Mary Howlett passed away, aged 82.
Entry in the Agapemone diary for
Thursday, 18 January 1951
The green baize door leading from the upper landing clanged on its hinge as it swung behind me. I winced. My grandmother was blind, but her hearing was legendary. Thoughts of all those tiny treasures drove me on and I tiptoed up the dark, narrow stairs leading to yet another baize door, this time in dark brown. I crossed the corridor outside her boudoir and slowly inched open the door. I hadn’t much time, as I was due back at school for the start of term later that day.
My grandmother was seated in her chair by the fireplace, a rug covering her knees. Her false teeth grinned at me from the small saucer set on the table next to the radio. I dropped to my knees and began a slow crawl across the carpet towards the cabinet. I reached for its glass door.
‘Who’s there?’
I froze.
‘Somebody’s in here,’ said my grandmother. She thumped her walking stick on the carpet.
‘It’s only me, Granny.’ I couldn’t stop my voice quivering. ‘You invited me to tea, remember?’
I realised she had forgotten, in the fuss of Mary Howlett’s passing. I wondered if I should still have come but a summons by my grandmother wasn’t something any of us could ignore. Every now and again Uncle Pat’s daughter, Angela, who was three years younger than me, and later, her younger sister Victoria, would also be summoned to take tea with their grandmother. But perhaps, I wondered, I should have thought twice about choosing this afternoon to try and get into her corner cabinet.
‘It’s not teatime yet,’ the old lady pointed out.
Twenty minutes to four o’clock. ‘I came early in case you had lost your teeth,’ I said with sudden inspiration, ‘and you needed me to help you find them.’
‘Hmmm.’ Her hand felt its way towards the saucer holding her teeth. ‘I’ve told you before, Kitty, you will see my treasures when you’re old enough and not a day before.’
Sometimes silence is the only answer.
But my grandmother welcomed my company that day – once she had reprimanded me for trying to get the better of her. She seemed to find comfort in telling stories about her life before she met my grandfather, when she was young and death wasn’t something she thought about much. Her reminiscences more than made up for failing once again to reach her cabinet, they were told with such relish.
She had been born on Guy Fawkes Day, the 5th of November. I liked the sound of her home in the small village of Sellack in Herefordshire, where her mother was a country midwife. My grandmother let it be known that her father had been a ‘gentleman farmer’, a myth that survived until recently, when I obtained a copy of her birth certificate. Her father had been an illiterate farm labourer who had signed her birth certificate with an X.
‘I was a good scholar,’ she said firmly, turning her head in my direction.
‘I am too,’ I replied, a little defensively.
‘And I was good-looking as well,’ she went on. She had reddishbrown hair which, even in her 80s, had retained its colour and fine texture thanks, she insisted, to never washing it in anything but rainwater. ‘Your grandfather had a third tap installed in the bathroom,’ she said proudly. This tap was connected to a barrel outside.
As she rattled on, I sat at her feet imagining this ‘young Annie’, so bright that after leaving school, she got a job as lady’s maid on a local squire’s estate.
‘Most started off as scullery maids.’
Like my Granny May, I thought.
‘I was too clever for that,’ she added with such relish even my nineyear-old self got the message. But, she went on, within a couple of years she had grown bored of running around after a grown woman and jumped at the chance to travel as governess to a local family heading to Brazil.
‘You liked Brazil, didn’t you, Granny?’ I prompted, as we tucked into our tea and Madeira cake, which Ellen carried in on a huge tray.
These were the stories I loved best. How she had had to learn to shoot, and once wounded a fleeing attacker who had tried to break into her bedroom through the window. How she had set about two men with her umbrella when they tried to rob her as she was walking across a bridge. ‘They soon fled,’ she said with satisfaction.
But by the time she returned to England in the late 1890s, she had decided she was capable of more than being a governess and had trained as a nurse at St Peter’s Hospital ‘for stone and other urinary diseases’ in London.
‘That’s you,’ I said, pointing to the framed photograph above the sideboard. She was pictured in her uniform of long-sleeved dress with starched cap and cuffs, and a big bow under her chin.
