One Young Fool in Dorset (14 page)

“Yes, Helen, she is. But of course you two must see
each other during the holidays, lots of times…”

I was heartbroken, and so was Snort, but the
decision had been made. Looking back on it now, I imagine it was
probably more of a financial decision as my father had just retired
from the army.

I never saw Snort again. Her parents lived in
Singapore, so we couldn’t meet in the holidays. We wrote letters
for a while, but as our lives progressed, the letters faded and
finally died away.

I tried to put the thought of starting at a new
school behind me and concentrated on enjoying my summer break. The
first week was always tricky as my parents opened our end of term
reports. As usual, my sister’s positively glowed, while mine was a
little worse than mediocre.

* * *

School Report

English:
Victoria may have
ability but this is not evident as she is disorganised, untidy and
rarely produces homework.

Mathematics:
Victoria’s
defeatist attitude and daydreaming do not assist her progress in
this subject.

It would seem that Victoria has made very
little progress this term. Unless her overall attitude improves, it
is unlikely that Victoria will succeed in her new school. However,
we wish her well.

Mrs Driver (Housemistress)

* * *

It was fortunate for me that my younger brother’s
school report was even worse than mine. The comments from his
teachers were so appalling that my parents decided to send him to a
‘crammer’ the next term. A crammer is a school that prepares pupils
for examinations. I felt sorry for him, but pleased that my report
was marginally better than his.

It wasn’t my happiest time. I felt settled at
boarding school and I missed Snort already. I was thirteen and I
couldn’t even imagine going to a new school and having to start all
over again. At one point, I even considered running away, although
I’m not sure how I thought that would help the situation. What I
actually did was
pretend
to run away, just to see if anybody
cared. I shut myself in the outside toilet, a place nobody used as
it was a home for spiders.

“
Ach,
where has Victoria gone?” I heard my
mother say on her way down the garden to visit her beloved compost
heap.

“Probably gone round to see Annabel,” said my
brother.

I held my breath, waiting. Were they worried? Would
they go round to Auntie Jean’s and check? Nobody did, and I got
very bored waiting in the toilet. Eventually, I shuffled out.
Nobody commented because nobody had realised I’d gone missing. It
was a huge non-event.

Of course my pride was dented, but I soon forgot
about it as I helped make Crispy Crunchy Crackly Crack with Auntie
Jean and Annabel in their kitchen. Oh, the pleasure of that first
bite and taste with a glass of milk! It was enough to make anybody
forget all about running away.

Auntie Jean was a wonderful cook, unlike my mother.
I think my mother could have been, but her plants interested her
far more. However, sometimes a glut in the garden would spur her
into making slightly crazy dishes, her Eastern European heritage
making a rare appearance.

“
Ach,
the plums are nearly ripe. Next week we
will make
Zwetschgenknödel
.”

“Hooray!”

The damson plums ripened, and the day was set aside
for
Zwetschgenknödel
, or plum dumplings.

On these days, we all lent a hand. My brother and I
rushed out into the garden and picked the plums from the tree,
dodging the wasps that were just as keen to get to the fruit as we
were. Then we washed the plums, but, unlike most recipes, left the
stones in. My sister was on dough duty, and my mother supervised
and dropped the dumplings into boiling water. The result was a
mountain of fragrant dumplings. On
Zwetschgenknödel
days,
there was nothing else on the menu; we just guzzled
Zwetschgenknödel,
eating them with our hands, juice running
down our faces. We ate until we could eat no more.

My mother’s gardening skills ensured we had fresh
vegetables and fruit nearly all year round. The only thing she
failed dismally at was corn on the cob. The cobs never reached
their full size, and never ripened to that glorious yellow. This
was a big disappointment, particularly as my parents had named the
house
Kukuruz
, meaning corn on the cob. I really don’t know
why it was named that. When the subject came up, my parents would
steal secret glances at each other and my mother would blush.

Along with gardening, history was another of my
mother’s passions.

