I can remember this: lying in my pram and looking up at a white sky. Across the sky, some lines are drawn, like musical staves. Fluttering shapes arrive and land on the staves: birds on telegraph wires.
My mother used to say, ‘You couldn’t possibly remember that. Babies can’t capture anything, because they have no words. Your mind would have been as empty as the sky you think you saw.’
I would remind her that the sky wasn’t empty. It was filled with the descending notes of birds. They settled on the wires. And she would say, ‘Don’t be silly. You invented that stuff. The first real memory you could possibly have – when you were, say, three or four – would have been of Linkenholt.’
All right, then. Linkenholt. It’s clear and present in my mind. The big house stood on a hill in Hampshire, where the wind was always strong. It was never a beauty. The colour of its brick was too screechy a coral red. Its white-painted gables were too massive. It reminded people of a lumpy three-masted ship, riding its waves of green and beautiful land. But all through my childhood, I longed for it – for the moment of walking through its heavy front door and breathing its familiar perfume. What was that perfume? A composite of beeswax furniture polish, Brasso, French cigarettes and dogs. It was the smell of home.
It wasn’t my home.
Linkenholt Manor belonged to my grandparents, Roland and Mabel Dudley. My older sister Jo and I only went there three times a year – Christmas holidays, Easter and summer. But our love for it was uncontainable. Our day-to-day lives in a dark, post-war London were smog-bound, constrained and confined by the walks to school and back, to the Italian corner shop, to the sooty parks, the skating rink, the swimming baths. But at Linkenholt, we were free. Around the house on the hill were spread two thousand acres of chalky farmland, owned by our grandfather, across which, on our Raleigh bicycles, in corduroy dungarees or sometimes improbably dressed as Indian chiefs, we were allowed to roam. These fields and woods, in the 1950s, were some of the loveliest in England. It is not an exaggeration to say that we often felt our London existence to be a kind of exile, from which we longed to escape, a dark dream from which only at Linkenholt would we awake.
And here we came at last: pulling up Linkenholt Hill in a low gear of our mother’s Morris Traveller, cruising slowly through Linkenholt village, past the dairy, past the tiny cricket pavilion, past the church where I was christened, then into the gravelled drive, on the border of which three vast elm trees stood like restless giants.
And now, the arrival. Jill, the overfed Springer spaniel, barking. The door opening. The slow emergence of Granny and Grandpop into the porch. Brief contact with the tobacco-tainted scent of their clothes, with the skin of their faces – taut and shiny over Grandpop’s skull; soft and powdery, falling in pastry folds, on Granny’s cheek – and then the rush past them to where we longed to be: inside the house, feeling it take us in, then hearing the lovely percussion of our feet clicking against the brass rods of the wide stairs.
The room Jo and I shared was at the back, overlooking a rose garden and a wild spinney beyond, where the wind sighed in the night. To drift to sleep to the sound of this wind, knowing that we were ‘home’, that the morning would lay before us the paradise we kept dreaming of, was to feel drugged with happiness.
Linkenholt loved us. That’s how it seemed to me, when I was ‘Rosie’, a very young, ignorant girl. The place gave us its soul and its grandeur, but Granny and Grandpop were heartbroken people who had almost nothing left to give us. They had lost their elder son, also called Roland, aged sixteen, from a burst appendix. He was away at Harrow School when this happened, so they didn’t even see him die. Of their remaining two children – our mother, Jane, and our uncle Michael – they loved only Michael. But in the last month of the war, November 1945, Michael Dudley was killed at Fürstenau in Germany. He was twenty-eight. Roland and Mabel went on living, but they never recovered.
They were left with the one child, the middle child, the girl child, Jane, who seemed to give them no joy at all. Their precious boys were dead. Such scratchings of affection as they had left, they gave to Michael’s two sons, Jonathan and Robert, our cousins. Perhaps, when they let Jo and me cycle off down the drive in our Indian feathers, they secretly hoped a few cowboys had strayed out of Wyoming, USA, to Hampshire, England, and would put an end to us – an end to trying to love children who meant almost nothing to them.
The strange thing is, this didn’t seem to matter to us. We were never – in my memory, anyway – craven to the grandparents, longing to please them or hoping to be hugged or petted by them. We loved Linkenholt, not them. They were rich and they had created a beautiful world around themselves, and that world was all to us.