‘Was that before you married my grandfather?’ I asked.
But Granny had finished reminiscing. ‘That’s quite enough for today. Ring the bell for Ellen to clear.’
* * *
A few weeks later I was home once again without my sisters. I had gone to say good morning to my mother and Uncle David.
‘We’re busy, Kitty,’ my mother said in answer to my knock on the drawing-room door before muttering, ‘Pas devant l’enfant’ to my uncle. Did they really think I didn’t know what that meant?
I set off to hunt for Edward. As I let myself out of the front door, I glimpsed Ellen hurrying to a side door in the tall stone walls holding aloft a huge black umbrella. Few outsiders ventured through the studded doors and the balding, briefcase-carrying figure she let in wasn’t the doctor come to see one of the old ladies. I wondered if he was a lawyer, visiting my mother about her divorce. I had overheard her complaining to Waa that our father wasn’t giving her nearly enough money with which to raise three children. I followed and watched as Ellen ushered the stranger in through the French windows of my grandmother’s dining room rather than taking him to the front door. I reasoned she would only have taken him through the French windows if he had an appointment with my grandmother. I decided to continue my surveillance from her favourite blue cedar overlooking the entrance. The tree would also give me protection from the rain, which by then was falling steadily.
I had barely climbed the tree’s lower branches when I caught a glimpse of the stranger behind Grandmother’s net curtains, which screened the bay window of her boudoir. It was an hour or more before the man reappeared, this time accompanied by my mother, who looked grave, and Uncle David, who looked angrier than I had ever seen him.
As Uncle David closed the door behind the stranger, he turned and caught sight of me on my perch. ‘Get down from there, Kitty,’ he commanded.
‘I was only playing,’ I replied in injured tones.
‘Well, go and play somewhere else.’
After lunch, Waa informed me I had been invited to take tea with my grandmother and so, at precisely five minutes to four this time, I obediently knocked on my grandmother’s door. ‘Have you washed your hands, child?’ she asked.
‘Yes, Granny.’
‘Then please take the chaise.’
The chaise stood beneath my great-grandmother’s picture, a winsome charcoal drawing of my grandfather’s mother who, legend has it, had been one of the three beautiful Miss Nairnes noted by Queen Victoria in her diary: ‘Today I met the three beautiful Miss Nairnes.’
Curiously, my grandmother waited in silence for her tea to arrive. I occupied myself by arranging the small, round three-legged table in front of where I was to sit. The top of the table was covered with an elaborate pattern of fruit and leaves, carved by Olive Morris. I loved tracing my fingers over the wood but didn’t like to rest my cup and saucer on it. The carving was so deep it usually ended up slopping my tea into the saucer.
The clock struck four and Granny thumped her stick on the floor. ‘Where is everyone?’
‘It is only just four, Granny.’ I crossed to the tasselled bell-pull and gave it a yank.
‘Pull hard,’ Granny commanded. ‘Ellen is getting very deaf.’
First to arrive was Uncle David, who didn’t look pleased when he saw me sitting with my grandmother. When my mother appeared a few minutes later, she didn’t seem happy either. I stared back at her, aware, for the first time, how dowdy she looked. She had put on weight, her clothes looked cheap and ill-fitting, and her black hair was badly permed and too short. Worst of all, her generous lips rarely curved in laughter – how different from the faces of the young people captured in those photographs in Katie’s bedroom. And on the rare occasions she did smile, splashes of deep-red lipstick stained her stillwhite and astonishingly even teeth. I found it deeply embarrassing. I thought of photos my mother had shown me of her as a slim, ravenhaired young woman in her teens. How could someone change so much? It would be more difficult to recognise her from the photos than Waa, Aggie or Ellen as young women. I watched her as she crossed the room. Her shoulders were hunched as if she were carrying a heavy load.
‘What are you doing here, Kitty?’ she asked, seeing me watching her.
‘I invited her,’ my grandmother said shortly.
