Everything I Have Always Forgotten (6 page)

Strangely, without our knowing it, this ‘Molly' daughter corresponded to a child that Mother was told: “It would not be advisable to bear to term”. Her pregnancy was terminated, though she regretted it forever, saying that “this child might have been the most wonderful of all of us.”

As a matter of fact, this fictitious tale of
schadenfreude
was almost acted out by me, though I don't know if the accident was before or after the hatching of the myth by my older siblings: I was delighted when I inherited my brother's small bicycle (I was perhaps seven at the time) that had been brought up from our pre-War home in Laugharne. During the war, the tyres had rotted, but then, learning to ride, I would be on grass. Although the driveway was long, it was far too rocky and potholed to learn to ride a bicycle. Finally one day I managed to coast down the grass hill from the lawn in front of the house, past the ‘fatal' well and around to the right at the bottom. I was so thrilled that I even burst in on Father as he worked and asked both my Parents to come out and watch. He cannot have been deeply engaged, for he came outside with his slightly sardonic smile and watched with Mother as I launched myself on the bicycle down the hill again. This time, since the gate to the left at the bottom of the slope was open, I decided to turn left instead of right. I did quite well, turned to the left through the gate at the bottom, but failed to make the turn quite sharply enough. Instead of riding triumphantly off to the left after the gate, I missed the turn and rode over the five-foot seawall and crashed onto the sharp rocks below.

I was certainly not dead, but quite bloody enough to render lurid the warm bathwater into which Mother had put me. I remember sitting in the pink water and continuing to bawl. Well, who would not want to milk sympathy for everything possible? Anyway, I was not at the bottom of the well and healed quickly. I soon became a more proficient bicycle rider.

Tyres were not in my primitive lexicon so the soap box car I made for myself, using the wheels off the bicycle and two others were also tyre-less. Coasting down the rocky track from the farm at the top of the hill above our house with a cousin behind me, we capsized and he somehow ran over my hand – which henceforth sported a twin track cut where one of the wheels, without a tyre, had run over me. I did not even lose the finger, so I suppose it was ‘just one of those things'.

On the higher terrace to the north of the house, was a splendid solid brass cannon. It first arrived on its wooden carriage, but that quickly rotted away. Someone tried to make another carriage out of heavy, solid wood – but that too rotted away in no time. Finally, it was simply propped up on the low wall of the terrace – weighing several hundred pounds, it was unlikely to be moved until we finally sold the house.

West of the house, there lay Father's principal garden, fenced against rabbits. Southwest of the house was a line of enormous Hydrangeas on a bank, which seemed to bloom all summer long. They were amazingly dense, healthy and huge: about fifteen feet high and wide with both light and dark blue flowers, besides various pinks – all the size of a dinner plate. The entrance gate was to one side of this great barrier of blossoms, on the other side of the gate was a giant fuchsia, a small tree of a shrub, covered in red and purple pendant flowers for months on end, late into the autumn. On the lawn in front of the house, two poplars with their shiny bark stood slender and sculptural, bending in obeisance before the winter storms.

A couple of hundred yards west along the coast, my Parents had bought a square stone house on a bluff. When they were alone in winter, they often went to live there, finding it easier to heat than the large main house. They sometimes lent it to deserving young artist friends ‘to finish their
magnum opus
', when they themselves went away to work in Spain, Italy or Greece during the winter. In the summer, they would rent it out to acquaintances for their summer holidays. One family in particular came back every year and still does, sixty years later. The path that led to this house passed through a small gate and up through a wet, shaded gully with blackberry brambles on either side. At night, these thorny plants would grab at one's trouser legs if one wandered ever so slightly to one side or the other in the dark. These brambles gave birth to the myth of the ‘Bramble Fairies' who would reach out with their thorny briars and grab you in the night and carry you off to their lair. Again, many a child believed us implicitly when we told them about the Bramble Fairies.