A small regiment of servants kept this world shined up. It was human endeavour that gave to the great hallway its perfumed magnificence, that pruned the lavender paths and the fruit trees and the laurel walks of the vast garden. In the kitchen, huge roasts and puddings were confected by Florence the cook. In the dairy, old Mr Abbot churned yellow cream and a stiff salty butter more delicious than any I’ve tasted since. In the greenhouses, Tom, the head gardener, would, with tender, earth-blackened hands, offer us choice ripe strawberries and vine tomatoes perfumed like exotic fruit.
In London, we habitually ate a lot of bread and jam, Spam, Kraft cheese slices, Ryvita, toad-in-the-hole, tinned ravioli – parsimonious post-war food which kept us very thin. Here at Linkenholt, we consumed roast grouse, honey-baked ham, rhubarb syllabubs, treacle puddings, apple pies and cream. And we could give our whole attention to these wonders. Nobody expected us to speak much at mealtimes. I think it was assumed that girls would have nothing to say. We just had to sit up straight and wipe our mouths nicely with starched linen napkins and, when the meal was done, ask Granny if we could leave the table. ‘Can we get down, Granny?’ we would say. But she would never answer. She would just give a furious little nod of her head, which made her powdery chins wobble.
Yet I don’t think we cared. I can remember running straight out of the dining room, through the hall, down a long passage, past a locked gun room, to the back door where our bicycles waited. A circuit or two, perhaps, round the restless elms, then away down the drive, out into the ever-unfolding green spaces, through a larch glade, up a chalky hill, pushing our bikes towards a great wood of beech and fir, oak and ash, where pheasants were fattening themselves up for the shooting season. Or sometimes, if an excited, daring mood was on us, we would cycle slowly from the manor gates to the top of Linkenholt Hill, stop for a moment, then whizz at colossal speed, as fast as we could, down the hill, the scented hedgerows a blur, the bright sky seeming to bounce at the edge of our vision.
Skidding to a stop at the bottom of the hill, we might meet Mr Carter, the gamekeeper, with his posse of lively Springer spaniels. The dogs would come rushing towards us – five or six of them. Jo loved this rush. She would kneel and pet the dogs, while I ran away. Bred as gun dogs, they were, I’d always assumed, adept at biting things, and I imagined those things would probably include my limbs or my face. Mr Carter would gently encourage me to stroke the dogs, but I never lost my fear of them.
Mr Carter was a man of few words, who lived alone in one of the estate cottages, a house with a strange tower growing out of its roof. He always treated us with patience and affection. And this was true of all the people who worked for the Dudleys. We must surely have been annoying to them, ridiculous even – spoilt kids from London, charging about on expensive bikes, given every material thing we asked for. But, perhaps because they had lived through the tragedies that had so wounded the Dudley family, they understood why our grandparents were unable to give us much affection, and so they compensated by showing us what kindness they could.
The person we were closest to was Douglas Abbot, only son of Mr Abbot who looked after the dairy. Douglas had two roles, as butler and chauffeur. He was tall and very thin, with a gentle voice, never ruffled by our grandfather’s outbreaks of bad temper. In a special cupboard in the dining room, he kept orange squash and ginger beer for us. Once, when with our cousins Jonathan and Robert we’d built a tree house in the spinney beyond the rose garden, Douglas Abbot climbed the makeshift ladder to our hideaway carrying four glasses of squash on a silver salver.
When I think about this extraordinary image, I understand that if part of your childhood is spent in a paradise like Linkenholt, a veil falls between your eyes and the truths you need to learn about the world. Later, this veil falls away.fn1
Christmas at Linkenholt involved beguiling preparations.
Every year, Jo and I were allowed to dig up a tiny Christmas tree from the spinney and keep it in a pot in our bedroom. (In January, it was replanted in the wood.) We decorated it with glued-together things: branches of wild oats, with the seed heads wrapped in multicoloured sweetpapers; pine cones and twigs dipped in glitter powder; garlands cut out from strips of chocolate foil.
We festooned our room with home-made paper chains and tissue-paper bells, bought from Woolworths in the King’s Road in London. We gathered our toys around the tree: my pig and his two rag-doll friends made by me, complete with extensive wardrobe, and named Mary and Polly; Jo’s dog Diggles and his companion Little Bear. We sat them up and let them marvel at our decorations. Mary and Polly put on their cocktail gowns.
