Enchanted Evening (28 page)

Apparently the creatures were now parked in a special wired-off section of the park at Mike's ancestral home, Packington. He said the staff of the Berkeley had not been amused. I don't wonder.

We sat talking for so long that we missed a good half of the musical comedy he had booked us in for –
Balalaika
I think – and finished up in a nightclub somewhere in Regent Street called the Slip-in, one of several such clubs owned by a lady affectionately known to the gilded youth of her day as ‘Ma Merrick'. It was the first time I had ever driven through London in the small hours when the streets were empty, and so quiet that you could hear the footsteps of the ‘Bobbies' – London's policemen – on the beat, the
miaow
of a prowling cat and the racket (it seemed no less) of the car and the occasional home-going taxi.

The silent city fascinated me, and later when I was living alone in a London ‘bed-sit', one of my favourite amusements when I could not sleep was to walk through the London streets after midnight, admiring those shop-windows that remained lit up all night. For some reason it always gave me a feeling of belonging. That I belonged to London, and that it belonged to me. It was
my
city. That was in the thirties, which still seem only a little way behind me. Sadly, few women of any age would dare to stroll alone through the midnight streets of any city in these ‘peaceful' post-war days.

It must have been getting on for about four o'clock when we neared Camberley, and Mike said, ‘Don't let's go back to the house. Let's go to Portsmouth – there's a chap I know there who has a small hotel near the front; you can see the sea from it. He won't mind giving us an early breakfast. What do you say?' What I said was ‘No', because if Mother found I was still missing when she woke up, she'd have a stroke. ‘Nuts,' said Mike – or words to that effect. ‘We'll write her a note and push it through that slot in the front door, and tell her we'll ring her later to say we're OK and when we'll be back.'

So we did; and oh! how well I remember that part of the drive … how beautiful England looked on a clear, dewy morning with the sun still below the horizon but the whole world bright with the dawn and as empty as the palm of my hand. No dual-carriageways or roundabouts, and many of the towns that have by now become cities were villages then. Everything was so green – miles and miles of woodlands, fields, commons and meadows, and hedges full of wild roses – and always a cuckoo calling.

The staff of the hotel were barely awake, but its proprietor, an ex-Navy type, came out in his pyjamas and we were given an excellent breakfast, sitting in the glassed-in verandah and looking out at the Channel, watching the ships go by. Mike rang Mother around eight o'clock, and I remember we made an unsuccessful attempt to pay an unofficial call on Andy and the Bosun.
5
The night out with Mike, and that drive through sleeping London and through the dawn-lit countryside to Portsmouth and the Channel, still stay in my memory as a bright splash of colour in an otherwise grey and unhappy period, full of regrets. As does a visit we paid to Packington, not long before Bill's arrival. Mike drove down to spend another night with us, and on the following day he drove us up to Packington to spend a few days with him.

It was quite a long drive from Yateley, and I believe that the nearest town to the estate was Coventry. Packington was one of the weirdest houses I have ever been in. It was a huge Georgian pile that strongly suggested
The Fall of the House of Usher
, for it gave the impression (correctly as it happened) of being neglected for too many years. It must once have had wonderful gardens, but they had been shockingly uncared for and had become overgrown and run to seed. As for the vast park in which it stood, the entire space seemed to have been smitten by some disease. And that too was correct. The disease was called ‘rabbits'.

Wherever one looked, the ground was humped and bumped and riddled with the burrows of rabbits, so many of them that when one walked out in it, the whole park seemed to surge up and run away, as if the ground itself was alive. You've no idea how gruesome the effect of scores of rabbits bolting into their warrens can be. Every inch of grass appeared to have been nibbled off short, and the entire place was patched with earth scratched out of the rabbit-riddled ground. The house itself was equally neglected, except for one end of it, which the brothers Adam had fiddled about with, adding their familiar touch of pillars painted to look like marble to a large entrance hall, in which there was a beautiful curving Regency staircase that swept up the wall and appeared to be attached to it only by gravity and mathematics.

