John Victor Read died suddenly at 11.15 p.m. at Abingdon, Berks, aged 66.
Entry in the Agapemone diary for
Tuesday, 21 October 1952
My mother sat at my grandfather’s kneehole desk, pen in hand. Before her lay several sheets of heavy cream paper, some covered in her handwriting, the top one half-full. By her hand sat the heavy iron stamp she had used to emboss our address at the top right-hand corner of the paper. A shiny black, its swirling gold-leaf decoration, painted by Olive many years before, was beginning to flake.
‘I’m just writing to Granny May, and to your father, to say how sorry I am about Grandpa John,’ she explained.
‘Did you like him?’
‘Yes, Kitty, I was always fond of John – or Pops, as we called him.’
So had I been. I cried when I was told he had died – and on holiday. I wondered what it would be like to stay with Granny May and her sister without Grandpa John’s leavening presence.
‘Do you like Granny May?’ I asked.
‘She certainly didn’t want me to marry her favourite son.’
‘Why not, when she had lived here and knew everyone so well?’
‘I don’t think she felt I was good enough for him.’ Unexpectedly, my mother’s face lit up with the mischievous grin I glimpsed only too rarely. ‘But then would anyone have been good enough for her precious Polo?’
She returned to her letters, drying the ink with the Victorian silver rocker-blotter, which lay on the desk next to a photograph of my mother’s father as a pious-looking young seminarian. It was an unthreatening picture, one in which I noticed how my mother had inherited her father’s aristocratic nose and mouth. One day, when I began to appreciate the finer points of male beauty, I would realise how sensual was the shape of his lips.
‘He was very good-looking, wasn’t he?’ commented my mother as she folded her letters and placed them carefully in their envelopes. ‘You would have loved him, Kit. And he would have adored the three of you.’
I perched on the edge of the sofa, pleased with the idea and also enjoying my mother’s company before she made her first daily visit to the pub, and before Uncle Pat turned up to fill the house with his loud voice and tuneless whistling.
My glance flickered over the other items lying on the desk: the maroon leather-bound Agapemone diary and the Victorian calendar, the small box with the month, day and date showing through three windows in its carved wooden front. It was Ellen’s job first thing every morning, when she drew back the heavy brocade curtains and lit the fire, to change the day and date by turning the little carved knobs on one side of the box. (This calendar now sits on my mantel.) And the handmade pewter frame hung to one side, with the Latin saying ‘Homo sum; humani nil a me alienum puto’ painstakingly engraved in Gothic script. I had asked my Latin teacher to translate it for me the previous term – I said I had found it in a book. ‘I am a man; I count nothing human alien from me,’ she’d told me. I had been rather disappointed.
My mother and I weren’t often on our own. Now that she was working I rarely saw her during the day, and in the evenings, when she settled down with her whisky and her library book, I fled her thickened, over-careful enunciation and need to put out a hand to steady herself when she rose from her chair. Instead I would go to the Ledermans’ welcoming cottage; perhaps I should have stayed home more often. Surely, in those long hours before bedtime, with my mother’s tongue loosened by her pre-dinner drink, her wine with supper and her postprandial whisky, I could have unlocked the enigma of my childhood home; especially during the long, lonely months when my uncle was at sea.
I was surprised at my pleasure at being alone with her that morning – and unlikely to be interrupted: Granny’s nose was being dressed by the visiting nurse and Waa was mending my brand-new school tunic, which I had snagged on a hook the evening before.
‘But why weren’t you good enough for Daddy?’ I was genuinely puzzled. ‘Granny May had only been a KP, after all.’
My mother smiled. ‘It was nothing to do with class, Kitty. It was to do with your grandfather. She didn’t get on with him . . .’
‘But . . .’
‘She didn’t want any of her precious sons to have anything to do with us.’ I heard a surprising and unaccustomed bitterness enter my mother’s tone. ‘So your father and I eloped!’
I felt my jaw drop. ‘You eloped?’
‘Yes.’
‘Whatever did Granny say?’
‘There wasn’t much she could say! She was in no position—’ She clammed up.
‘What do you mean, she was in no position?’
But my mother would say no more.