Downstairs, in the library, the other tree, the real Christmas tree, waited. It was very tall and reached out its wide scented arms far into the room. Here, the decorations we loved most were strange pastel-coloured Victorian angels with anguished faces and long flowing gowns made of horsehair.
On Christmas morning, after the deep pitch darkness had sighed us to a long sleep, we woke to find filled stockings, heavy and rustling, on the end of our beds. We always opened these alone, instructed to let the grown-ups lie in (presumably after their Christmas Eve tippling).
The stockings themselves were the heavy wool socks Roland Dudley wore for shooting. The small presents were wrapped in tissue paper: chocolate cigarettes, tiny furniture for our doll’s house, crayons, Matchbox cars, gobstopper sweets, packets of transfers, a tangerine in the toe … Then our mother would come in, probably smoking her first du Maurier cigarette of the day in a long black holder, to make sure we were washed and tidy for Christmas breakfast.
She was very particular about our hair. Jo’s hair was insanely curly – ‘beyond hope’, our mother said. She could never figure out where this curly hair had come from. (We once annoyed her by suggesting that Jo was African.) My hair was just straight and slippery and had to be tied in bunches or clenched into obedience by a tortoiseshell slide, which kept falling out. She’d look us up and down. In some way that I can’t quite fathom, we disappointed her. Had she longed for boys, inherited a ‘boy only’ love from her parents? Had she even lost a boy child in the miscarriage she’d endured during the four years between Jo’s birth and mine? I will never know now. All I can remember was that this disappointment was of long duration.
Christmas breakfast was a fine Linkenholt moment. I can recall the sun coming through the mullions of the south-facing dining room, falling onto the mahogany sideboard, where Douglas would carve a ham on the bone and set slices before us on fine china plates. In my household in Norfolk, when my daughter Eleanor and her family come for Christmas, we still eat ham on Christmas morning. Indeed, small remembered delights have been lifted from Linkenholt and brought into our lives and kept vibrant there. We now wrap the grandchildren’s stocking gifts in tissue paper.
After the ham breakfast, we’d put on our best coats – the ones from Hayford’s of Sloane Street, with little velvet collars – and walk to Linkenholt church, the place where I was christened and where Jo, given a candle to hold during the christening ceremony, floated off into one of her dreamy moments and set fire to her disobedient curls. Our grandfather would usually read one of the lessons. Granny never moved from her pew. She’d sit there, wearing a strange floppy velvet beret, staring at the arrangements of holly and ivy, her face unmoving. No doubt she was thinking of her dead sons. In the bleak midwinter. O little town.
St Peter’s Church, Linkenholt, is a tiny flint building halfway down the single village street, set back against ancient yews, with a Germanic ‘witch’s hat’ tower and a graveyard almost empty of people. When our grandmother died, Roland Dudley had constructed a lychgate in her memory. When Roland himself died, a second marble plaque was put into the gate, commemorating his life. When my mother died, I and my stepbrother, Sir Mark Thomson (always known in the family as ‘Mawkie’), obtained the agreement of the vicar and the church wardens to add two more plaques, naming Jane and her second husband, Mawkie’s father, Sir Ivo Thomson. And Jane’s ashes, as she instructed, are scattered on Linkenholt Hill. A libation of Gordon’s gin was poured on them.
Mawkie and I – together with my daughter Eleanor and my beloved partner of twenty-five years, Richard Holmes – still make a pilgrimage to Linkenholt from time to time, usually choosing the spring, when the hedgerows offer up primroses, violets and the small white flowers we used to call ‘star of Bethlehem’. We walk up to the house to find it gated and locked, the gravel driveway now a tarmac road. The elms are gone, of course, but the spinney is still there and the wind still makes it sigh. I like these visits. I like seeing the ghost of Rosie in her feathered headdress, riding round the lawns on her Raleigh bike. But Jo has never been back there. She’s a person who is able to put portions of her past into oblivion. It isn’t that she can’t remember them; she just doesn’t want to revisit them.
Without Jo, I would have been lonely as a child at Linkenholt. The grown-ups mainly put themselves into a drawing-room existence, where they smoked and drank and played cards and did The Times crossword and waited for meals to arrive. Only Roland, who had worked as a civil engineer in India and now put all his energies into modernising and mechanising his huge farm, found this tiresome, and would bounce away down the drive in his old jeep, which he drove with alarming abandon, like Mr Toad, off to visit his sheep or his cattle, or to argue with Mr Carter about which woods to shoot when. The dog, Jill, stood up beside him – his most favoured passenger.
