For the Time Being (4 page)

I always, however, said my prayers. I still do to this day. But it is a prayer to a greater force than the simpering plaster figures to which I once prayed so ardently.

However, to return to Twickenham and innocence: a priest I decided to be, and that was that. The fact that no one took my decision seriously, even beloved Sister Veronica herself, did not trouble me. I had time before me, and I was exceptionally happy.

There were other moments of happiness which I recall during
the Twickenham years. Days on the river in a punt. My father in white flannels and shirt, poling us along; my mother lying among cushions, a Japanese parasol shielding her face from the sun; Layton and Johnstone on the portable gramophone; a picnic hamper among the bathing towels; the smell of boat varnish and the excitement of getting to one of the locks and watching the rise and fall of the water.

Opposite our house were the Howards. A family of four: three boys and one girl, called Jessie. Jessie was one year older than I was and I liked her because she had a small tent in their back garden, a wilderness still of rutted mud and cement dust, and invited me to come and play with her.

It made a change from my sister, because Jessie was really pretty daring. She showed me a secret box in which she kept cigarette butts, and we sucked away at these for a time, without, of course, lighting them. They made me feel sick. So she rustled about and produced another tin box, battered but secure, in which she had a hoard of rotten apples, bits of cake and a whole tin of baked beans which, with an opener in the shape of a bull's-head (which I coveted instantly), we opened and ate cold.

I felt a little more sick, but better after a bit of mouldy cake. Then she pulled down her knickers and said that she would show me her ‘thingy' on condition that I showed her mine. This surprised me slightly – we had only known each other for an afternoon – but I was still feeling a certain unease in my stomach and anyway I had seen Elizabeth naked in the bath every night, just as she, indeed, had seen me; so I was not fearfully interested, for I could hardly believe that I was about to witness something extraordinary.

I complied.

We regarded each other in silence.

‘My brothers have got one like yours,' she said.

‘My sister has one the same as yours, so there. I think I'll go home now,' I said.

Later I was extremely sick, and would not look at supper, which alerted my nanny to the fact that perhaps all was not well. She told my father that I had spent the afternoon with ‘those dreadful people
in the new houses. It's not fitting. They'll spoil his ways, and there is nothing that I can do on account of the fact that I have only one pair of hands and no eyes in the back of my head. He wanders.' My father was a just and kind man; he followed my anxious mother down to my room and asked me what had happened that day. ‘We only want to know what has made you so ill, and then we can get it set to rights,' he said.

So I told him in detail, from sucking cigarette butts to eating mouldy cake and cold tinned beans and examining each other's ‘thingys'.

He looked grim, but said nothing. My mother took my temperature, found that it was normal, and they said goodnight and went away.

A few weeks later we moved back to Hampstead.

And that is that. The first seven years of my life recalled as faithfully as I can remember, aided by others who have filled in the gaps.

The years of innocence. These, I am told, are the impressionable years, the formative ones during which all the things which one discovers, or is shown, stay with one for the rest of life and, as it were, one is moulded. One sets like a jelly. Perhaps not quite the right word. Cement? That sounds too heavy. Moulded, or fixed, must suffice.

I discovered light, scent, and, through Aunt Kitty, was made aware of colour and texture. Enduring senses for me all these years later.

I have, it would seem, left out a fifth most important one. Music.

Music was a constant part of my life in those years: my father's passion was music. Not always the kind that I particularly cared for, it must be said. His studio at the top of the house was filled with what I grew to learn, and detest, as chamber music. It was the music to which he painted. We called it, naturally enough, ‘Po Music'.

But there was opera, too. Great ballooning sounds soared through the house; voices swept us from corner to corner, subliminally reached us in sleep. We were aware of music from our earliest
moments, and in time, as is right and proper, the sounds which were incomprehensible between four and seven years, for example, began to take their own forms.

At the convent, of course, there were songs of praise and sonorous organs and those, too, became a part of the pattern of one's existence.

