VI

POSTWAR SURVIVAL / BABY SITTERS

As 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.

She had a large wooden barrel with a crank handle on a cradle. She poured the milk in and then started to turn the crank. I remember marvelling at those strong arms going round and round for what seemed like hours on end. She told me to try, but I could last only a few minutes before giving up in exhaustion. When she was satisfied with the consistency, she would pour off the whey, which some customers even preferred to whole milk (I suppose this buttermilk is more like low-fat milk) and put the butter into moulds and stamped them with her butter stamp in the form of a thistle. I was used to eating shop-bought butter which came from New Zealand at the time, it was bright yellow with food colouring rather than natural carotene, while the butter made by Mrs Lloyd Williams was pure white, white as lard or shortening. She did not salt it as the Bretons do, to help in preserving it and there were beads of sweated water on the surface.

Father, when he was lucky enough to buy a pound of her butter, would salt it himself… as for hers, the demand was such that she never had to worry about conserving it without refrigeration. By now, most of her clients had electricity and refrigerators and could thus keep the unsalted butter for weeks.

Of course, one problem in the equation that had been dealt with from time immemorial, was that there were no telephones in the Croesor Valley. She could not call clients to say the butter or the milk was ready, nor could they enquire. The only method of communication was to ‘stop by’, which, if she was not too busy, entailed a cup of tea and the local news. Indeed, when my Parents wanted to invite a guest from the mountains to dinner, they had to send a telegram to the Post Office in Garreg and hope that someone would walk down the two or three miles from where they lived and then back up again, dropping off urgent messages such as telegrams on the way. If the telegram required a response, then the recipient would have to walk down to the Post Office where there was a telephone box and there they could make the call to us, accepting or declining. It was a most laborious form of bush telegraph. A few people now had cars, and that made the trip much easier, but ownership of a car entailed a good deal of community service as well… as in: “We’ll be needing your car to take Gran to the doctor next Tuesday.” Wealth had its concomitant responsibilities.

The alternative to staying with Mrs Lloyd-Williams or in a local hotel was less appealing, because it bore with it far more solicitous care than I was accustomed to, besides more rules. That was going to stay with Uncles and Aunts. They all lived in England and their spouses had normal jobs such as banking or farming. I never went to stay with Mother’s Brother until much later. He was a brilliant eccentric whose letters to The Times were regularly published. He was a pioneer in ecological farming and used some of the very first solar panels in Britain. His four children were younger than we and his beautiful Spanish wife (who had worked as a translator throughout the war) knew, I believe, her limits as to how many small children she could manage at any one time. Their house was always a delightful chaos, not unlike our own, yet very different in its muddle.

This uncle and aunt came to stay with us from time to time and if either was under the weather, they both retired to bed and ate nothing until they both felt better. She always had just the right tool in her handbag for any small repairs that might come up. We saved up broken twelve-volt table lights and egg timers for this aunt to repair when she came.

* * *

The Banker Uncle (by marriage, the one whose courtship caused my grandmother to call him ‘A counter-jumper’), on the other hand, was very tall and kind. He treated me as his equal – which left me swimming in completely unknown waters. The Farmer Uncle (also by marriage) was kind enough and jolly, though with him I was clearly a child. In both cases, I was bewildered by the regular, excessive meals, which seemed to take up the whole day, when one could have been off catching tadpoles or fishing for minnows in the stream.

There was always breakfast with cereal, eggs and bacon and sausages and fried tomatoes, and toast and marmalade… Then came luncheon with overcooked meat and overcooked vegetables and a bland salad and some pudding. Tea entailed little cups and saucers with milk jug and sugar bowl and little spoons and tiny sandwiches and scones and cakes. Dinner, included an hors d’oeuvre, more meat or fish and vegetables (forever, over-cooked), a salad and desert. The rhythm suffocated me, though I followed it politely.

The banker’s hobby and expertise had led him to become Chairman of the British Numismatic Society. He never spoke of his business day. But he did show me a little ‘valueless’ coin in his collection that amused him: it had been minted in the very village to which he had moved, by the local grocer or perhaps the general store. What amused him about it was that the merchant’s family name was the same as his own. The fact that it was minted in about 1450 gave it no great value, he told me. In those days, the King minted sovereigns (and no one else might do the same), but there was no small change available. A sovereign was a year’s pay for a labourer. So the local store minted their own change which was probably only viable at that store… the very origin of the ‘company store’. This uncle was very tall, slender and courtly.

The Farmer was a little more corpulent, and much shorter. He walked with a rolling limp from too many broken legs and hips as a horse trainer before the War. He was always in a good mood and had the fattest, the healthiest, the best pigs, sheep and cattle. He ran his farm with great efficiency and was always beamingly proud of his crops, his stock and his children. He was also a mine of child-friendly funny stories and anecdotes, which he recounted in his jolly fast voice and then laughed at with more gusto than did we. He was treasurer of his church and was once pounced upon after a service by a large lady of the congregation:

“Mr Treasurer, you have not sent me a receipt for my generous contribution.”

“Oh dear” he replied, “when did you send it? What kind of envelope was it in?”

“Three weeks ago in one of those small brown business envelopes.”

“Well, that explains it! I take quite a while to open brown envelopes, they usually contain bills.”

Both of these kind Uncles and Aunts had what Mother referred to as: ‘conventional homes’, with lots of little tables piled with knickknacks, tiny china figurines and silver whatsits. They were what I would call, ‘overstuffed houses’. No place for toddlers, but I was a discreet boy by then, I wore a tie to dinner and attempted conversation with my neighbours at table. It was like being in prison for me… I far preferred to be out on the salt marshes with my dog or walking the hills.

These were just a sample of my general hosts, when my Parents could no longer put up with my existence… Mother once told me that, after a long luncheon with some relatives of their generation, Father said (as he turned the car out of their driveway): “Can you imagine? They have children! That means that they must have, at some time, disrobed and had intimate relations!” Yes, some of them were most definitely, Formal!

If there was one thing Mother despised, it was conventionality – her greatest compliment was always: ‘original’. She loved her sisters, but it was despite their profound conventionality and really, they were much easier to deal with than her eccentric younger brother. They came when they said they would, they always had money in the bank and they could be counted upon to take in any of her children when she didn’t know what to do with us. Our cousins often came to stay with us and loved the unstructured, barefoot chaos of our lives, but I am sure the logistics of arranging for them to come must have been quite terrifying to their regimented parents!

A pair of very young twin cousins were sent to stay with us alone by train. Their mother asked them if they would recognise the stop where they were supposed to get out. “Oh yes,” said one: “it’s the station which has a tap with a notice saying ‘Not Drinking Water’!” All train stations in Britain had taps with that warning on them…