with a man … If you go down to the woods today … you’re sure of a big surprise … today’s the day the teddy bears have their picnic … picnic time for teddy bears …
3 MRS FISH (#ulink_10fab35a-b328-56be-9e8f-acf6d715b26c)
I put my fingers in my ears and run up the yard to the woodsaw that is screaming in the cart shed. Mr Munday pushes apple branches at circular whirling teeth spinning in and out of a slit in an iron table. A running tractor engine powers a long wide-webbed belt looped on the saw arm. As each slit log opens sawdust flies and a sawn log tumbles off the table. The saw whines until Munday feeds the branches to the spinning teeth again. I run back down the yard and unblock my ears going indoors.
In the kitchen jodhpur sweat is boiling out in a black cauldron before Mrs Fish scrubs the legs. My mother says … Shall we make a cake or meringues … I’ve got eggs to use up and enough sugar. I twiddle the wireless knob and see Mr Munday’s knuckles knock at glass in the kitchen door. My mother says … Open it for him … there must be something he wants.
Mr Munday comes in and one hand holds the other and his brown hand-knitted vest has wet patches and he says … The saw had my fingers off.
My mother pushes a black saucepan off a hot Esse plate and closes the chrome mushroom lid. She picks up a tumbler off the drainer and turns a tap and fills the glass and pushes the rim at Munday’s mouth and says … Drink some water … I can hold it for you … water will help … well done … that is enough … lift your hands up higher … up near your shoulder … keep as still as you can.
She tears a roller towel down the seam and tips two silver safety pins out of a jam jar by the wireless and says to me … Get cotton wool out of the dresser drawer. She wraps a sling round Munday’s chest and sticks in a pin at the back of his collarless shirt and a pin at the back of his elbow and looks in the sling and says … Give me the roll … and stuffs in all the cotton wool. She rinses blood off her hand under the tap and says … Come on … hurry … in the van … quickly … I’ll get the saddle room cotton wool … you jump in … Mr Munday in the front.
I run ahead and open the van door and clamber between the front seats onto the corrugated tin floor and pull a blue-and-yellow-checked horse rug flat. Mr Munday sits down sideways in the passenger seat and faces the house and I say … Put your feet in Mr Munday … I’ll do your door.
I clamber out of the van and run round the bonnet past the silver fox galloping in a horseshoe and slam his door and run back round and climb in again over the driver’s seat and my mother races down the yard in her blue dungarees and blue canvas lace-ups with hard jelly soles and says … Good girl.
She leans over the gearstick and unrolls the white cotton wool pad in royal-blue paper and stuffs a handful inside the blue-and-white-striped towel sling. Her hands get wet and she wipes cotton wool up her fingers and drops the red-and-white sticky lump by her feet. She starts the van. She backs past pigsties and swerves by the barn. The van roars up through the gateway past granary steps and the tractor shed’s dark-green corrugated door in bottom gear and stops at the cart shed by the tractor.
The saw whines and whirls and my mother leans over the spinning belt to the tractor and the blade slows down. She looks at the sawdust and kneels on one knee and reaches under the table and picks up – once and twice – and runs to the van and says … Don’t look … look away … both of you … and I see a fingernail black round the rim and cuticle and cut skin end and a second finger.
She puts Mr Munday’s cut-off fingers in cotton wool and wraps them in dirty green velvet she keeps for cleaning the windscreen and pushes the bundle onto the glove ledge in front of her knees beside a torch and a spanner and says … All right in the back … well done … sit on the rug … you made a good start on the wood, Munday … it is bad luck … they will take you in right away at the hospital … I will make sure you are seen to … then I can drive home and find Mrs Munday and bring her down … does she do up at Foxcote today … am I right? … until Jimmy comes home from school.
Mr Munday doesn’t speak. The van hits potholes by Sheep Dip hump and uphill by Five Acre and Triangle Field. My mother steers zigzags to miss the bumps and at the red gate on the main road she corners and changes gear up to top on the level past Wistley Common. At Chatcombe Hill brow she goes down into second and accelerates through the double bend along the rim of the steep drop to Chatcombe Wood edge and at Seven Springs she says … Look left Mr Munday … if you are well enough … anything coming on the Cirencester road … and he stares ahead.
She brakes and looks left to Cirencester and straight across towards Gloucester and right to Cheltenham. She takes her chance and accelerates right and freewheels down Leckhampton Hill and says … Now we are moving … it is good luck the road is clear for us … the dry wood left from last winter is enough for you Munday … and for us … plus two loads for Joe … and for Mrs Fish … we can use any old there is and add the new when you are well enough to carry on … there is plenty to creosote for now … that will be easier for you … larch posts for Grindstone fencing … and stable doors … the creosoting will keep you going … I will make sure there is work for you … Joe can take on things that need shifting … how are you holding up … not far now.