Music was everywhere: but I agreed with nanny fervently when she said that she ‘did like a nice tune, something you can hum. And you can't hum much of your father's music, I can tell you.'

But, anyway, music.

Light, scent, colour, texture, music. I entered the next phase of life with a rich haul.

Telegraph Sunday Magazine,
25 March 1984

Perhaps, after so many years, this episode of my life may seem to be faintly trivial. Greater ‘nights' have been set before me since, but none has moved me so intensely.

It was the darkest, coldest, winter just after the disaster of Arnhem. My Division never got to Arnhem, but stayed where it was, just across the river, watching the hideous death of a dream, a city and much of its population in helpless frustration. Uselessly one wept, or dragged muddied, soaking bodies up the slithering river banks, and watched as our youth (I was twenty-three) drained away into the swirling waters of the Rhine.

We settled into the battered buildings of a small village called Elst, just across the river from the terrible bridge which we had failed to hold. I stuck my camp-bed up under the roof of a shattered farmhouse in a dusty, tile-spattered attic which I shared with two aged men and a sad-faced, very plain girl of about twenty. Together we crawled up a ladder from the wreck of what had been the main room of the farm, having eaten part of my rations and some potatoes and turnips which the whey-faced girl had forced into some sort of a soup.

We were mostly silent, for no one spoke English and I spoke no Dutch. Apart from the slurping of soup from the old men and the whining of starving dogs (they were barely alive, and survived, I guessed, to serve as a basis for future soup), there was no sound. We were down to rock bottom. My army ration, spread among the four of us, was just enough to keep us alive.

Holland, up on the polders, is cold, colder than anywhere I had ever been. The ice in the mornings was finger-thick, the skinny blankets under which we huddled in the attic were beaded in the mornings with white pearls from our breath.

I was here from September until, I think, the end of November. Doing nothing apart from trying to keep warm, help any stray escapee who managed to get across the river, and file useless intelligence reports. Occasionally members of the Dutch Resistance slipped silently into our midst, faces blackened, intent on looting from a stalled goods-train stranded, packed with booty, on the Bemmel Polder not far away. One night the mortars got its range, hit it from end to end, left it blazing, and I was summonsed by field-telephone back to HQ in Eindhoven.

Eindhoven, war or no war, was alive. Lights were on, people walked about in the streets, there was some food (we drove into Belgium and brought out jeep-loads), and one night I saw to my amazement a poster stuck on a splintered tree which announced that ENSA, the highly abused ‘entertainment for the troops', had finally reached us. That night, for seven nights, we were to see
The Merry Widow
at the Phillips Theatre, commandeered in town, and the stars were Madge Elliot and Cyril Ritchard, two ageing, but still gallant, Stars from the
real
West End.

I was almost first in line. After Elst, the darkness and the sadness across the river, the dead swinging silently in the current of the Rhine,
The Merry Widow
could not be missed. I sat enraptured in my plush seat, no heating, but snug-ish in a greatcoat; the orchestra crashed into the overture and sheer glory, magic, beauty, life and fun were there before us.

Madge and Cyril Ritchard burst into our delighted, amazed, deprived lives, sang and danced, were wondrous to behold, made us laugh, adore and cheer. OK, there were holes, if you looked, in the fishnet tights of the chorus, some of the costumes had got a bit frayed round the edges, perhaps the stars were not quite as lissom as once they had been.

But they were there; they gave us back the youth which we were in severe danger of losing for ever. Their laughter, their songs, their aliveness brought us all back to a daring belief that, perhaps, just perhaps, we could make it through to the end, that we might survive.

I went to every performance. I know the score by heart to this
day and I learnt, that night in the Phillips Theatre, Eindhoven, just exactly what the theatre
really
meant. It was not some obtuse essay into ‘Why or How', not Shakespeare, not Shaw. It was glorious, glowing, colour, laughter, light and life with the added splendour of music. Because of Cyril and Madge, and
The Merry Widow
which they and their company brought to us in that bitter cruel winter, I swear that hundreds of us survived.