My uncle and mother exchanged glances.
‘But you knew, Mama, we needed to talk to you privately,’ protested my mother.
‘I know no such thing,’ my grandmother retorted.
‘Mama!’ insisted Uncle David, with a glance in my direction. ‘You talked with—’ He paused, glanced at me, then seemed to change his mind about what he was going to say. Then continued, ‘—only this morning. You can’t just ignore what has happened.’
What had happened, I wondered. And who had my grandmother talked with? The stranger, perhaps?
‘Careful, David,’ said my mother, shooting a warning look in my direction.
‘Stay where you are, Kitty,’ my grandmother commanded, although I hadn’t moved. She thumped her stick on the floor again.
Tea was a silent affair. Not even the popular post-war radio soap opera Mrs Dale’s Diary lightened the atmosphere.
It wasn’t until the Easter holidays and all three of us were home from boarding school that I learned the stranger had been the local bank manager. Margaret and I had been playing in one of the attic bedrooms at the top of a steep flight of uncarpeted stairs. We had spread our stable complex across the entire floor. It was constructed from shoeboxes and was complete with show-rings, exercise paddocks and all the horse paraphernalia two horse-mad young girls could dream of. Over the years, we had collected dozens of tin horses, grooms, hounds, etc. and would spend many a rainy afternoon holding everything from foxhunts and gymkhanas to three-day events. This particular day it was a showjumping competition and Margaret’s horse, a jet-black stallion inevitably called Black Beauty, was jumping last. My horse had already received four faults (my elbow had caught the top bar of a treble jump). As Black Beauty took off at the last jump, the black-painted pencil representing the take-off bar moved for no apparent reason and rolled to the floor.
‘Four faults,’ I shouted gleefully.
‘It doesn’t count,’ she retorted. ‘It was the wind.’
True, the breeze had got up and was scything through the only source of natural light, a skylight in the far corner, but I wasn’t about to let such an advantage go by the board. ‘It does so count.’
‘Does not.’
Our bickering soon erupted into a pushing match, which progressed to the top of the steep stairs. The next thing I knew, I had lost my footing and was tumbling down. When I realised it was me who was groaning, I found I couldn’t stop and, even worse, couldn’t catch my breath. I was surrounded by gummy old ladies missing their teeth and wrapped in the shawls in which they each draped themselves during their afternoon rest. Waa elbowed her way through the throng, followed closely by Mummy.
Just as I thought I would surely die from lack of air, my lungs filled. The noise stopped. ‘It’s all right, Kitty,’ said Waa, easing herself onto her knees beside me. There was nothing broken, except the peace of the afternoon, and the old ladies began to wander away.
As soon as she discovered I was all right, Mummy rounded on me. ‘Really, Kitty, I can’t have this disturbance.’
Waa helped me up. ‘Come on, Kitty, you’d better lie down for a bit. You’ll be a bit shocked.’
I must have fallen asleep on the sofa in my grandmother’s downstairs drawing room, as the next thing I remember hearing was Mummy and Uncle David whispering in the passage outside. They were discussing the local bank manager. I soon realised they were probably talking about the man I had seen arriving when I had been home from school previously – it was so unusual for a stranger to be admitted into the community (I knew what the doctor and the undertaker looked like, so could tell it wasn’t either of them) that it wasn’t hard to put two and two together. I pricked up my ears.
‘Not again!’ said Uncle David. ‘Mama would have given it to him. After all, she always does!’
‘I know, but things are very difficult for Pat at the moment,’ replied my mother.
‘But knowingly bouncing cheques! That’s going too far, Lavita.’ Uncle David went on to say how humiliating it was for my grandmother to be obliged to receive a bank manager who had come to complain that one of her sons was bouncing cheques.
‘I know, but don’t forget he’s desperate at the moment. After all, he has a young daughter as well as a new baby,’ said Mummy.
‘You’ve got three daughters,’ Uncle David pointed out. ‘And you don’t get nearly the financial handouts our brother does. What’s to prevent Pat getting a job? He certainly doesn’t have to spend his life gambling, drinking and making life miserable for his unfortunate wife, even if she isn’t quite one of us.’