Even Mike confessed to feeling nervous about it on occasions – when he was about half-way up, and looked down at the hall below. I don't blame him. I never felt 100 per cent safe on it myself. The sets of guest-rooms on that end of the house were modern and very attractive, but the majority of the rooms in the rest of the house were dusty and tattered. Apparently Mike's grandmother (a formidable Victorian beauty and girlfriend of the future Edward VII) had, when her son, Mike's father, was killed and her husband died, refused to retire to the Dower House as expected, but had dug herself with firmness into Packington and metaphorically drawn up the drawbridge and sat it out in the big house, allowing it to decay around her until she died.

We spent a lot of time exploring layers of empty rooms, when not punting around on the lake – or was it lakes? There was an enormous shuttered and never-used drawing-room that must have been redecorated (presumably in the heyday of Grandma, and towards the end of Victoria's reign) by Messrs Wedgwood. A mistake, I thought. The whole thing was a riot of Wedgwood blue plaques showing scantily clad gods and goddesses. There was also a State bedroom somewhere in that maze of upper rooms, the chief feature of which was the vast and imposing four-poster bed. I remember walking round it, and thinking that even a feather-duster and a pot of glue would have been a help.

Somewhere well below the house lay a huge cellar, complete with enormous beer barrels that must have been built
in situ
, since they could not possibly have been man-handled there. These were scribbled all over with the signatures of distinguished guests, only one of which has stuck in my memory: poor Czar Nicholas, who had been murdered less than a decade earlier in a cellar in Ekaterinburg. I remember touching it with a kind of horror; because it suddenly made him
real
.

The wolves inhabited a nature reserve of their own in a large wired-in enclosure in the Park, not far from the house. The surrounding fence must have been fifteen to twenty feet high (it seems that wolves excel as high-jumpers) and turned inward in a line of spikes along the top. The fence surrounded a pinewood and (well underground) a disused ice-house in which they had made their den. Mother wouldn't go near the place, for the very idea of timber-wolves being kept as pets revolted her. But on the day after our arrival Mike asked casually if I'd like to meet his wolves, and as the very casualness of the voice in which he put the question made me ‘think nothing of it' I said yes. He fetched a key and together we strolled off to the wolf-pen.

I must say that they looked pretty scary as they slunk through the pine-trunks of the wood, like the illustrations of wolves in one of Ernest Thompson-Seton's animal stories, and I wasn't surprised at the precautions that had been taken to see that they didn't get out. I hoped that they couldn't dig as well as they could jump, and was interested to find that there were two locked sections to the entrance. Mike unlocked the outer door of a short, wired-in approach corridor and, having locked it behind him, walked down to the end of it to unlock one at the far end. ‘Just a precaution in case they make a sudden dash for freedom,' said Mike as he ushered me through the second gate and locked that one too behind us.

The wolves shot out of the shadows of the wood like a couple of grey torpedoes fired by an enemy submarine, and, ignoring Mike, came straight for me, nearly knocking me over as they jumped up at me, smelling me all over and finally giving me a few slavering licks. I accepted their exuberant welcome with pleasure, patting them and scratching them behind their ears, and interested to find how coarse their thick coats were when they looked so fluffy. Having given me the once-over, they turned their attention to Mike, fawning on him, putting their paws on his shoulders and lavishing loving kisses on him, and obviously trying to persuade him to play ‘Chase-me-Charlie' with them.

I suppose we must have spent the best part of half an hour in there walking through their wood, while they gambolled beside us. They sobered up and became slightly hostile when Mike showed me the mouth of a dark, sloping tunnel that led down into the heart of a tall hillock that rose between the tree trunks over the spot where the ice-pit had been dug more than a century ago. ‘They're a bit possessive about the ice-pit,' explained Mike. ‘Probably because they regard it as home.' We left them to it, and only when both doors were locked and bolted behind us and we started walking back to the house, did Mike say: ‘Well done, Number One. Nice work! I
knew
you could do it.'

‘Do what?' I inquired.

‘Meet the chaps,' said Mike airily. ‘Do you know that you are the very first person to go in there that hasn't beaten a hasty retreat? My gamekeeper has made a hell of a fuss about going in there, ever since they tried to take a bite out of him. They don't like strangers.'

