Everything I Have Always Forgotten (7 page)

Mind you, Mother was never very enamoured of Tangier. I believe she thought, although many of her best friends were gay, that it was all a bit of a waste of manhood. With homosexuality still being illegal in England (a friend was arrested in the fifties), many gays went to Tangier at the time. Besides, there was the pervasive use of hashish, while she preferred wine. Part of her distaste certainly sprang from the fact that she was operated on for appendicitis on the kitchen table of a local doctor, while several months pregnant with my brother. Both survived, but the experience put her off Morocco for good. Nevertheless, she cooked the best Moroccan tagine (on a kerosene Aladdin stove, which mimicked the very slow fire of a carefully-tended charcoal or manure fire) I have ever tasted, in Morocco or anywhere. It was the servant/saint Hammed's first wife who had taught her.

Father had also travelled to the New World, telling us of one trip he made travelling steerage (or deck class) in the early twenties with Immigrants to America and landing at Ellis Island, only to be rescued from Immigration by not one, but two limousines and their chauffeurs, sent to meet him by the fathers of friends from Oxford! Or about his trip from New York to Louisiana in an old Model T Ford. There he stayed with a most hospitable lady who he later assured me would surely be delighted if I were to call. In 1971 I decided to look her up, but found that her address had changed and she had moved, but she insisted by letter that she would be very happy to meet me – she was indeed a Grand Dame of Southern charm, now ninety nine years old and living in a genteel old people's home!

In Louisiana, Father had met an old negro who had been born a slave. The man showed him how to flip a fully-grown, sleeping alligator onto its back using a long, pointed fence-post. Then he scratched the animal's belly with the fence post, until it relaxed into a blissful state with a ‘smile' on its face! And an old lady, likewise born a slave, who still lived on the impoverished plantation where she had been brought up and was now looked after by the white family that still owned it. They surprised him by calling her from her shack for lunch by yelling: “Hey Virg, dinner's ready!” When he asked about the name, he was told she was christened: Virgin Mary Queen Victoria – and you could hardly call out that mouthful! Again, small wonder that we were all imbued with wanderlust…

Then, there was the tale of how, in 1925, to save a lady-friend from some unwanted attention, he suggested to the suitor (who possessed a large, six-cylinder motor car) that they drive up north into Canada and see how far they could go. By main force, they dragged the monstrous motor further north than any automobile had ever gone before (to Lake St John) and were thanked by the local mayor with the offer of a week with a Native American tribe that was moving to their summer camp. He was astonished by the lack of verbal communication amongst the Native Americans: discussion was conducted with the slightest of hand motions and an occasional grunt. Hunters do not gossip, they are as silent as their prey.

I recall one incident during a story-telling session, Father was telling us about his wanderings in Croatia in the early 20s, when my brother and oldest sister were sitting on the floor, or more likely, on the almost bald lion skin in front of the fire. My brother was wearing an ancient pair of lace-up shoes, perhaps second-hand ones. They had been repaired with new soles that ended at his instep or arch of his foot. There, they had been nailed together, but the glue had failed and if he curled his toes up in a particular way, a gap opened like a mouth in the sole of his instep. However, when the ‘mouth' opened, it displayed the line of small tack nails that had not held, like tiny shark's teeth. In the faint light of the fire, my sister saw the gap in his sole and decided to try tickling his stockinged foot inside – in the dim light she did not see the tiny nails. When she got in her first little tickle, he automatically arched his foot away from the annoyance and she screamed like a banshee, her fingers grabbed by the serried rank of sharp nails. The interruption brought the proceedings to an abrupt halt, until we all understood how the trap had been sprung and laughed it all away.

VI

POSTWAR SURVIVAL / BABY SITTERS

A
s soon as I was old enough, it was my job to wash out the fragile glass chimneys of the lamps, using soapy water to remove the soot. I trimmed the wicks straight and sometimes changed them or the asbestos mantles which came with a protective pink coating on it that you burned off with a match. Thereafter it was fragile as a worm cast in sand. Then I filled the lamps with kerosene from a small hand pump, ready for the evening's reading.