Sometimes, after tea, he would take us with him in the back of the Land Rover – these strange little girls he laughingly called Rosebud and Jo-bags – to witness lambs being born, to admire the new bailer he’d invented for straw and hay, to watch stubble being burned. At first, we loved these outings. But one day, when we were riding with him on the combine platform, Jill came rushing towards us across the half-harvested wheat field. Jill loved her indulgent master. She didn’t like being without him. She attempted to get to him by trying to climb up the rotating blades of the combine. I remember the stricken look on Grandpop’s face, his shouted instruction to stop the combine and his call: ‘Jill! Jill! My Jill!’ But the dog kept climbing and was torn to shreds before our eyes. We never rode on the combine again.
Before Christmas dinner, Jo and I put on identical dark red velvet frocks with lace collars. We were allowed to go down to the library and take fronds of silver tinsel from the tree to make pretend tiaras for our hopeless hair.
Next, we sat and waited for the servants to come in to be given their gifts by Granny; Douglas smart in a tail coat, Florence’s cheeks scarlet from the kitchen heat, the housemaids always dressed in pigeon grey. What gifts did they get? Heartbreak hadn’t turned the Dudleys into Skimpoles, so perhaps good money was handed out, or perhaps Douglas had been dispatched in the Rolls to Andover or Marlborough to find ‘appropriate’ items. But the servants’ presents were never opened there and then. Everybody just stood around with glasses of sherry. There was a kind of awkward silence to these moments that nobody knew how to overcome. No doubt Michael Dudley, renowned for his good humour, for his jokes and his laughter, would have found the right things to say, but he was long gone.
After this, while Florence basted her vast turkey and Douglas put the finishing touches to the beautiful table, the grown-ups drank champagne. We drank ginger beer and opened our presents. There were few, but they were always good. The objects I remember loving most were a tin cash register, and a blue scooter, very like the ones all kids love riding today, but heavier and harder to steer. But what did we – polite children that we were – give Roland and Mabel? Something would have been organised: a ‘shooting’ tie for Grandpop, Yardley’s soap for Granny, hankies or talcum powder for eccentric Great-Aunt Violet, who sometimes left the dark confines of her flat in Grosvenor Street to brave a Hampshire Christmas? I can’t remember.
What I can recall is that Christmas Day at Linkenholt passed for us in an almost debilitating haze of excitement and overeating. After the roast turkey and the plum pudding, after more ginger beer and Mint Crisps and crystallised fruit, Jo and I would climb slowly up the green-carpeted stairs with the brass stair rods, tired out by sheer delight, our tinsel tiaras lost somewhere under a heap of wrapping paper. We’d get into our flannel pyjamas and stare out at the night and wait for the sound of the wind. We’d ask our toys if they had had a lovely day.
On Boxing Day, there was always a shoot. Grandpop had redesigned the Linkenholt acres with shooting in mind, planting beautiful woods and copses where the birds, so carefully bred by Mr Carter, could shelter and feed. We heard the quark-quark of pheasants all the time on our walks. Often they had lumbered into the air, panicked by our whizzing bicycles on Linkenholt Hill. Now the poor exotic creatures were driven from the woods and copses by an army of beaters and felled by the guns. The dogs seemed to shimmy with delight as they raced in to retrieve the bodies.
The men who gathered for the shooting party were the same each year, neighbours of the Dudleys, each with his own estate. Between them, this country elite must have owned about a third of Hampshire. They wore heavy tobacco-scented jackets, checked shirts and plus fours. The skin of their faces was ruddy and roughened by their outdoor life. Many of them had bristling nasal hair, which you hoped wouldn’t touch your face as they bent down to give you an avuncular peck on the cheek.
But they were a friendly old bunch. The nicest of them, Sir Eastman Bell, who owned Fosbury Manor, had developed a late passion for daffodils, and every Easter he would invite us to lunch, to walk with him round his acres of flowers. He must have had thirty or forty varieties, spreading out across lawns and fields and into woods. He didn’t grow them to market them; he grew them because he loved them.