The instant that I hear the first notes of'Vilja' or ‘We are going to Maxim's', I am instantly, for a second or so, back in Elst, with the crumping mortars, the blazing train on the polder, and the brilliance, the bravery, of Madge and Cyril Ritchard, whose laughter, delight and energy revived a battered, almost defeated group of wretched soldiers for ever; in my case, anyway.

Sunday Telegraph,
12 January 1992

On a terrace some way from the house I noticed a patch of grass which was always lush and brilliant even during the greatest heat of July. Mint flourished there, tall reeds, even bull-rushes: the area was thick with spongy moss which squelched when you walked upon it. All around the land was sere and dry beneath the great olives, but parting the dense rushes I found a crystal spring bubbling furiously; a veritable oasis in the parched limestone earth.

I should have a pond here, I decided. A real English pond 500 metres up in the terraced hills of Provence. A pond where there had never been a pond before, brimming with clear water, speared with yellow flags, with water lilies and carp perhaps, or golden orfe: a place where I could sit on hot summer evenings and just feel the cool and watch the water lapping gently round the great boulders with which I should surround my little
pièce d'eau.
It would not be formal: quite the reverse, a natural, simple, country pond.

Armed with spades and barrows, with forks and wellingtons and high hearts we – the local builder and his son, and Ahmet from Tunis, who came twice a week to help on the land, plus any stray guests who happened to have wandered down from London or Paris or up from Nice and Cannes – set to work. We dug and carted, water spilled crystal about our feet which we sipped with relish, cool on burning days; pure water gushing from the land, ice cold, refreshing, natural. One day, digging on my own as the others were occupied elsewhere, I vaguely noticed a tiny fragment of paper swirl across my aged wellingtons. I ignored it until there was a second: this was rather harder to ignore, since it clearly bore a fragment of floral decoration very much the same as that which decorated the lavatory paper in the house.

On closer inspection it
was
the lavatory paper. No spring this.
No natural phenomenon. A savage leak in the pipe leading from the septic tank was just what it was.

Alerted, gentlemen arrived from Grasse and Antibes with bottles of brilliant dyes which they poured into the drains, pipes, sinks and lavatory pans. The spring took on the hues of Bonnard's palette. We all had injections because we had spent a considerable amount of time during our digging seeking refreshment from its apparently unending supply. Spades and barrows were put away, pipes laid and a new drainage system installed. The spring ceased abruptly. I surveyed sadly a wide, muddy pit.

But why not have a pond after all? The pit was there, much of the work had been done, the rushes flourished. I set to work again. The pond grew. Cemented carefully, lined with boulders and shards of local rock and stone, fed by a hidden waterpipe in a clump of nettles, and filled to the brim from the local mains, it shimmered in the summer evening. My sister brought me water lilies from her Sussex garden pond, my father packed roots of ‘real English mint' in his sponge bag, someone else brought gnarled roots of water iris. I bought a plastic bag of little goldfish at one franc each from the Monoprix and a bunch of green Canadian pondweed. In two summers it was established; it was a real pond. The Monoprix fish went mad and became hundreds, the weeds flourished, the iris nodded in the speckled shade, the lilies were white cups with flat green saucers, the mint smothered the banks.

And then the strangers arrived, borne upon the wind one must suppose? The dreaded mare's tail, wall pennywort, the Canadian pondweed, so small in the bunch, became a vast viridian carpet. Then came the ‘people' … voles and shrews plopped along the sedge, dragonflies of every size and colour darted across my pond, water wagtails came, the yellow and the grey, swallows and swifts and once, to my astonishment, a bewildered heron lost on his way to the Camargue. Waterboatmen, water beetles, dragonfly lava, water spiders and mosquito lava multiplied. I bought half a kilo of eels and three carp from the fishmonger. Small green frogs with gold eyes and yellow bellies sang in the mint and sprang from rush to rush with the dexterity of trapeze artists.

I sat entranced before my creation. Five hundred metres up in the limestone hills of Provence, among massive olives and jagged rock where no water had ever been before, I now had a lush English country pond.