In Charlton Kings suburbs she says … Shall I risk it … thirty miles an hour will not get us there in a hurry … I am going to hope for the best. She cuts the red lights at the Prestbury Gymkhana field crossroads and says … Needs must … and she and I chant … When the devil drives … and the van corners right hard and right again onto gravel and stops and she looks back at me and says … You stay there … I won’t be long … I promise … if I have to be I will come to get you … out you get Munday … we will have those fingers stitched on again in no time … if that is at all possible.
She walks up the hospital steps and opens the door for Mr Munday and holds the velvet bundle in her other hand.
Mr Munday’s bloody vest comes home in brown paper and my mother hands it to Mrs Fish and says … Mr Munday had a bad time … two fingers lost on the circular saw … will you soak his vest … if it dries he will have it when he comes back from hospital … which hopefully will be before tonight.
She says to me … You stay here with Mrs Fish … I don’t know what time I will be back … have a hunt for eggs in the top barns … I see one hen going in and out … she may be thinking of sitting … if you count six or more in a nest we will move her into a coop … thank you Mrs Fish … the wireless says afternoon weather is uncertain … good luck with the drying.
Mrs Fish drops Mr Munday’s vest in a white enamel bucket of cold water and colours thicken from pale pink swirls to crimson. She turns back to the white china sink and her Woodbine ash falls and powders my mother’s pink brassieres and silk peach camiknickers and linen blouses and blue dungarees piled on the flagstone floor. Her orange ringlets bounce under a bright-green crocheted beret she keeps on indoors and she leans forward in hot water steam. Her splashed crossover cotton apron has flower faces and the black plimsoles she keeps in the coal shed and changes into from white rubber boots have no laces.
I go in the larder and scoop up food in my fingers. Pastry crust on rabbit pie and rice pudding from under brown skin and pale-pink rhubarb fool. I watch Mrs Fish through larder door hinges. She dangles jodhpurs on a thick wooden spoon. Dirty water trickles in the sink and she dumps the sopping wet lump on the drainer and spreads the legs and scrubs at buckskin thighs with yellow Sunlight soap.
I tip up a glass bottle of Kia-Ora orange squash and the bottle mouth knocks my front teeth and I lick hurt nerves. Three chrome thermoses for harvest teas stand in a row and under the slate shelf cider and ginger beer and Guinness brown glass bottles fill a cardboard box and a note says … Brown bottles – keep out of light.
I stand beside Mrs Fish at the sink and run cold water in a glass of orange squash. She hisses … Get me a gin then … go on … you heard. She grins and the Woodbine sticks to a lip and her teeth close on the little cigarette.
I can hear my father saying when he was home on leave … Here’s to mother’s ruin … and see him lift a cut-glass tumbler of gin and fizzy tonic … Shall we celebrate our beloved home by getting nicely foxed … what say you … how’s that for the best idea the Colonel has had all day … and he sips from the glass and says … That washerwoman has been at the gin again … she damned well has … taste this … it’s simply awful … watered down to cat’s piss … she will simply have to go … I will not tolerate petty thieving in my house … I most certainly will not.
Mrs Fish puts her face close to mine … If I don’t get my gin I’ll tie these sodding jodhpurs round your neck … I am telling you.
Her wet red fingers open and the soap bar slips underwater. She pulls a blue-and-white stained tea towel off the Esse chrome rail and twists the linen in her hands and shoves the tea towel back and walks down the long white dining room her black plimsoles squeaking.
The dining room has a rosewood sideboard spinette. The keyboard has been sawed out and there it stands ruined and pretty at the end of the dining room and along the polished top stands Dutch and Irish and English silver. A rosebowl engraved with my mother’s maiden name – ‘May Lenox-Conyngham – 1936 Pytchley Hunt Ladies’ Race’. Two silver cock pheasants … one pecking and one peering sideways. Two filigree jam pots with silver coolie hat lids and blue glass jars and a silver filigree pattern of tigers climbing flowers. Four glass decanters line up in grooved oak coasters with circular silver miniature picket fences. An Irish Waterford crystal decanter pair hold dark-crimson port and brown sherry. Two square Dutch ship’s decanters hold transparent gin and tawny whisky.