The Fosbury daffodils presented to me and Jo a sight we never, ever forgot. It surely outshone in variety and wonder the golden blooms that Wordsworth saw ‘beside the lake, beneath the trees/Fluttering and dancing in the breeze’.
Time goes slowly when you’re a child, and I used to imagine that those fields of flowers were still there all through the summer and into the first leaf fall. Later, I realised that Sir Eastman Bell spent two thirds of his year looking at drooping brown stems or bare grass. But he sacrificed the months of this empty landscape for his paradise of a spring.
Sometimes Jo and I, wearing woolly hats and gloves, stood with him for one of the shooting drives. He’d remind us about the need for silence as we waited for the sound of the beaters coming nearer through the woods. And the quality of this silence – men standing in line with guns, the dogs obediently quiet, a mist hanging low over the plough, or even a light snow falling – I have never forgotten. The images are almost like images of war, and yet what I felt, as a child, was wonder. It felt like a silence that contained all my life to come. My grandfather and his friends were somewhere near the end of their time on the earth, but what I could see was the landscape spread all around me in its winter magnificence, waiting for me to find my place in the world.
It could be bitterly cold out on the Linkenholt fields. But the cold was part of the wonder, an endurance necessary to the time. I remember curling up my freezing toes inside my wellingtons, holding on to Jo for the warmth of her arm. And once, Sir Eastman gave us a nip of cherry brandy from a silver flask – a river of scented lava creeping down inside me. He patted our woolly heads. ‘Don’t necessarily tell your mother,’ he said.
Then the pheasants began flying up, making their honking cry, and the guns were pointed at the sky, and the russet and green bodies fell and the air was scented with cordite.fn2
I have often wondered, did Jo have this feeling of some marvellous existence waiting for her beyond the Linkenholt fields?
For I grew up with the reality of Jo’s genius. From a very young age, she was a seriously brilliant artist. Art teachers at school cooed over her. Our Aunt June (our father’s sister), who was something of a painter herself, nurtured Jo’s talent with frequent superlatives. Even our mother, who never liked to ‘show off’ by praising us, was aware that Jo was gifted and might have a professional future.
At Linkenholt, when rain kept us indoors, we began a little book together. It was called The Bear who Went to Sea. I can remember nothing about the story I wrote, but I can still see Jo’s vibrant little pictures: the bear setting off with his knapsack; the bear discovering a sailing boat in a cove; the bear at sea, alone with the night, with the moon and stars, longing for home.
And Jo entered a national newspaper competition with a crayoned picture of me at Linkenholt. It was titled ‘My Sister on the Farm’. I’m wearing my corduroy dungarees, a woolly jumper and a scarf patterned with windmills and Dutchmen wearing clogs. This picture won first prize (two guineas, I think) and was printed in The Times. Jo would have been no older than nine or ten. Even Granny thought this was terrific.
In the summer holidays, our cousins Jonathan and Robert were sent down to Linkenholt to be with us. Their mother Barbara, Michael’s widow, had married again and given birth to two more sons, James and Charles. Roland and Mabel never invited Barbara or the other boys to Linkenholt. I believe, in their immovable post-war snobbery, they had never much liked their daughter-in-law, whose father was a Jewish businessman, Bertie Stern. Perhaps Barbara had never seemed good enough for their beloved Michael. And now they never saw her or her new husband. When summer came around, they snatched their grandsons from her and put them in Jane’s care.
Johnny and Rob had (and still have) an affection for our times at Linkenholt as fierce as mine and Jo’s. But I remember our mother complaining about having to look after four kids instead of two. Later in our lives, she told us that while she knew that we and the cousins were ‘in paradise’ on these holidays, she was ‘in hell’. It was the hell of feeling unloved, of arguing with Grandpop over trifles, of enduring Mabel’s unending, debilitating grief.
And perhaps the presence of the boys didn’t help her. They were noisier and larger than us. They adored climbing trees and riding their bicycles through puddles even faster than we rode ours. Their clothes got muddier. And, most importantly, they were less afraid of Jane’s bad temper. They slept in a room across the landing from ours, where, Rob complained, the birds kept them awake all night. Jo and I would often emerge from our tranquil sleep to hear Jane shouting: ‘Will you boys BE QUIET!’