It also happened that the stove in this other house (a bottled gas one) had an enormous oven. Some years later, the Christmas turkey was too large for our normal Aga oven, so it was put in the oven ‘next door' (actually a quarter mile away, past the gauntlet of the Bramble Fairies). After the requisite time, I was sent to bring it back. There was a rare blizzard blowing (though the snow was not settling), the air was full of driving white fluff. I carried back the monster under a huge silver cover with the coat-of-arms of Mother's family, the snow swirling around me and almost completely covering any light from the sky. As I passed the bramble fairies, they reached out with their pointed talons and tried to drag me from the path – but I struggled on heroically with my sacred task of bringing home the roasted Christmas turkey.

I have not yet described the back stairs: They ran in a single, straight flight from the scullery up to a long passageway upstairs. Off this passage there were doors to bedrooms, the attic and the bathroom. Both stair and corridor were floored with the original, institutional brown linoleum. This meant that when our Parents were out and it was too rainy or cold to be out-of-doors, we could play the most raucous games. One was to take a single-sized mattress and toboggan down the back stairs on it; it felt like riding a caterpillar and one finished up at the bottom in a pile, often with the mattress on top. Another version for sliding down the stairs was sitting in a large metal tub that our ducks used to bathe in – and no, we had not cleaned it out very well beforehand. This led to many smashed fingers and severe bruises, so we soon abandoned it for a softer vehicle, like the mattress.

The best game, though, involved the dogs. We played tag running up the front stairs, down the passage, down the back stairs and helter skelter through the kitchen or telephone room. The dogs would follow the chase in a general hysteria, skidding out of control when taking the sharp turns on slippery linoleum where their claws could get no purchase. They would bark excitedly, encouraging us to run faster and get wilder. Then there was a new adaptation of the game: two of my sisters received children's scooters as gifts. The chasers were each handicapped by having to stay in physical contact with a scooter, whether riding it or just dragging it along. Once they tagged someone, they would hand over the scooter and become one of the pursued.

These raucous games only became really dangerous when grown-ups joined in. Grown-ups tend to get seriously overexcited… I remember the celebrated British architect Maxwell Fry vaulting over the banister from one flight of the front stairs to the one below, still clutching his obligatory scooter and hallooing all the way. How he didn't break a leg is a mystery, he must have been well into his fifties…

I believe these games originated in Mother's mother's house, a huge Victorian pile (though the old Jacobean façade had been kept behind it, the vast house had been rebuilt in the mid-nineteenth century) of grandeur with its butler and head gardener and dozens of minions. These games were invented by adults after long, too-formal dinners. At least we had no servants to disapprove of us and our Parents didn't care (providing, of course, that they were out and could not hear the din) as long as we did not irreparably damage the house or ourselves.

There was also a much quieter game that could be equally thrilling: Cat and Mouse. Chairs and other obstructions were removed from around the long dining table and two people were chosen as Cat and Mouse. They were placed blindfolded at opposite ends of the table in stockinged feet and utter silence was declared. They moved to and fro with fingertips lightly touching the table for guidance, the cat intent on catching the mouse that was intent on survival. The tension for both the players and public was intense – especially since, on a calm night, there would not be a sound outside to distract the players. All you could hear on a still night with the tide out was the pounding of your own heartbeat in your own ears. Breathing made too much noise. Again adults tended to spoil the game by becoming over-excited and suddenly dashing at their quarry with a clatter.

Evenings, after washing the dinner dishes (which involved considerable story-telling and jokes), often closed with one person reading out loud to the rest, using one of the few Aladdin paraffin lamps with bright asbestos mantles. They were the only source of light strong enough by which to read. We huddled, cold, in front of the living room fire. The black lab, Lanta, would sit so close to the fire that her black chest was too hot to touch and, like us, her back was cold as she sat on the balding lion skin. I remember readings from many books, in particular
Englebrecht, the Surrealist Boxer
which was a favourite. We read Tolkien's
The Hobbit
in first edition, then, as soon as it was published volume by volume, there was
The Lord of the Rings
, which was reviewed by Father – somehow there was always something to read which would appeal to young and old alike, even a hilariously funny film script Father was working on for Ealing Studios.