Mrs Fish pours three fingers of gin and carries the tumbler and decanter to the kitchen and runs cold water in the decanter and holds the glass neck out to me and says … You put it back … go on … I’m telling you. Her soapy fingers slip and I catch and hug the cut-glass and tiptoe to the sideboard and say under my breath … Don’t drop … don’t drop … and think I can hear my father’s voice shout … What the bloody hell is going on in here … I damned well want to know … speak up.
Mrs Fish drinks half a glass of gin and leans on the kitchen table and coughs. Her coughs are rough and brittle. I go out of the kitchen door and run up the yard slopping orange squash on dandelions and stones.
Outside the harness room the mounting block is a two-step concrete throne in sunshine. Behind a creosoted stable door horses’ shoes scratch cement and straw shifts under a pony’s feet. A crow flies over to Fishpond Wood. My father’s horse kicks a pine partition plank and splinters break. A horsefly comes at my face and swerves. My black pony hangs his head over a half-door and sighs and pricks his ears. I see creosote blister on stable doors facing south. Mrs Fish carries a clothes basket out of the kitchen door and weaves up coal shed cinder path and drops the basket. A forked ash pole props the washing line and Mrs Fish gives the pole a slap so the fork slides down the wire and the line sinks. She flings wet clothes up over the wire and clips stripped bark hazel pegs on overlaps of jodhpurs … knickers … blouses … brassieres … nightdresses … vests … dungarees. She stands on two sawn-off logs and throws white sheets up and over and steps down and tugs the sheets flat along the wire. Under the oak branches she does a dance with the forked ash pole to hoist the line and the wet clothes rise up and flap between the tree and coal shed roof.
I go in the stable and dandy-brush dust out of the black pony’s silky summer coat and finger yellow wavy dandy bristles and hold up my hand in sunlight strips of dust. I hear Mrs Fish’s gumboots flap up the stable path and she looks in over the half-door … You can take me back home now … get him out …
I say … No thanks …
And she says … Get him out here … I’m telling you.
She slams back the barrel bolt and the pony’s head jerks up and I push his face in a webbing halter and lead the pony. Mrs Fish steps up on the mounting block under swallows playing in the blue sky. She lifts one white gumboot and hops a circle on her other foot and says … Come on then … bring him close … And I say … I’ve got to get on first.
I vault on off the ground and ride past the mounting block and she steps behind me across the pony’s broad back. We turn out of the yard and start down Rickyard Lane. White elder flowers big as saucers lean over stone walls on either side. Mrs Fish begins to sing … If you were the only boy in the world, and I was the only girl … in a sweet, husky treble and I groan.
At Fiveacre gate the stream parts clumps of gold kingcups and goes under the lane and oak and ash and larch grow along steep slopes either side and the path gets darker. Low branches stretch across and meet. The pony walks in hardly any light. Mrs Fish finishes singing ‘God Save the King’ and begins … If you walk through a storm hold your head up high and don’t be afraid of the dark … and we come to the wide-open Valley gate. The pony trots across baked mud ruts and starts to canter on the grass and I yell … I can’t stop him … and Mrs Fish shouts close to my ear … Let him go then.
Her bony arms are tight round my waist and her fingers hold a butcher’s grip. The galloping pony rocks. I pull up my knees and crouch and grip mane hair in both hands and hold the halter rope. Mrs Fish leans her chest on my back.
The pony gallops flat out over Valley cowslips and thistles. Rabbits run past bluebells and disappear down warrens in trees. Hoofbeats rumble and jays scream. A pigeon swerves above us as we race down the long bright-green strip. Where the woods end a chaotic plan of anthills circles Alexandra’s Gorse hillside. Green tumps bulge high as the pony’s knees and at a tall one the pony swerves downhill. Gravity pulls Mrs Fish sideways and she hugs me tightly. Her thighs slip. Our bodies cling and wobble and our legs stick out sideways and wave.
Mrs Fish and I fall … rolling over gorse twigs … stuck by green gorse needles … squashing yellow gorse flowers … red ants scurry … lucky for us ancient grass is spongy. We sit up side by side between anthills puffing hard. Downhill the pony pulls couch grass and mows small brilliant blue speedwell flowers and Mrs Fish says … Go on then … fetch him up here.
A rabbit skims a gorse bush and scuds uphill to the wicket gate and the flowering horse-chestnut tree and the pony’s head comes up and his ears prick.
I say to Mrs Fish … Stand on an anthill … and I tug the pony up close and say … Bend your knee … one two three … and I lift her foot and she lands astride. I jump off the bouncy anthill behind her.