They didn’t want to be quiet. Linkenholt was a paradise for them too, and the expressions of their happiness could sometimes be noisy. Johnny’s nature tended somewhat towards anxious obedience; he was a boy who wanted to please. But Rob, I think, didn’t care much what any of the grown-ups felt about him. He was perpetually lively and restless and would keep talking for as long as anyone would listen. And he had a wonderful knack of saying things that made everybody laugh. He became the house jester, as Michael had allegedly once been. Even Granny’s cross mouth would stretch itself into a secret grin at some of Rob’s sayings and antics. And to see Granny smile – a thing she did so very infrequently – was a strange phenomenon, as though, for a moment, a different personality had taken her over.
She loved it when the boys sang to her. Before lunch, sometimes, when the grown-ups were on to the sherry and we would be ravenously hungry (after a morning spent playing in the garden, trying to climb hayricks or building dens in the spinney, but cleaned and brushed up by Jane), we would cluster in the drawing room and Johnny and Rob would sing, in their sweet boy-soprano voices: ‘The Minstrel Boy’, ‘Molly Malone’, ‘Oh Shenandoah’ …
What worlds of memory did these songs evoke in Granny? Had Michael once sung them, or poor little Roland? It interests me to recall that, as far as I can remember, Roland was never talked about. He must have died in about 1926 – thirty years before. So did the sheer weight of time cast some oblivion on him? Or had he perhaps been a weak boy, of whom Roland and Mabel were very slightly ashamed, whereas Michael had been large and loud and strong?
And when Mabel looked at Jonathan and Robert, who did she see? I like to think she saw these children only for who they were – these deeply individual souls – but I fear the ghost of one or other of the dead sons hovered always round their heads. Robert had a tomboyish look, laughing brown eyes, hair wild, clothes slightly out of order. Jonathan was tall, athletic and beautiful. He was, to some extent, their ‘golden boy’, but his young life was made difficult by a debilitating stammer, brought about, it seems, by the tragic loss of his father.fn3 Rob, who had no such affliction, managed to steal their hearts with his jokes and his laughter.
I don’t remember that Jo and I were ever invited to join in with the singing sessions, but I’m pretty sure we didn’t mind. The cousins brought fun and daring to paradise. We loved them. We only tried to puzzle out, I recall, what on earth or where on earth was Shenandoah.
Johnny and Rob were quite skilled at tennis, and Jo and I, already given tennis lessons at the Hurlingham in London, were good enough to play children’s mixed doubles with them, all of us tutored by Jane, who kitted herself in a white pleated skirt, white plimsolls and white-framed sunglasses. She was thin but strong. Her high-kicking serve could sometimes take even Johnny by surprise. Tennis was one of the few activities she deigned to engage in with us.
Above the tennis court was a summer house, where Granny occasionally came to watch us play and keep murmuring, ‘No, no, no …’, as though everybody was doing everything wrong. The summer house was full of cane furniture, once brown and shiny, now faded to lichen grey and slowly dismantling itself, like sinews falling from dead bones. Granny laid herself down on these bones and stared at us and at the wrecked tennis court, its asphalt blackened and broken apart by weeds, its chain-link fencing rusting in the sun.
We once asked Jane why, when everything else at Linkenholt was kept in such pristine order, the tennis court looked like something from an urban slum. But we probably knew the answer before we asked the question. ‘Michael,’ she said. ‘Michael loved to play tennis. Now, no one plays.’
We played. But who were we? I suppose we were the ‘no ones’.
But we were real to many others.
One of these was Mr Daubeny – a neat and energetic man with, ironically, the physical colouring of a fox – who cared for the chickens.
The coops were set out over two grassy fields. Mr Daubeny used a pony and cart to make his rounds of feeding, watering and egg collecting. This pony and cart was so beguiling to us, I used to dream about riding in it. But I think it was Rob, also fascinated by the idea, who eventually plucked up the courage to ask Mr Daubeny if we could ‘help’ him. He said yes. And so, instead of just watching Mr Daubeny work, we gained access to all the paraphernalia of caring for hens: untying great bales of straw to spread fresh in the coops, rounding up birds that had escaped into prickly hedgerows, searching for eggs, topping up the grain feeders and the water troughs. We were farmers at last.
We probably caused more chaos for Mr Daubeny than he ever admitted, but he seemed happy to let us follow him, bundling us all into the cart as we moved from one part of the field to another, and – miraculous event! – letting one of us ride on the pony as we went.