Besides the four ducks (whose bath we purloined to slide down the stairs), we had four chickens that had a very nice little hen house, which we kept scrupulously clean. As they grew older, instead of laying fewer and fewer eggs, they laid more and more. Finally the mystery was solved: young free-range hens from the farm two fields away would come and lay their eggs in our hen house. When the old girls finally went in the stew pot, we were careful to keep the hen house just as clean, with fresh straw in the laying boxes. But alas the neighbour's chickens no longer came… we decided that it was the conversation of the old hens that brought in neighbouring chickens, not so much their fancy clean house.

At one time, there was such a menagerie at the house, that when Mother went away and we were all off at school, it was quite a task for Father to take care of them all by himself. He solved the logistical problem with porridge – raw oats for the horses and the white rabbit (his oats were mixed with used tea leaves, which he loved) and cooked porridge for himself, besides the two grown dogs, seven puppies (bred from Lanta), a cat called Michew (from
micino
– pussycat), four ducks, four hens and the jackdaw with a crossed beak called Dr Marara Douglas (had to be an honourable ‘doctor', since we never knew what sex it was). So ‘everyone' ate porridge.

Dr Marara had been saved from under its nest by my middle sister, who wanted to be a veterinarian. It could not eat properly because of its deformity, so we kept it in the fruit cage in the garden. Jackdaws are not very interested in soft fruit and we fed it well on things like porridge and tiny scraps of our food. It used to sit on my sister's shoulder during tea, but never did learn to talk – as they are reputed to do. Finally, it seemed to manage on its own and we let it go. For two or three years thereafter, it would come back to visit us, accompanied by a spouse… but in the end must have decided that we were not worth the trouble.

Talking of birds, Father took the foghorn from the
Tern
(our largest boat, at 25 feet) and fixed it to a post that held one end of our washing line. We could all be summoned to meals with a good loud, lugubrious ‘honk' on the horn. Its sound carried for miles. One evening, he was dining at Portmeirion Hotel opposite and met a celebrated ornithologist who remarked on the strange honk he heard from time to time on the estuary. That certainly showed to what extent we did not live by the clock. Meals were never at regular times, so the timing of the foghorn's honk was pretty much aleatory.

Indeed, Mother always had a great deal of trouble with numbers – as with times, cheque books and the like. Father used to say that if he wrote another bestseller he would have a watch surgically implanted on Mother's wrist. He did (write another bestseller) but did not (carry through with his threat).

A helpful little nephew came into the kitchen one day and asked if he might help.

“Why, yes!” she replied, “go and lay the table.”

“For how many people?” he queried.

“Oh, I don't know – a
lot
! Don't ask stupid questions.”

Another time, another child asked her if he might help with the cooking?

“Go and break six eggs.”

A few minutes later, he came back with: “Auntie, I've broken them for you.”

“Where are they?”

“On the larder floor.”

“Oh you bloody fool. I wanted them in a bowl. Go and clean them up at once.” He did so, using one of those push carpet cleaners with revolving brushes…

When chaos was getting the better of Mother, she would start singing a hymn that went: “Confusion rains where'er the sun, doth his successive journeys run…” I felt it was not so appropriate when it had been pouring with rain for so long. Though I am sure it was precisely at those times that Mother became overwhelmed because the house would be too full of children moping around. Then she had no space to think.

There were clearly times when us smaller children were in the way and had to be disposed of or farmed out. The older ones could well fend for themselves, but my youngest sister and I were twice dropped off at hotels as the easiest method of having a baby-sitter – in the form of hotel staff. I suppose that we were relatively well behaved and tractable as children go, but children lack the experience of life that can help avoid some accidents.

Once we were dropped at the fabulous Portmeirion Hotel, that architectural folly blending salvaged ancient buildings, Italianate cottages and Chinese pagodas made of sheet steel. The manager was an old friend of Father's from Tangier, Jim Wylie. Jim was a lively, witty man, a homosexual painter, who had moved to Tangier around 1908. He used to drive up through Spain and France to England every spring to his summer job as hotel manager. He did landscape paintings along the way and until very late in life insisted on driving all the way in an Austin Healey Sprite (the one with bug-eye headlights) loaded with small canvasses and paints. Anyone who knows the tiny car may judge his intrepid eccentricity.