‘No, Babe isn’t one of us, but don’t forget, David, she and Pat have done better than we have when it comes to marriage. At least they’re not divorced. Let’s just forget it and say nothing.’ But Uncle David hadn’t finished. It was time, he went on, that their brother realised that even though the community was no longer hounded by journalists it wouldn’t take much for them to begin making a nuisance of themselves again.
I heard my mother’s sharp intake of breath. ‘Imagine what a field day the press would have if this got out.’
I frowned. I couldn’t imagine why the press would be interested.
* * *
My oldest sister was not only good at sewing but also had an eye for fashion. Ann was becoming nearly as good as Waa at turning lengths of material found in some neglected drawer during our rooting expeditions into dresses and skirts. Now she was consumed by the task of getting together a wardrobe for her approaching departure to stay with our father.
I wasn’t the least bit interested in clothes unless they were jodhpurs, but I envied Margaret’s creative talents. She could conjure up a herd of wild horses, manes and tails flowing in the wind, with a few strokes of a pencil. She had constructed working puppets of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, complete with strings, which stood more than a foot high and were dressed in outfits made from the clothes we had found rooting. Surely she would be able to help me, I had decided, staring at the page in the Good Housekeeping magazine Mummy had bought on impulse one day. The competition was for children up to and including age ten, and involved drawing a clock. Margaret agreed to lay out the points of perspective. I made a first attempt at the drawing and then Margaret helped me improve it.
A few weeks later, I found a parcel waiting for me on the hall table. I tore it open and discovered, to my delight, I had been awarded second prize in the magazine’s monthly competition, a copy of the Good Housekeeping Book of Fairy Stories, which had been newly selected, edited and translated by P.H. Muir, with decorations by Geoffrey Rhoades. The slim volume had been published by Gramol Publications Ltd of London and Cheshire. Noted on the flyleaf, in my best handwriting, is: ‘Awarded to Kitty Read for being second in Good Housekeeping’s monthly competition.’
Ann was busier than ever with Waa’s sewing machine that Easter holiday, turning a shawl she had filched into a dress. She was constantly washing her hair, whether it was dirty or not, and buffing her nails – and was she wearing lipstick when she left to stay with a school friend?
Ann and Margaret often excluded me from their whispered confidences – and their arguments – but that year my isolation seemed worse than ever. They were hardly ever at home; they even spent a couple of weeks in the summer with our absent father’s parents, Granny May and Grandpa John. I had begged to be allowed to go too, but my mother had said three was too much for our grandmother and I would have to wait for another time. But when they returned, they seemed even more at odds with themselves, each other and everyone else. Ann spent almost every waking hour at the home of a school friend in the village.
I hated venturing beyond the estate. It took all of my courage to make the fewer than 100 yards to the village shop to spend my meagre pocket money on bottles of Tizer, the vivid-orange fizzy drink, and Crunchie bars. The owners of the shop, a mother and daughter, were never anything but friendly but, oh, how I dreaded running the gauntlet of village children lingering confidently in groups outside the shop. If I spotted them before they saw me, I would turn tail for the security of the community. If I had been seen, I marched past them, nose in the air, ears attuned to the slightest giggle of ridicule.
To add to my misery, Margaret had suddenly become a perplexing whirlwind of confusing emotions: ecstatically happy one moment, furiously angry the next and then tearfully despairing. For several days, she was incapacitated by terrible headaches, which Waa said was ‘Just like dear Ruth,’ as she hurried to fetch a tablet and apply cold compresses.
Later I overheard Mummy and Waa discussing how difficult girls could become with the arrival of ‘the curse’, along with other changes I had learned about during a series of highly embarrassing talks by the school matron.
It wasn’t until years later that I learned Ann had found out the truth about our strange home during the previous term and had searched the school encyclopedias to understand the word Agapemone. There she had read the whole story and told Margaret, who had found the revelations upsetting.