Father would smoke his pipe or perhaps a cigar. Mother would sometimes puff on a cigar as well, but Father tired of her puffing on his good cigars with so little real pleasure, so he bought her some cheap Spanish cheroots. They were long and thin, irregular and lumpy from poor manual fabrication – and they came with woodworms in them. When the worms managed to find their way out through the skin of the cigar, the hole made it impossible to draw on them because air leaked through the holes. She never remarked on the taste of the burning worms, surely very bitter – if the worms in salad are any indication.

Besides reading out loud, there was storytelling, often by Father. He complained that when he told a story to one member of the family, the story would make the rounds of everyone else, until it finally came back to him – by which time it was totally unrecognizable. At least, by telling stories to most of us assembled in front of the fire, we all heard the same story once and for all… though when we then repeated them to school friends, we surely adapted it as much as we wished.

When Father was a teenager boarding at Charterhouse (1913-18), his dormitory was right next door to his house-master's bathroom. Every morning, winter and summer, he would be awakened at 6 a.m. by the sound of his housemaster taking his daily ice-cold bath. He would hear the old man berating himself with: “Come along now Jenks, come along now Jenks, be a man, be a man, BE A MAN!” and there would be a loud splash as he plunged into the freezing water. I have often wondered if he did it to steel his character (as in dousing his morning erection) or to cure his arthritis – both, I believe, popular reasons at the time for this Spartan habit.

I remember Father telling exotic tales of Morocco in the 1920s, his voice low and growly with pipe tobacco. How he bought his house in the Kasbah of Tangier, just down the street from his old friend Jim Wylie who had moved there even before the First World War. He told us how he had paid for the tiny house: with two donkey loads of silver, picked up from a reputable British Bank in town. The ‘street' to his house, only a few meters from Place de la Kasbah, was too narrow for a fully-laden donkey with panniers to pass. So they unloaded the panniers and carried them between two men to his future house, where the seller spent thirty-six hours, cross-legged on the ground, biting every single piece to assure himself that it was indeed pure silver. Much later, post Second World War, it was on Place de la Kasbah that Barbara Woolworth Hutton restored her palace (Dar Sidi Hosni), so notorious for wild parties.

Father described how, in the 1930s, his faithful servant, Hammed, was an hereditary saint who assured Father that as a Moslem, he could not drink alcohol but he was so saintly that, if he did ever let wine pass his lips, it would turn to the “purest of water”. Father told us that when Hammed joined him for a glass of wine or two, that it was interesting to note that this ‘purest of waters' ingested by his faithful servant, had nevertheless a similar effect on Hammed as wine would have on other men. His servant assured him that it was definitely water that he ingested, and fervently agreed that it was remarkable that it had such an effect upon him! Another candle would now be guttering and the little coal fire would need a prod to revive it.

He also recounted how Ibn Battuta was born in Tangier in 1304 and died there in 1368 after making his famous tour of the Islamic world. Later, while still in my teens, I acquired a translation of Ibn Battuta's travels and used them as a travel guide for the few thousand miles that I myself accomplished… a drop in the ocean beside his 75,000 miles, which included southern India (which had recently converted from Buddhism to Allah) and made himself unpopular with the local rulers when he complained about the way the local women wore only a sarong, baring their breasts for all to see. Times change and now it's the Hijab in question! Ibn Battuta started out as a wealthy man and initiated a few families along the way. His journeys included similar frustrations to my own: such as revolutions, the plague, robbery, attempted rape and so on, but I admit that he had a great deal more staying power than I.

Another of Father's stories was about camping in the cork woods south of Tangier and offering passing travellers hospitality for the night in exchange for the story of their life. He talked of going pig-sticking in the desert brush. He rode a lively little Arab pony that could skip out of the way of a wild boar like the best of matadors and kept him perfectly safe – providing, of course, that he could keep his seat. Had he fallen, his long lance would have been useless against a charging boar and their great tusks would have made short work of him. The last candle would be guttering by now as Mother announced it was time for bed, saying that everyone was “getting tired and cross” (meaning herself), but small wonder that some of us caught the travel bug and especially a fascination for the adventure of visiting Muslim lands. Every time I returned from travelling in the Middle East or North Africa via Greece, I always felt I had returned home when I landed there.