A couple of days later, I asked my grandmother what she had thought of my father’s father. I was never to pluck up the courage to question her about the man I knew as her own husband. I don’t know why; perhaps I sensed she wouldn’t tell me. Or would get upset. The very worst crime in my childhood home was to ‘upset your grandmother’. I never dared. But I reckoned my father’s father was a safe subject.
‘It’s sad about Grandpa John, isn’t it, Granny?’
‘Yes, it is, Kitty.’
‘Did you know him well?’
‘Yes, he was a very nice, polite young man.’ She paused, adding quietly, as if unable to help herself, ‘That tiresome young May did very well for herself!’
* * *
It wasn’t long after Christmas that year that I would begin to solve the mystery surrounding Grandpa John’s family. Christmases at the ‘A’, as I came to call my childhood home, were truly memorable – on a scale, I understand, with my grandfather’s own birthday celebrations on the 1st of August. The estate would be filled with visitors: my cousins and aunt from Holford, elderly followers from London; sometimes even visitors from Norway, where a small group of followers still lived. During one of these celebrations, largely unchanged since the community’s heydays, I received a complete beaded outfit from these kind people.
On Christmas Eve, Granny would walk through the mansion carrying a copper warming pan filled with incense. (I only remember the latter days, when her sight had gone and she was forced to make her annual progress with the assistance of one of her sons, or her daughter.) How the scent lingered in the long corridors and hid in long-shut-up bedrooms, and filled our nostrils when Margaret and I ventured in for a spot of rooting, sometimes months later – even now, incense conjures up not a high Mass or the hippie ’60s but childhood memories.
Edward would erect the huge Christmas tree in the withdrawing area of the dining room. It was a branch from one of the cedars that dotted the grounds – the only tree to escape such severe pruning was Granny’s blue cedar. We children would help decorate the tree with our own creations and antique decorations, such as the glass birds with real feathers for tails, remnants of another era.
As soon as we woke on Christmas morning, we were allowed to open our stockings: calf-length school socks which had been hung empty at the end of our beds and had overnight magically filled with erasers, marbles and always a gold-covered chocolate in the toe. Each small gift was wrapped in paper which had been carefully refolded after use the previous year. But we had to wait until the early evening to open the bulk of our presents.
Later in the morning, if Uncle David was at home, he would take Mummy into town to the Catholic Mass. But there was no religious celebration in the community and Eden remained shut up.
Christmas lunch was also the one occasion of the year when Granny would preside over the meal, sitting regally at the head of the table, back straight, chiffon veil flowing over her shoulders. Every seat at the long dining table was taken. Uncle David, seated at the end next to his mother, would carve an enormous turkey, hacking at it impatiently, unlike his brother sitting at the foot of the long table: Uncle Pat would carve his haunch of beef with meticulous skill, the slices as thin as the leaves of a book.
Following lunch, the agonising wait for presents continued, although they were rarely a surprise to Margaret and me, as they had been placed under the tree days before, giving us plenty of opportunity to creep in and feel through the paper.
But, at last, everyone would assemble around the tree and Granny would cut off the presents, one by one, with her scissors, handing them to us to distribute. Only after everyone had received theirs could we open ours.
That Christmas I began to wonder whether I hadn’t been forgotten – by my mother, of all people – until she took me by the hand and led me to the stables, followed by as many old ladies as could make the walk. The little procession reached the end stall where a skewbald pony with a wayward stick-up mane gave us all a knowing look.
‘Happy Christmas, Kit,’ she said.
‘He’s mine?’ I couldn’t believe it. ‘All mine?’
The assembled throng nodded in unison. I wondered briefly why I hadn’t guessed something was up when I had come across Edward clearing all the old lawnmowers and bath chairs and painting easels from the stall in the middle of winter. And I was amazed Margaret hadn’t told me. But, at 16, her sights were set on a future of art college and painting; she no longer had much interest in riding. Perhaps she also felt that my having a pony would ease her own inevitable departure from home.
Returning to school after Christmas was agony. We weren’t allowed to bring our own ponies until we had reached what the school regarded as the responsible age of 12. I begged for an early weekend home and could barely contain myself during the inevitable wait for my mother. We arrived home so late Mummy insisted I leave seeing Pinto until the next morning.
‘There’s a gale blowing in, Kit,’ she warned. But the temptation was too great and as soon as I heard her snoring, I slipped into a sweater and jodhpurs and headed for the stables.
