VII

GRANNY CADOGAN

Then there were the Christmases that we did not spend in London amongst ‘intellectuals’, when we went to stay with Mother’s mother (Granny Cadogan, née Howard, first married to Bazley, Mother’s father) for the holiday. She no longer lived in the enormous Jacobean/Victorian mansion where she had brought up her own family, by now that had been converted into a girl’s private school. She had moved to a much more modest old rectory… but modest? Oh how some country vicars had lived!

The house seemed to have a dozen bedrooms, huge living room, elegant dining room, besides vast kitchens and coach houses around a courtyard, all built of that warm, honeycoloured stone so typical of the Cotswolds. A lovely lazy river (right out of The Wind In The Willows) dozed brilliantly clear and full of water life, through the garden. Grandmother was old. She was virtually blind and wore a too-tidy white wig. She sat regally in her throne-like chairs and ran the household in its minutest detail. When she left one of her thrones and walked very slowly with two canes, then she became poignantly mortal. She was a staunch teetotaller, though she paid for her husband’s pleasure in good wines and spirits, besides that of all her guests. She did not impose her beliefs.

On Christmas Day 1954, the enormous glass-like mahogany table had been set with her finest lace, cut crystal glasses and solid silver. Her second husband had carved the turkey with a textbook in front of him, counting out the enormous slices of over-cooked meat according to technical sketches in the book. We ate enormously, the grown-ups drank wine, but the festivity was muted, like a brewing storm that never bursts. We all knew that after lunch we would have to listen to the Queen’s Speech on the wireless and not until that was over, might we open our presents. As coffee was served to the adults, liqueur chocolates were passed. No one noticed that the children all had one, and then she took one. With the first bite she knew her mistake as a teetotaller and spat it out with such force that the perfectly waxed solid mahogany table, the hand-laundered and ironed lace, the lovingly shined, sparkling silver were all splattered with wet chopped chocolate.

Granny’s second husband (the first, grandson of the amazing industrialist, having died of complications from a routine appendectomy after giving her five children) was a delightful character. Known as ‘the Commander’, he had run away to the navy as a teenager. On a four-masted training schooner he managed to fall, not just from the masthead to the deck, but right to the bottom of the empty hold, on his head. Or so it was said. Anyway, he remained frozen at the charming, lively age of sixteen throughout his life, though with a stocky old man’s build and permanent whisky breath. He enjoyed telling the story of how he had met Granny (recently widowed) in 1912.

He was commander of a British battleship laying off Boulogne and was checking out the local talent through his powerful Navy-issue binoculars, when he “espied” (his own word) “a most handsome and stately lady promenading with her brood of five children, kept in check by plenty of nursemaids.” “Damn,” he would go on, in full hearing of his regal wife, “looked like a fine breeder to me, with that brood in her train. So, being a man of action, I called up the Quartermaster and ordered him to lower a longboat with eight oarsmen and take my card to the Lady. Upon presenting my compliments, he was to invite the little family for a full tour of the battleship.”

When the longboat returned, it was full of white lace and femininity, so while the children were amused, he made his honourable intentions clear. I gather that Grandmother was enchanted, for they married and she bore him two more children, a son who died in the Second World War – another of her older sons having already died while serving as Britain’s youngest Member of Parliament at the time (he was twenty-six). The second child, a daughter (widowed during World War II), served as a lady-in-waiting to Princess, then Queen, Elizabeth for her lifetime. A very beautiful, cuttingly witty and hilarious aunt.

At some point in this second marriage she gave the Commander a brand-new Bugatti. It was delivered to the stables – now being converted more and more into garages (though the Head Coachman, whose title had become Head Chauffeur, never did quite master the art of driving a horseless carriage) and he was told to go and find it there. Delighted, he turned on the ignition, checked that it was in neutral, set the ignition advance/retard, the hand throttle, hand choke – and cranked it into life. He must have sat in it for a few minutes to warm it up, before letting off the choke, re-adjusting the spark timing and putting it into gear. He listened to the perfect little engine sing as he accelerated, shifted into gear and let in the clutch. He drove it full-tilt into the heavy stone wall at the end of the garage. I believe Bugatti rebuilt it for someone else.

Staying with Granny Cadogan was a regimented affair, with meals at precise times. I had to wear a jacket and tie for meals, though dinner jackets (or tuxedos) were only worn by older boys and for special dinners. Everything ran like clockwork, until the day when her husband (we never called him Grandfather, since he was our ‘step-’ and anyway we had a more affectionate name for him: Duggy) came home to lunch an hour late. The household was upset, the kitchen staff out of humour, when Duggy came waltzing in, full of enthusiasm: “Driving back from Sisister (as locals pronounced Cirencester) when a great flight of Canada geese came over. Damn, if I didn’t count up to twenty-seven of them before I went into the ditch!” A farmer eventually pulled him out of the ditch with his tractor and here he was, unscathed, but late for luncheon.

He was a breath of fresh air; forever an enthusiastic sixteen-year-old, he delighted us children with his puerile conjurer’s tricks, fake turds and ink spills. For the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, in the summer of 1953, he spent days setting up a firework display using fireworks he had kept since before the war. He had nailed the fireworks to planks he had laid on a wheelbarrow, which naturally meant they were so close together that they ignited each other in one magnificent explosion which sent the wheelbarrow (rocket-propelled) into one of Granny’s favourite bushes, setting it ablaze. My brother and Duggy were the only ones outside, we children and women were watching from behind a large window at a safe distance. I must have been looking away at the dramatic moment, so as far as I was concerned, the coronation celebration was a mere damp comedy of errors with barely a bang or a pop.

We watched the ceremony on television (Granny had the first one I ever saw) and it was of course black and white. Richard Dimbleby commentated historically, relating arcane technical details to fill every empty space in the long, boring proceedings. Indeed, that was my only memory of watching television until I was eighteen. My farmer uncle refused to purchase a television because he said it only showed trash… with the result that my cousins went to watch television in the cottage of his tractor driver – who was not so narrow-minded.

At Christmas time, Grandmother would hold a ball for her own children and their offspring. The carpet in the drawing room was rolled back and most of the furniture removed. We so wanted some of our second cousins, the Howards invited, but she was adamant – no one but her direct issue and their families might attend. My sisters wore long skirts and occasionally dragged me onto the dance floor, to their embarrassment and my total confusion.

“Watch my feet, you little fool!”

“I can’t see them, they’re under your dress.”

“Well follow my lead.”

“I can’t do anything else, you’re stronger than me.”

Later, when I was almost a teenager, Granny told me of going to balls when she was young. They were often in the winter and before the young people set off in the coach, all dressed up, her own mother would summon the Head Coachman and enquire after the condition of the roads and bridges on the way. Of course, Grandma and her siblings and friends would waylay the coachman, kiss him sweetly and implore him to report favourably on travelling conditions. Sometimes a bridge might be down, washed away by an unusual flood – in that case it would take a lot of kisses and sweet words to get the coachman to assure their mother that it would only take twenty minutes more to bypass the fallen bridge… but they did their damnedest to get to the party one way or another. As highly privileged, young people, they must have yearned for social contact, what with raging young hormones and an insular life in ‘the castle’.