I could have killed him! – and I said so in no uncertain terms. If I'd had any idea that those creatures had attacked other people who had been introduced to them, nothing would have induced me to go inside that cage, let alone pat those creatures' heads and make a fuss of them. ‘Of course you wouldn't. Don't be silly!' retorted Mike impatiently. ‘Because you'd have been scared, and the chaps would have known it. As it was, just because I gave you the impression that they were safe as houses, they welcomed you in with open paws! Now that they've accepted you, you'll be able to go in whenever you like.' I replied suitably to that suggestion and didn't go near them again. They had a nasty habit of sitting on top of their hillock with their noses straight up to the sky, howling most mournfully at first light every morning and last light at night. It was a most haunting sound, a real ‘call of the wild' in the depths of the English countryside.

*   *   *

Bill duly turned up to fetch Mother, and I seized the opportunity to go up to London and see Mrs Goulden, a one-time teacher at McMunn's Studio where I (and incidentally the three girls who made a great name for themselves
6
as theatrical designers in the thirties and who are still remembered as being among the greatest in their craft) studied when I first left school. Mrs Goulden, who was never known as anything but ‘MG' to the generations of students who passed through her hands, was the only person I could think of who might give me sound advice as to what to do with myself in the commercial art world. And I was right. It was due to her that I was accepted into a group of artists who called themselves the Chelsea Illustrators.

Firms and people who wanted designs for book or magazine covers, illustrations for serial stories, fashion sketches, fairy stories, Christmas, birthday or anniversary cards – anything in the art line in fact – could (and did) submit their particular requirements to the Chelsea Illustrators. MG would let us know what was wanted, and one of us, or sometimes several of us, would take on the job if we thought it was in our line. The customers could do the choosing and a percentage of the price would always go to the group, to pay for such expenses as rent of the studio and heating and lighting bills etc. The rest went into the pocket of the successful artist. It was, for someone in my position, a lifeline, and I grabbed it with enormous relief and made many friends there. Two of them became lifelong ones: dear ‘Fudge' Cosgrave, whose parents, like mine, were members of the Raj, and Temmy – Margaret Tempest, the illustrator of that famous series the
Little Grey Rabbit
books.

MG advised me to find myself a ‘bed-sit' as near to the studio as I could, to save bus fares and to move into it as soon as Bill and Mother sailed. It was advice which I ought to have taken at once, if I'd had any sense. But when I returned to Yateley with the good news that evening, it was to discover that Mother had already been making inquiries about bed-sits in anticipation of this moment. Cull Brinton's new wife, ‘Curly', who had been spending a few nights with us, had told her of a houseful of bed-sits in a Georgian square near Notting Hill, where her own daughter, a ballet-student studying under Marie Rambert at the Mercury Theatre in Notting Hill Gate, was already installed. Curly had given Mother the telephone number of the house and the name of the landlady, and Mother had rung up that very afternoon. Yes, there were still one or two vacancies in the house. We were to call and see it the very next day, and if we approved of it, I could move in at once …

I didn't think much of the idea, as Notting Hill was nowhere near the Illustrators' studio in Park Walk, Chelsea. But Mother and Curly had got all that taped: there was a bus that I could catch at Notting Hill that would take me to Hyde Park Corner, where I could catch another one that would take me down King's Road and drop me at the King's Road end of Park Walk – all those bus fares! My heart sank. But Mother, wildly elated at the prospect of returning with her darling Bill to India (he had asked her to keep house for him in his new posting in Poona), had the bit between her teeth. So off to Notting Hill we had to go. And the moment I saw that square, I fell for it. It was the most beautiful bit of Georgian nonsense and as pretty as a picture. The church at the end of the square was exactly right for the design, and the central oblong of carefully mown grass that filled the square was edged with trees. The whole thing looked like a design by Motley for
Quality Street
, or something painted by that enchanting Dutch illustrator of nursery rhymes, Willebeck le Mair. I couldn't resist, and I took the room, even though it was going to cost me more than I could afford.