If we went there towards the end of the morning, we would get to ride down to the farm buildings where the pony was fed and stabled at lunchtime – over the two fields, down a chalky track, then onto the road, where in the 1950s almost no cars ever came, but which gave us a wild feeling of excitement and daring. The road was steep and narrow, with tall hedges on either side. Once, we met a Green Line bus and everything came to a standstill. Did we turn the pony and cart around, or did the bus back away down the hill? I can’t remember. I just recall that Rob was riding the pony, and when he saw the bus, he let out one of the expletives that used to blue the air in conversations between Grandpop and Mr Carter.
Then we’d trail back up the hill to the house. Did one of us own a watch, or did we just tell the time by the hunger we felt or the positioning of the sun? As I recall, none of the grown-ups showed any anxiety about us. Perhaps this is one of the excellent laws of paradise: that time is no longer an enemy, but a watchful friend, steering you home before anybody misses you, before any rule has been broken.
We went pounding in, remembering to take off our wellingtons at the door, our cheeks long cured of their London pallor, our clothes pricked here and there with bits of straw and feathers. Jane would lead us away to the bathroom, perhaps complaining that she was missing her third glass of sherry, that we stank of chicken manure. In her slender hand would be a hairbrush.
When I was nine, our grandmother fell ill.
Children were not told the names of serious illnesses in those days. We only knew that Granny had taken to her bed.
Douglas and the maids came and went with cups of broth and glasses of Sanatogen. It was winter. The cousins weren’t there to sing to Granny, so Jo and I were taken into her suite of rooms, to stand quite far away from her and try to remember the words of ‘Oh Shenandoah’. This wasn’t a bit of the house where we ever normally went. But I remember finding it beautiful, painted in soft greys, with a grey carpet and ornate cherrywood furniture the colour of honey.
Granny had stomach cancer. Grief, cigarettes, sherry, arthritis and overeating had made her body slightly grotesque. Now she seemed shrunken – a different person. She looked at us sadly but intently from her mound of pillows. She said she would like to hear ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’. It was as though she’d noticed us at last, knowing she wouldn’t have to be bothered by us for long.
Jo and I were strangely disconnected from the idea of her death. Johnny remembers Granny as a kindly person, much liked by all those who worked at Linkenholt. But we didn’t like her very much. My most tangible memory of her was when, walking along the lavender walk with us, she would lean on me, to steady herself, and the weight of her hand, pressing down on my shoulder, would get heavier and heavier until I wanted to scream with pain, but knew that I couldn’t.
Apart from this remembered torture, surrounded by the lavender-scented air, I think Granny had never really been fully alive for us, just a cross, ghostly presence who had given us a paradise to inhabit and then withdrawn from it.
The one macabre gift we had from her, early in our visits, was a plait of red hair that had been hers when she was young. Jo seized on this, attached it to her disgraceful curls, covered them with a scarf and pretended to be Deborah Kerr in the hit movie King Solomon’s Mines, which we’d already seen two or three times. I was thus press-ganged into spending a portion of my childhood attempting to impersonate Kerr’s co-star, Stewart Grainger. Later in my life, I got to know Frankie Shrapnel, a horticulturalist, wife of the actor John Shrapnel and Deborah Kerr’s daughter. Frankie, too, had beautiful red hair. She was very amused that I’d spent so much time facilitating the imaginary world of a person who sometimes believed herself to be her mother – or ‘DK’, as Jo liked to call her.
Looking back at Granny’s dying, I understand that Jane was crucified by the approaching loss of her mother. If you haven’t been loved by a parent, you never quite give up on it – even though part of you knows that you should. You obstinately keep hoping that he or she will somehow discover this affection before they die. And then, when they’re nearing their end, you realise that it’s never going to come, that their afterlife you carry in your heart will be as arid and as lonely as the lived years. I think the overwhelming feeling in Jane was fear. She dreaded being left alone to cope with her father.
Granny didn’t die at Linkenholt. She died in a London hospital, where I know we were taken to see her not long before she vanished out of our existence, though I have no recollection of the visit, only the memory that we’d missed out on tea and that I was terribly hungry. We rode home from the hospital on the Tube, whereas our habitual mode of transport in London was the buses – the 19, the 22 and the 137. I remember seeing how all the cigarette stubs, thrown down by the Tube travellers, had collected between the wooden slats of the floor, and how everybody stared at everybody else as we flew through the darkness.