XI

BACK TO W.W.II

Like the ubiquitous mosquito, that thrives in the Arctic, the Antarctic and almost everywhere in between from the Amazon to most of Africa and Asia, mankind is almost infinitely adaptable to his environment. When I think what pre-war Wales must have been like for Mother, brought up as she was in a huge house, knowing only the name of the Head Gardener (and of course the same applied for the Head Coachmen, the Housekeeper and the Butler) she never got to know the under-gardeners, kitchen maids, nurses, valets and chambermaids. Now, without servants, she had to face her own arduous destiny single-handedly.

At the outset of war, when Hitler was fully expected to invade Britain at any moment, my Parents were living in a romantic sixteenth-century house high up on the flank of Cnicht in Snowdonia. It was a fine old stone farm manor-house, unchanged in the last couple of centuries: without running water, drains or electricity. The walls were six to twelve feet thick. The thicker walls accommodated a couple of ‘priest holes’ or early safes. It was always cold and damp. Indeed, it was so damp that soft, velvety emerald green moss grew on the risers of the stairs – even during the driest of months. There she was, with three young children and no domestic help. One day Father announced that he had to go down to the train station to help with the triage of evacuee children from Birkenhead, Liverpool and Manchester. At the end of day, he returned, driving his two-seater Bentley, with a dozen of the least physically or mentally fit children. They had all been refused by local farmers, who were hoping to use them as free labour on their farms. Mind you, the billeting of these evacuee children was not exactly expedited by the fact that the list of possible billeting addresses dated from the First World War, over twenty years before! Not that that was surprising for, as Father wrote after the War, in his arcane history of the British Admiralty: “Much of the shipbuilding machinery in the Tyneside Shipyards dated from a hundred years before!” A point contested by a gentleman who actually read it and declared that “the oldest steam winch was only ninety-eight years old at the time!”

Mother was then saddled with not three, but fifteen children! The newcomers had never walked on grass before, nor eaten a lettuce salad and here they were, swathed in cloud half the time, not an inhabited house in sight, homesick and very unhappy. She did what she could, but was constantly frustrated. The lack of running water came as no surprise to most of the children – in the city they had to get water from a pump at the end of the street, while here the spring was only a dozen yards in front of the door – but there were many other culture-shocks. When offered salad, they said it was rabbit food (many people in cities raised rabbits for food). Once, when Father saw a teenage girl carefully bringing in a huge amount of food in a great Chinese bowl, very likely Ming, he said, “Oh Emily, you really shouldn’t be carrying that bowl” – and at that she stopped, opened both her mouth and her hands, and let it smash to smithereens on the slate floor.

My brother remembers being bathed in a tin hip-bath in front of the roaring kitchen fire (on which all the cooking was done) and finding the side away from the fire was freezing cold, while the side near it was scalding hot. Presumably, all the children went through that hip bath and the water cannot have been changed often, given that it had to be brought in from the spring in buckets and heated in the huge kettle that hung on a chain over the fire. What a contrast to having the children brought down, tidily dressed and coiffed at teatime, to be ‘seen but not heard’! If Mother had had a nervous breakdown at that point, she would have been fully justified, but instead she soldiered on, ‘muddling through’ and saved her breakdowns for less inconvenient times, when there were fewer tender souls relying on her.

Fortunately, this early evacuation wave was relatively short-lived. Once the Civil Defence Department determined that there was no immediate danger of invasion and that German bombers would not yet reach so far north, the children could go home again. It was established that the early Luftwaffe was busy enough bombing London, Birmingham, Bristol and literally flattening Coventry. Only later did their range increase and they come further North to Liverpool and Birkenhead. A few of the older evacuees even stayed on in the valley and may still be there, or buried nearby.

Certainly, caring for refugee children was a far cry from Mother’s youth. When she was teaching me to ride horses, she told me that as a teenager, her mother insisted she ride side-saddle when she ‘rode to hounds’ or went fox-hunting. Side-saddle, as required for society ladies, was suicide if you ‘rode hard’, jumping hedges, banks and ditches along the way, as did she. There is no way to hold on with your knees, save the small pommel of the side-saddle. You stayed on the horse by balance alone. So she used to make arrangements with one of the young stable boys (certainly not the Head Coachman, he was far too faithful to her mother) to bring a normal saddle to a rendezvous beyond the end of the driveway. She would ride out side-saddle to show her mother, then slip to the ground and change saddles as soon as she was out of sight, get a leg-up from the stable boy, tuck in her voluminous skirts so as to sit astride and be off to the Meet. Once the hounds were on a scent, she would be up there with the Master of the Hounds (or rather just behind him, it didn’t do to overtake the Master), riding and jumping hell-for-leather. It was a tribute to the landed gentry who rode along behind, that no one mentioned Mother’s tricks to her mother! They must have had considerable respect for her daredevil horsemanship, riding as she did like a dashing young fellow.

Now, transplant that rich, spoiled, wilful young lady to the gaunt cold of a stone house in the mountains of Wales, without nursemaid, housemaid, chambermaid or anyone else to do her bidding, save perhaps, briefly and ineffectually, the older Evacuee Children. Totally unaccustomed and unprepared, she rolled up her sleeves, tucked her skirts in her knickers and scrubbed the floors, cooked for a small army and washed and suckled her babies.

Of course, all this was before I was so much as a twinkle in my Parents’ eyes, but hearsay and family legend was an integral part of the lore of our existence, just as much as the dog in front of the fire during our story-telling sessions. We collected tales and retold them to such an extent, that Father claimed he could be the origin of a story, but by the time it had made the rounds of his substantial family, it was so totally unrecognizable that he might try telling it himself, only to be scolded by one of his children for misrepresenting the ‘facts’… small wonder I had so much trouble with single-word tests at school. ‘Facts’? What are these things called ‘Facts’?

Father himself gave lectures at the Gresham College in London, in one of which he argued (with considerable logic) that ‘fiction’ was much nearer the ‘truth’ than ‘non-fiction’. Indeed Gore Vidal also subscribed to the same idea, when justifying his own historical novels. I myself have subscribed to the idea ever since. Anyone who accuses me of skirting the facts, neglects that I am just trying to get nearer The Truth.