Rosie Read online

  Without Jo, I would have been lonely as a child at Linkenholt. The grown-ups mainly put themselves into a drawing-room existence, where they smoked and drank and played cards and did The Times crossword and waited for meals to arrive. Only Roland, who had worked as a civil engineer in India and now put all his energies into modernising and mechanising his huge farm, found this tiresome, and would bounce away down the drive in his old jeep, which he drove with alarming abandon, like Mr Toad, off to visit his sheep or his cattle, or to argue with Mr Carter about which woods to shoot when. The dog, Jill, stood up beside him – his most favoured passenger.

  Sometimes, after tea, he would take us with him in the back of the Land Rover – these strange little girls he laughingly called Rosebud and Jo-bags – to witness lambs being born, to admire the new bailer he’d invented for straw and hay, to watch stubble being burned. At first, we loved these outings. But one day, when we were riding with him on the combine platform, Jill came rushing towards us across the half-harvested wheat field. Jill loved her indulgent master. She didn’t like being without him. She attempted to get to him by trying to climb up the rotating blades of the combine. I remember the stricken look on Grandpop’s face, his shouted instruction to stop the combine and his call: ‘Jill! Jill! My Jill!’ But the dog kept climbing and was torn to shreds before our eyes. We never rode on the combine again.

  Before Christmas dinner, Jo and I put on identical dark red velvet frocks with lace collars. We were allowed to go down to the library and take fronds of silver tinsel from the tree to make pretend tiaras for our hopeless hair.

  Next, we sat and waited for the servants to come in to be given their gifts by Granny; Douglas smart in a tail coat, Florence’s cheeks scarlet from the kitchen heat, the housemaids always dressed in pigeon grey. What gifts did they get? Heartbreak hadn’t turned the Dudleys into Skimpoles, so perhaps good money was handed out, or perhaps Douglas had been dispatched in the Rolls to Andover or Marlborough to find ‘appropriate’ items. But the servants’ presents were never opened there and then. Everybody just stood around with glasses of sherry. There was a kind of awkward silence to these moments that nobody knew how to overcome. No doubt Michael Dudley, renowned for his good humour, for his jokes and his laughter, would have found the right things to say, but he was long gone.

  After this, while Florence basted her vast turkey and Douglas put the finishing touches to the beautiful table, the grown-ups drank champagne. We drank ginger beer and opened our presents. There were few, but they were always good. The objects I remember loving most were a tin cash register, and a blue scooter, very like the ones all kids love riding today, but heavier and harder to steer. But what did we – polite children that we were – give Roland and Mabel? Something would have been organised: a ‘shooting’ tie for Grandpop, Yardley’s soap for Granny, hankies or talcum powder for eccentric Great-Aunt Violet, who sometimes left the dark confines of her flat in Grosvenor Street to brave a Hampshire Christmas? I can’t remember.

  What I can recall is that Christmas Day at Linkenholt passed for us in an almost debilitating haze of excitement and overeating. After the roast turkey and the plum pudding, after more ginger beer and Mint Crisps and crystallised fruit, Jo and I would climb slowly up the green-carpeted stairs with the brass stair rods, tired out by sheer delight, our tinsel tiaras lost somewhere under a heap of wrapping paper. We’d get into our flannel pyjamas and stare out at the night and wait for the sound of the wind. We’d ask our toys if they had had a lovely day.

  On Boxing Day, there was always a shoot. Grandpop had redesigned the Linkenholt acres with shooting in mind, planting beautiful woods and copses where the birds, so carefully bred by Mr Carter, could shelter and feed. We heard the quark-quark of pheasants all the time on our walks. Often they had lumbered into the air, panicked by our whizzing bicycles on Linkenholt Hill. Now the poor exotic creatures were driven from the woods and copses by an army of beaters and felled by the guns. The dogs seemed to shimmy with delight as they raced in to retrieve the bodies.

  The men who gathered for the shooting party were the same each year, neighbours of the Dudleys, each with his own estate. Between them, this country elite must have owned about a third of Hampshire. They wore heavy tobacco-scented jackets, checked shirts and plus fours. The skin of their faces was ruddy and roughened by their outdoor life. Many of them had bristling nasal hair, which you hoped wouldn’t touch your face as they bent down to give you an avuncular peck on the cheek.

  But they were a friendly old bunch. The nicest of them, Sir Eastman Bell, who owned Fosbury Manor, had developed a late passion for daffodils, and every Easter he would invite us to lunch, to walk with him round his acres of flowers. He must have had thirty or forty varieties, spreading out across lawns and fields and into woods. He didn’t grow them to market them; he grew them because he loved them.

  The Fosbury daffodils presented to me and Jo a sight we never, ever forgot. It surely outshone in variety and wonder the golden blooms that Wordsworth saw ‘beside the lake, beneath the trees/Fluttering and dancing in the breeze’.

