The Day Gone By (2 page)

When my father said he was going to marry Lilian Button there was a hell of a row. The Adamses and the Beadons didn't half create. One fragment only my mother passed on to me. They said to her ‘We've got a Lilian already in the family, so we're going to call you Rosie.' If this doesn't strike you as humiliating, reader, try it on yourself.

There were worse humiliations, I am fairly sure. However, there must have been a degree of acceptance, for I have two amusing recollections of my mother's from about those times. Martock lies only a mile or so from Montacute, and the Adamses were, of course, on friendly terms with the Powys family, which included those three egregious authors, the brothers John Cowper, Llewelyn and T.F. Powys. There used to be visits to Montacute. My mother once told me how, while she was sitting on the terrace with one of the brothers - she didn't say which one - he suddenly asked her ‘Doesn't the intense beauty of that cloud give you a pain?'

‘Whatever did you say, Mummy?'

‘I said “No”.' (She uttered it in a tone of perplexity mingled with the faintest touch of exasperation.) That apparently concluded the conversation.

At some other time during my childhood my mother remarked, a propos of nothing in particular, ‘That Mr Hardy wasn't a very nice old man.' I have often wondered since whether she might have met Florence (she could not have met Emma) and if so, what she thought of
her.

Anyway, what happened was that my father married his Lilian (who abjured her Methodism and became C. of E.), told my grandfather that he had no wish to continue in practice with him and bought a practice at Newbury in Berkshire.

At first they lived in a distinctly modest, rather ugly house in a Pooteresque, unfashionable street. At Newbury Hospital my sister Katharine was born in 1911 and my brother John in 1913. In 1914 my father tried to enlist in the R.A.M.C., but they wouldn't have him: by then he was forty-four. My brother Robert was born in 1916 and in 1919 died in the terrible influenza epidemic which swept Europe in the wake of the war. Thereafter my parents, sister and brother never spoke of Robert, and as a little boy I never even knew of his existence.

I was born in May 1920. I have sometimes wondered whether, if poor Robert had lived, I would have been born at all, for my father - who was usually up-to-date - knew all about Marie Stopes and possessed a copy of her book
Married Love
(which he kept locked up). This wasn't the sort of question about which you could ever have asked my parents: but my conception must have been intended, I think.

In spite of his humble start my father had got on well in Newbury, both in the hospital and in the country round. One of his patients was the famous John Porter of Kingsclere, who had been racehorse trainer to Edward VII and trained Minoru and goodness knows how many more great winners. (My father once told me that at Christmas 1916, when virtually no luxuries whatever were to be obtained, John Porter sent him not a bottle, but a case of cherry brandy.) If my father was going to build up a good practice among wealthy people (which he did), he needed a better house in a more distinguished neighbourhood.

Apart from the death of Robert, a year or two before my birth, two things happened. My grandfather died, aged about eighty, and my father bought the beautiful house out at Wash Common (then outside Newbury) where I was born. My mother told me an odd story about this: apparently my father came home one day and said to her ‘I don't know what you'll say, but I've gone and bought Miss Bruxner's house.' She told me this with pleasure and with no air of resentment whatever - it was, after all, a marvellous change for the better - yet it seems strange that apparently she herself didn't get a look at the house or even hear of his intention before he bought it.

It certainly was a splendid place to grow up in. The house, ‘Oakdene', had been built about 1895, in a style that was then rather popular with upper middle-class people in the south of England. It was L-shaped, with the long arm facing due south and the short, east. It was of brick, with a tile-floored, pilastered verandah running the whole south length. The upper storey (there were only two) was half-timbered against cream-coloured plastering. The tiled roofs were pitched. Downstairs was a parquet-floored hall, also running the length of the house, and off this opened at one end the dining-room (where we mostly lived), at the other the drawing-room (which was not sacrosanct, like some, but was also used a good deal, especially since it contained my brother's piano); my father's consulting-room and study; and the pantry, which led to the kitchen, scullery, larder and mangle-room. There were no fewer than seven bedrooms, two of them for servants. One of these became my nursery.

There were three acres of land altogether and a gardener's cottage, which had its own small garden. The superb view to the south was across the open country of ploughland, meadows and copses typical of the Berkshire-Hampshire border, stretching away four or five miles to the distant line of the Hampshire Downs - the steep escarpment formed by Cottington's Hill, Cannon Heath Down, Watership Down and Ladle Hill.