“Come along!” she would shout up the stairs. “Today
we are visiting Sherborne Castle. It was built by Sir Walter
Raleigh, you know, and it has 40 acres of grounds.”

We climbed into Ivy, and she ground the gears and
bucked all the way to Sherborne, some 40 miles away.

My mother adored visiting castles and country
estates, all steeped in history, then touring the grounds, always
on the lookout for gardening ideas. Dorset has numerous stately
homes, and we probably visited most of them. I don’t remember many
individually; they blur together in a haze of suits of armour,
portraits, mazes and kitchen gardens.

I remember visiting Athelhampton House, a fine
example of a 15th century manor house surrounded by one of the
great architectural gardens of England. Of course, my mother almost
drooled as she spotted rare plants, and her sleight of hand, as she
stole cuttings and stashed them in her enormous handbag, was
legendary.

I also recall Kingston Lacy, an elegant
Italian-inspired country residence in Wimborne Minster. I don’t
remember it because of its lavish interior, or because of its
splendid gardens. I remember it because of the rather incongruous
Egyptian obelisk, sculpted from pink granite, which stands in the
gardens.

In 1820, adventurer William John Bankes found the
toppled 2nd century BC obelisk on the Nile island of Philae. Being
a collector, he arranged to have the granite artefact transported
to his family home in Dorset. The inscriptions on this obelisk,
along with the famous Rosetta Stone, helped crack open the mystery
of the ancient Egyptian symbols.

And the story didn’t finish there. Very recently, in
2014 to be precise, the inscriptions were inspected again. Modern
imaging techniques allowed for areas to be deciphered that had
gradually been rubbed away by centuries of Egyptian sun and 200
years of English weather. The result has revealed startling new
insights into ancient Egyptian history. Fifty years later, Joe and
I visited the island of Philae on the Nile, the birthplace of the
Kingston Lacy obelisk I had stared at as a child.

Back home, my mother nurtured and nursed the
cuttings and seeds she had stolen. It was common to overhear this
typical conversation as she walked visitors round our garden.

“
Ach,
this rather unusual azalea comes from
Athelhampton House, and this shrub here is a very fine hebe I found
in the grounds of Lulworth Castle.”

Another of my mother’s ideas of a good time was
visiting old churches, of which there were hundreds within easy
reach of Ivy. Old churches abound in Dorset, and we visited many.
Some were within walking distance of our house, like the Saxon St
Martin’s Church, which is one thousand years old and holds a
priceless effigy of Lawrence of Arabia.

Why Wareham for such a valuable effigy? Because it
was sculpted for St Paul’s Cathedral but was refused because of the
controversy surrounding T.E. Lawrence’s death. Neither would
Westminster Abbey or Salisbury Cathedral take it. So it ended up in
the tiny Wareham church which, at a stretch, seats just 40. The
effigy didn’t interest me much, but I stared with horrified
fascination at the crude red stars daubed on one wall, each star
representing yet another death in the parish due to the Great
Plague.

I confess, as a child, I didn’t always enjoy these
trips. The churches were dark and cold inside, and smelled musty.
Even the sun shining through the stained-glass windows didn’t
brighten things up much. I did quite enjoy exploring the
graveyards, reading the headstones with ghoulish interest, but even
that palled after a while.

So my mother came up with an idea she thought might
keep us amused. She bought thick wax crayons and rolls of
shelf-lining paper, and showed us how to lay the paper on a
headstone or brass plaque. When we rubbed the wax crayon over the
surface of the paper, the inscriptions magically appeared on the
paper. Brass-rubbing, as this was called, is no longer permitted as
it is very damaging, but it was common in those days.

My mother’s latest money-making venture, painting
little salt boxes my father made with
edelweiss
flowers, (I
will sell hundreds! I can’t understand why nobody has thought of it
before!) hadn’t taken off, so she was trying something completely
different. She became a market researcher, working for a big
company. Now she knocked on doors asking to interview people from
specific age groups, or lurked on street corners ready to pounce on
unsuspecting members of the public. More and more of her time was
taken up by her new job.