A sudden gust of cold wind almost tore the handle of the side door from my grasp. Clouds raced across the moon as I stepped outside. One second I was in a huge, black inky space and the next the whole garden was moonlit. I felt an unusual tremor of fear. I glanced at my watch: nearly midnight. The big cedar on the upper lawn sighed as the wind caught it, sending the swing moving as though propelled by a ghost. The bushes bordering the path up to the balustrade swayed like a crowd.
It took all my courage to ease myself through the squeaky gate into the shadowy courtyard of the stables, but the sound of distant stamping drew me on. I eased the door into the stable block and was rewarded with the heady smell of warm horseflesh. I could just make out Pinto’s white patches in the darkness as he turned toward me.
‘Cup, cup, Pinto,’ I whispered, holding a biscuit stolen from the supper table in my outstretched hand. ‘Good boy! I couldn’t wait till morning to see you.’
The bristles on his nose tickled my palm as he took the biscuit in his yellow teeth and then searched for more, nudging me back against the wall with his nose. ‘Hey, clumsy! Don’t be greedy.’
I stopped, jolted into silence by the unmistakable squeak of the stable gate, followed by the sound of heavy boots on the cobblestone stableyard. I crept under my pony’s neck and stood rooted to the spot with fear as the stable door opened. A beam of light flashed round the huge space and came to a stop at Pinto. I ducked lower and wished my heart wasn’t making such a noise.
‘This is the police. Show yourself,’ commanded a voice from beyond the light.
I ducked back under my pony’s neck so the intruder could see me.
‘You’re one of Mrs Smyth’s granddaughters.’ The torch was lowered and I could make out the tall helmeted figure of the village policeman. ‘What are you doing out here, miss, in the middle of the night?’
‘I came to see my pony. Did someone call you?’
‘No, miss. We’ve been patrolling round here for close on 50 years, I’d say; since old Mr Read was attacked, anyways.’
Old Mr Read attacked? When? Why? My mind raced as the policeman escorted me back to the side door and made me promise not to sneak out after dark again, ‘Or I’ll consider it my duty to inform your grandmother, young lady,’ he’d said. As I crept up the stairs to my bedroom, I wondered who to ask.
‘You’d be better asking someone else about such things,’ said Edward when I tackled him the next morning. He attached the hosepipe to a tap. ‘If you’ve got nothing better to do, can you help me wash down the floor of the conservatory?’
Next, I tried Waa. But she too demurred. ‘It was all a long, long time ago, Kitty, and such a difficult time.’
So I tackled my mother. ‘Who told you about anyone being attacked?’ she asked, staring at me suspiciously.
‘I just heard it,’ I lied. ‘I can’t remember where.’
‘It happened before I was born,’ she replied.
‘But what happened?’
‘Your great-grandfather, Charles Stokes Read, was attacked.’
‘But why?’
My mother sighed. ‘They were after your grandfather – my father.’
‘But—’
‘Who knows, Kit!’
Could this be the ‘incident’ my paternal grandparents had alluded to? The one which led to my great-grandfather’s early death? I resolved to find out. But I would have to tread carefully if I were to get anyone to tell me about it.
‘Lettit,’ I began casually a couple of days later – once again, I was perched on the window sill in the laundry: Cissy had gone into town, leaving Lettit on her own, and vulnerable to my questions – ‘it must have been awful when “old Mr Read” was attacked.’
‘Oh, it was, my dear,’ she replied. ‘We were all scared to death. So many people didn’t try to understand what a good man your grandfather was. There was a lot of misunderstanding back then.’ She shook her head in sorrow.
‘But it was my great-grandfather, not Belovèd, who was attacked, wasn’t it?’
She nodded. ‘Yes, it was.’
‘But why?’ I asked again.
But I was to get nowhere with my questions. The more I asked Lettit, the more flustered she became. ‘You must ask your mother. It isn’t my place,’ she said finally.
I tried another tack.
‘Was Granny May still living here?’
‘Yes, dear,’ she admitted.
I decided to stretch the few facts I had learned. ‘She told me my great-grandfather died because of the attack.’
‘It certainly contributed, of that I’m sure,’ she replied. ‘And now I must get on, this ironing won’t do itself.’