Only part of the garden was cultivated. The lawn was big enough for a tennis court, a clock golf green and a small croquet-ground. Beyond it lay the long herbaceous border, and beyond that, the meadow we called the Paddock. To the west, behind the hundred-yard-long hornbeam hedge, was the kitchen garden, with its pear, plum and apple trees.

But this was only half the substance of that garden. To the east lay a little copse, known as the Wild Wood; and beyond that the drying-ground with its clothes-lines and rough grass, among which lay the netted raspberry bed and a broken-down, disused pig-sty.

Just to the north of these lay Bull Banks. (Beatrix Potter: ‘The Tale of Mr Tod'.) Bull Banks was an actual bank of considerable size, perhaps twenty-five yards long, five feet high and ten broad, planted with laurel, forsythia, cydonia, lilac and other shrubs and crowned along the top with three silver birches. In front of it, outside the dining-room windows, lay the rose garden and behind it the potting-shed, a vegetable patch and the sizeable stables (part of which had become the garage). Here was a place and a half! In Bull Banks you could go to ground and no one could tell where you might be. (‘If you're called you're to
answer,
Richard!' ‘Shan't!') It could represent anything - a fortress, the council-rooms of a kingdom, a series of caves or dwellings, a dangerous jungle. But reality was often more delightful than pretending. Thrushes, blackbirds and chaffinches nested in Bull Banks. A small child, lying still among the bushes, was better placed to watch them than an adult. In due course the fledglings, all brown feathers and glum beaks turned down at the corners, would come out to fly. I would catch caterpillars off the leaves, put them down in the open and see how close a blackbird was ready to come to take them. (They never came to the hand, though.) Once, I fabricated a nest and brought my sister to see it, claiming to have found it. It didn't deceive her and I'm glad she didn't pretend it did. I hated being condescended to, and in fact I can't remember that anyone in the family ever did condescend to me, though sometimes they grew evasive. (‘When you're older . . .')

Bull Banks extended almost to the kitchen windows on the east side of the house, ending in a great bush of bay, the kitchen fence, a bed of wallflowers and on the house wall a wistaria. On the other side - the sunset side — of the house stood the conservatory and beyond that, in another wide patch of rough ground, the hazelnut trees, the swing and the rhododendrons. There were two great clumps of rhododendrons, one red and one mauve. When I was small, these affected me more deeply than any other flowers in the garden - more even than the roses or the dwarf begonias. I can remember once, after a shower of rain, standing on tiptoe and thrusting my head and shoulders up through the dripping branches and foliage to come face-to-face with a great cluster of blooms, covered with drops, glowing fresh, their brilliantly coloured trumpet mouths all maculate within, the whole bigger than my own face. In early childhood, I believe, awareness works on two levels at once: there is a paradox. Wonderful things are often apprehended composedly (after all, they're tangibly there), while ordinary things can seem miraculous in a way in which they never do again. I remember feeling soaking wet - including my feet, which I hated - and at the same time recognizing a kind of abasement before the rhododendrons: that is, there was nothing I could do, adequately to respond to something so beautiful. They were beautiful beyond comprehension, beyond assimilation. You would never be able to say ‘Well, now I've seen them.' You felt you ought to look at them for ever. They were beyond anything one could have expected or imagined. Saying even this much is really cheating - bringing in hindsight and words to try to express a child's incoherent, inarticulate sense of being utterly bowled over.

Nothing else in the garden affected me like the rhododendrons - which also, of course, provided caves, hiding-places and the dwellings of my imaginary friends. (I had plenty of those, as well as real ones.) But the dwarf begonias ran them pretty close. There is still, sixty years later, no garden flower with richer colours. I used to be allowed to gather up the fallen ones and float them in shallow bowls of water, and this gave me enormous pleasure. They were mine - mine! If only they had lasted a bit longer. One day I had an idea. I picked one or two
unfallen
ones on the sly. No one noticed. I believe this was the start of a certain unscrupulous streak in small matters which has remained with me all my life. It never got as far as pinching shirts, like Dylan Thomas; but by and large I believe it's done me more harm than good. I'm sorry I got away with those unfallen begonias.