One day, he was entertaining grown-ups with cocktails and his incredible stories on the hotel lawn, when a furious older lady came running across the grass, clad in slippers and nightgown, with her hair in curlers: “Mr Wylie, Mr Wylie, there's a cockroach in my bath!” He leapt to his feet with agility that belied his age and rushed towards her, crying: “Oh, how exciting Mrs So-and-so, is it all right? I've never seen a cockroach in my life! Will you please show it to me?” This, after some fifty years in Tangier, where if there isn't a cockroach in your bathroom, it's because you don't have a bathroom.

Another time, we were dropped at the Oakley Arms near Maentwrog, nowadays a rather dour pub. When I was put into my musty, damp bed (where was my youngest sister, I think she was there?) I amused myself by tearing up little strips of paper, dipping them in my water glass and applying them to the bulb of my reading light to hear the hiss. Since I was too young to use it for reading, the hissing sound that ensued, seemed a delightful use of the thing. Until the bulb exploded, showering shards of thin glass everywhere.

The rest of the time at the hotel, and indeed for some years after (perhaps even to this very day), I lived in mortal dread of being called to task for my sabotage, perhaps sent to prison or chained to the oar of a galley or even burned at the stake like Joan of Arc. Oh yes, Mother had taught me a lot about
la Sainte Jeanne
.

Less intimidating, despite being alone, was the elderly widow who still farmed her smallholding just twenty minutes' walk above the old Parc house in the mountains. Mrs. Lloyd-Williams was a determined powerhouse. She went about the tasks on her farm, Garth-y-foel, with the slow deliberation of an old-time farmer, now handicapped by arthritis and general old age. She was wise beyond comprehension and people often sought her out for advice. She had a craggy, deeply-lined, smiling face. She put me in the guest room of the farmhouse, which had been furnished for her wedding in the 1920s. The sheets were spotless, if a little worn – my foot went through a hole in the bottom sheet and I thought I had lost it forever. The hot water bottle I was given to warm my bed was indeed a bottle: a large, bulbous, ceramic bottle (that weighed its size in stone, it was so thick) with a cork stopper. My elderly hostess had filled this ceramic bottle with boiling water.

I carried the bottle upstairs and carefully put it where I would be lying in the bed. I covered it again and went downstairs for tea (the worker's evening meal) in the kitchen. There was something very wise and deeply kind about Mrs Lloyd-Williams, her unused parlour spoke of genteel origins. The china on the dresser and slender furniture recalled finer times. But I always remembered her thick red arms, the sleeves rolled up to her elbows as she taught me to milk the cows by hand. I once met her at some occasion, perhaps a funeral, dressed in her best black, with big black feathers in her black hat. I ran to hide from this unknown grand lady.

Back upstairs, the spot where I had placed the hot water bottle was too hot to sit on, so I slid it around to chase back the damp cold of the rest of the bed. It was a high bed (perhaps a four-poster?) and took some climbing to get in. I fell asleep fast enough, but was awakened by a terrible crash: it was the hot water bottle, now totally cold, that I had pushed away with my feet and it had fallen to the floor. I imagined it cracking open and pouring its contents of cold water all over the wooden floor planks. I had made as awful a gaffe as I had when playing with water on the light bulb at the Oakley Arms Hotel. I fell back to sleep anyway.

In the morning, the ceramic bottle was intact and my hostess never mentioned the great thump in the night. She awakened me early to help with the milking. She treated me like an adult, albeit a ‘city' adult who needed to learn the ropes. She had already fed the cows and mucked out the cowshed and washed it down with disinfectant. My hands were neither large enough, nor strong enough, to be much use in milking, but I learned quickly, and proudly milked two whole cows by myself, while she did the other six and lots of other things besides.

We went inside for breakfast and after that she showed me how to churn the milk to make butter. She made most of her milk into butter because it was not worth the trouble of carrying her very few gallons to Parc, to be picked up by the farmer there and taken down to be then picked up by the dairy to be bottled. These were still the days before milk coolers (she had no electricity) and pasteurization. Thus, she sold whatever small amount of milk had been ordered, the rest went to making butter. With fewer and fewer farms still making butter, hers sold well.