“
Ach
, you should take the children away
somewhere,” she suggested to my father, “then I can catch up with
my paperwork.”

Discussion followed, and a decision was made. My
father would take us camping in the New Forest that weekend.

“Can Annabel come, too?”

“Not this time, we haven’t got room in the tent. Now
go and get your stuff together.”

The tent was new, we hadn’t taken it on its maiden
voyage yet. Ivy was packed up with great excitement. The drive,
with my father at the helm, was surprisingly smooth, with no
kangaroo jumps.

The New Forest was decreed a royal forest by King
William I in about 1079. Used for the royal hunt, it consisted
mainly of deer, and is mentioned in the Domesday Book. Wild ponies
are plentiful having been allowed to roam free and breed for
centuries. In fact, as Wikipedia states:

Grazing of commoners’ ponies and cattle is an
essential part of the management of the Forest, helping to maintain
the internationally important heathland, bog, grassland and
wood-pasture habitats and their associated wildlife.

“First person to see a pony wins!” shouted my
sister.

That didn’t take long as the wild ponies, although
unbroken, are very accustomed to humans. Not only did we see
ponies, but also foals born that spring. I hugged myself in
anticipation. That night, I so hoped to see deer, maybe badgers,
and foxes, too. I also knew that there were still some red
squirrels in the New Forest. These did finally vanish in the 1970s,
chased out by their grey cousins, and only survived in cut off,
managed areas like Brownsea Island.

We put the tent up eventually, although it wasn’t
easy. It was the type that had a separate inner bedroom. My sister
and I were going to sleep in there, while my father and brother
slept in the outer part. We pumped up our inflatable mattresses and
laid out our sleeping bags; it all looked very cosy and inviting.
The New Forest ponies watched our activities and swished their
tails.

“Let’s explore,” I said, my notebook in hand. “I
want to see some wildlife!”

13 Robberies

Watercress, Olive and Lentil Pâté

T
he campsite seemed very nice, but on my
first trip to the washrooms, I made three discoveries.

New Forest ponies watch everything you do.

Campsite washrooms are a breeding ground for
spiders. Big hairy ones.

Campsites don’t necessarily provide hot water.

Never mind. We were only there for one night and
breakfast.

I’d been reading up all about the New Forest, and I
knew that we should be able to spot quite a lot of wildlife. I
didn’t think spiders really counted.

“We’d better lock tonight’s supper away in the
tent,” said my father. “I’m looking forward to hotdogs.”

We zipped up the tent carefully and made our way
down the track, equine eyes following us.

I’d love to be able to report that we saw badgers,
several species of deer, stoats, red squirrels, grey squirrels,
polecats and dozens of species of birds. But we didn’t. Plenty of
ponies, of course, but nothing else. At the end of the walk, all I
could write down in my notebook was:

Spiders
- in washroom

Ants
- on ground, climbing trees

Beetles
- on ground, climbing trees

Ponies
- everywhere

A naturalist never gives up,
I told myself
and the watching ponies. Perhaps I’d see some wildlife during the
night.

“Time to cook our supper,” said my father, and we
headed back to our campsite as the sun sank behind the trees.

Ponies stopped cropping the grass and lifted their
heads as we passed. An annoying zing floated past my ear and I
added another sighting to my list.

Mosquitoes
- on my arms, legs, everywhere

Nearing our tent, all of us realised there was
something seriously amiss. It was unzipped, and the door flap hung
open, revealing devastation inside. We stared.

“What on earth has happened here?” asked my father,
peering into the tent, his military moustache bristling with
indignation. “It looks like somebody has been searching for
valuables.”

We three kids gaped in wide-eyed wonder.

“Anything missing, do you think?” asked my
sister.

“Not as far as I can see, but I think we should
report it before we touch anything. The police will need to
photograph the scene of the crime. Come along, we’ll go and report
it at the campsite office.”

I tore my eyes from the mess inside. Darkness was
falling, but I had seen that the little camp stove had toppled
over, clothes and sleeping bags were strewn about, milk had been
spilt, and plates and pans were scattered everywhere.