My earliest memories are, first, of making my way through the paddock, among the long grass of June, with the sorrel and moon-daisies taller than my own head. I was perhaps three. The moon-daisies, if you gripped four or five stalks, would actually support your weight as you leaned backwards. Secondly, I remember lying in bed in the morning - my mother already up and gone - listening to a bird singing in the dew-glittering silver birch on the edge of the lawn. The bird sang ‘Bringing it! Bringing it! Bringing it! Marguerite! Marguerite! Knee–deep! Knee-deep! Wait! Wait! Wait! Wait!' It was, of course, a song-thrush, but I didn't know that then. I just felt it was beautiful - so vigorous and clear – and nothing to interrupt or stop it. But those are words, too. Cheating.

Another special flower - a wild flower, this time - was the orange hawkweed (‘Grim the Collier' or ‘Fox and Cubs'). It's not very common, but, like many wild flowers, where you do come across it, it's usually fairly profuse. It flowered here and there in the long grass by the rhododendrons, between the Spanish chestnut and the swing. It's a dandelion type of flower
(composita).
The clustered blooms, deep orange, are at the top of a stalk about as tall as a milk bottle, and are not large - perhaps each as broad as an adult's little finger nail. This was my own, secret flower. I knew that even my father didn't know it was there; or if he did, he'd never spoken of it. I loved its colour and vaguely knew it to be a shade uncommon, for you never seemed to find it anywhere else. In my imagination I attributed magical properties to it, though these I never put to the test. To this day I love to come upon one.

The insects continually fascinated me. There were huge slugs – yes, I know they're not insects – bigger than my thumb, some of them. They didn't disgust me, though naturally I preferred the snails. If you put them on a sheet of glass you could watch the pulsation along the base of their bodies, a regular alternation of colours as they slid along. I liked the earwigs, too, that fell out of the dahlias; and the woodlice which curled up defensively when you came upon them under bark or in old boxes in the potting-shed. But best of all were the centipedes and millipedes. For these you had to dig with a trowel - usually in the Wild Wood. The centipedes, bright chestnut, dashed away at speed, articulated and wriggling all ways. The millipedes - barely an inch long – shammed death, curling up like woodlice. But if you put them in a jam-jar and waited, after a while they would uncurl and start going round and round, with their wonderful, undulant motion on innumerable, fluent, flexible legs. The motion of these legs was weirdly smooth, as they followed one another down the length of the body. In the jam-jar the millipedes had a peculiar smell, not very pleasant. It occurs to me now that this may be a natural deterrent reaction against enemies.

The only insects we killed were - apart from greenfly - ants and wasps. The tile-floored verandah harboured colonies of black ants. When they flew, it was a sight to see. The air was filled with them. They could bite sharply, but as a rule they didn't hurt you if you didn't provoke them. Sometimes, however, they became so numerous that my mother would decide that they must be reduced. (I don't think total extermination would have been practicable — not in those days.) The job was done with relays of kettles of boiling water, which percolated through the long, thin cracks in the tiles. This never seemed to create any panic among the ants. Those who died, died at once, of course. Those who didn't simply carried on. I don't think these onslaughts really had much effect. They certainly had no long-term effect. Anyway, my father rather condoned the ants, because they kept down the greenfly on the climbing roses growing up the fluted wooden pillars of the verandah. Lovely roses they were: I can smell them now, and remember their names, too: Lady Hillingdon (yellow): Clos Vougeot (dark red); Madame Butterfly (pink); and the little, thornless yellow Banksia rose, which grew right up to the bedroom windows and flowered so profusely that you were allowed to pick a bloom or two if you wanted. At one end of the verandah was a white, scented jasmine and at the other end a ceanothus, whose blunt, smoky-blue cones of bloom I then thought rather dull. In those days I wanted all flowers to be fragrant (that was the only thing wrong with the rhododendrons and begonias) and hadn't much time for Canterbury Bells, gladioli (they were all pink in those days) or forget-me-nots. It was wallflowers for me, night-scented stock, lilac, viburnum, chrysanthemums, blue lupins on a hot afternoon: and above all, the scent of the Siberian crab-apple in bloom. It is the literal truth that I am half-afraid to smell one now, for it turns my heart over and makes me want to weep for Bull Banks. Bull Banks is gone, for ever. After the war, and long after we had sold the house, the house was pulled down. The whole place was built over. The former garden - even the great oak trees were felled - is now the site of twenty-two small dwellings.