The pony walks to the Valley end and I see smoke from Mrs Fish’s cottage and above Windmill blackthorn spinney grey windmill blades spin on a frame of legs and bars. Mrs Fish sings hymns – ‘For Those in Peril on the Sea’ and ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ and ‘And Did Those Feet in Ancient Times’ – up to Needlehole Cottages. In the paddock the scent of dead lilac and cow-parsley and wood and stone blow past and I slide off and Mrs Fish swings her gumboot across the pony’s neck. She sits side-saddle and slips down and I pull the pony round the way we came. Mrs Fish says … I’ll have a ride back after Betty comes in for tea.
She hauls a split elm rail across the paddock track and pokes it in a horseshoe nailed on the gatepost and says … I’ll fetch water … you let him go.
Dog roses grow up broken walls and stick through empty pigsty windows. Orange marigolds flower against a dark-green water-butt. Mrs Fish drops in a wooden bucket for water. The pony pulls at roses. Mrs Fish shouts … Get him off the flowers.
She throws a stone so the wall rings. The pony backs away. She lugs the bucket up the garden path and water slips inside her white rubber boot. The pony drinks and huffs. His breathing starts a whirlpool in the bucket. He sucks and gulps and his long top hairstar lip wipes inside the rim and the bucket falls over and rolls and rattles. His front legs rear up towards Halfmoon Spinney and he prances along the trees with his nostrils flared and his tail crooked high. He halts and his knees and hocks fold and he sinks on the grass and rolls and chucks his body side to side and gallops his legs upside down. He sits front legs straight and stands and shakes his skin and starts to graze.
Mrs Fish says … You come along indoors.
I cross my legs and stand still. She opens the blue front door and looks round and shouts … The privy’s round the back.
I hear water pour and wood fall inside the cottage. I can’t see past geranium flowers and green leaves clambering up smeared window-panes. I go along a grass strip between carrot rows and peas twined in hazel sticks to a corrugated-iron hut. I shove my finger in an opening and lift a wire hook. Inside the hut torn newspaper hangs on mouldy green string and a circle is cut in board on a box and down the hole is black water and floating brown lumps and the smell’s sweet rotted muck. I hunch off dungaree straps with my thumbs and shove down white cotton knickers and sit on the damp wood ring and shut my eyes tight. I can hear piss splash and see pink garden worms and shiny grey slugs crawl on my skin.
I don’t touch the paper flaps. I hoist up knicker elastic and trouser bib and one strap and lift the hook and run along the grass path strip.
Mrs Fish’s lovely daughter Betty comes in the garden gate. She is taller than Mrs Fish. Her auburn hair shines in the sun. She wears a white cotton puff-sleeve blouse and daffodil-yellow full gathered skirt and white ankle socks and slip-on black elastic plimsoles. Her blue eyes look my way. She smiles my father’s smile and says … You coming in?
I don’t follow her. In the paddock the backs of my legs press the drystone wall. I pick off yellow lichen cushions and hear chair legs scratch brick floor. The sun goes in. Swallows fly low over the two cottage chimneys. The cold breeze raises goose bumps on my skin. I lean on the pony’s withers and fold my arms and put my cheek on my hands and when he steps I step.
Rain begins. I turn over the water bucket and step up and spring off onto the pony and whack his neck with the halter rope knot.
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Xandra Bingley
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: A lyrical, evocative and wonderfully original wartime memoir about life on a farm in the Cotswolds, seen through the eyes of a child.‘Bertie, May and Mrs Fish’ is Xandra Bingley’s account of her childhood on a Cotswold farm, set against the backdrop of World War II and its aftermath. Bingley’s mother is left to farm the land, isolated in the landscape, whilst her husband is away at war. With its eccentric cast of characters, this book captures both the essence of a country childhood and the remarkable courage and resilience displayed by ordinary people during the war. The beauty and sensitivity of Bingley’s observation is artfully balanced by the harshness and grit of her reality.‘In the cowshed my mother ties her hair in a topknot scarf that lies on the feedbin lid. At five-thirty each morning and four o’clock in the afternoons she chases rats off the mangers. She measures cowcake and rolled oats and opens the bottom cowshed door. Thirty-one brown and white Ayrshires and one brindle Jersey tramp into their stalls…’‘Two thousand acres. A mile of valley. Horses cattle sheep pigs poultry. Snow above the lintels of the downstairs windows. Her fingers swelling. Chilblains. Her long white kid gloves wrapped around a leaky pipe in her bedroom. Knotted at the fingers. She has a lot to learn and no one to teach her. Accidents happen.′Bingley tells her tale in a startling voice which captures the universe of a child, the unforgiving landscape and the complicated adult world surrounding her. Her acute observation, and her gift for place, people, sound and touch make this a brilliantly authentic and evocative portrait.