  Time goes slowly when you’re a child, and I used to imagine that those fields of flowers were still there all through the summer and into the first leaf fall. Later, I realised that Sir Eastman Bell spent two thirds of his year looking at drooping brown stems or bare grass. But he sacrificed the months of this empty landscape for his paradise of a spring.

  Sometimes Jo and I, wearing woolly hats and gloves, stood with him for one of the shooting drives. He’d remind us about the need for silence as we waited for the sound of the beaters coming nearer through the woods. And the quality of this silence – men standing in line with guns, the dogs obediently quiet, a mist hanging low over the plough, or even a light snow falling – I have never forgotten. The images are almost like images of war, and yet what I felt, as a child, was wonder. It felt like a silence that contained all my life to come. My grandfather and his friends were somewhere near the end of their time on the earth, but what I could see was the landscape spread all around me in its winter magnificence, waiting for me to find my place in the world.

  It could be bitterly cold out on the Linkenholt fields. But the cold was part of the wonder, an endurance necessary to the time. I remember curling up my freezing toes inside my wellingtons, holding on to Jo for the warmth of her arm. And once, Sir Eastman gave us a nip of cherry brandy from a silver flask – a river of scented lava creeping down inside me. He patted our woolly heads. ‘Don’t necessarily tell your mother,’ he said.

  Then the pheasants began flying up, making their honking cry, and the guns were pointed at the sky, and the russet and green bodies fell and the air was scented with cordite.fn2

  I have often wondered, did Jo have this feeling of some marvellous existence waiting for her beyond the Linkenholt fields?

  For I grew up with the reality of Jo’s genius. From a very young age, she was a seriously brilliant artist. Art teachers at school cooed over her. Our Aunt June (our father’s sister), who was something of a painter herself, nurtured Jo’s talent with frequent superlatives. Even our mother, who never liked to ‘show off’ by praising us, was aware that Jo was gifted and might have a professional future.

  At Linkenholt, when rain kept us indoors, we began a little book together. It was called The Bear who Went to Sea. I can remember nothing about the story I wrote, but I can still see Jo’s vibrant little pictures: the bear setting off with his knapsack; the bear discovering a sailing boat in a cove; the bear at sea, alone with the night, with the moon and stars, longing for home.

  And Jo entered a national newspaper competition with a crayoned picture of me at Linkenholt. It was titled ‘My Sister on the Farm’. I’m wearing my corduroy dungarees, a woolly jumper and a scarf patterned with windmills and Dutchmen wearing clogs. This picture won first prize (two guineas, I think) and was printed in The Times. Jo would have been no older than nine or ten. Even Granny thought this was terrific.

  In the summer
holidays, our cousins Jonathan and Robert were sent down to Linkenholt to be with us. Their mother Barbara, Michael’s widow, had married again and given birth to two more sons, James and Charles. Roland and Mabel never invited Barbara or the other boys to Linkenholt. I believe, in their immovable post-war snobbery, they had never much liked their daughter-in-law, whose father was a Jewish businessman, Bertie Stern. Perhaps Barbara had never seemed good enough for their beloved Michael. And now they never saw her or her new husband. When summer came around, they snatched their grandsons from her and put them in Jane’s care.

  Johnny and Rob had (and still have) an affection for our times at Linkenholt as fierce as mine and Jo’s. But I remember our mother complaining about having to look after four kids instead of two. Later in our lives, she told us that while she knew that we and the cousins were ‘in paradise’ on these holidays, she was ‘in hell’. It was the hell of feeling unloved, of arguing with Grandpop over trifles, of enduring Mabel’s unending, debilitating grief.

  And perhaps the presence of the boys didn’t help her. They were noisier and larger than us. They adored climbing trees and riding their bicycles through puddles even faster than we rode ours. Their clothes got muddier. And, most importantly, they were less afraid of Jane’s bad temper. They slept in a room across the landing from ours, where, Rob complained, the birds kept them awake all night. Jo and I would often emerge from our tranquil sleep to hear Jane shouting: ‘Will you boys BE QUIET!’

  They didn’t want to be quiet. Linkenholt was a paradise for them too, and the expressions of their happiness could sometimes be noisy. Johnny’s nature tended somewhat towards anxious obedience; he was a boy who wanted to please. But Rob, I think, didn’t care much what any of the grown-ups felt about him. He was perpetually lively and restless and would keep talking for as long as anyone would listen. And he had a wonderful knack of saying things that made everybody laugh. He became the house jester, as Michael had allegedly once been. Even Granny’s cross mouth would stretch itself into a secret grin at some of Rob’s sayings and antics. And to see Granny smile – a thing she did so very infrequently – was a strange phenomenon, as though, for a moment, a different personality had taken her over.

  She loved it when the boys sang to her. Before lunch, sometimes, when the grown-ups were on to the sherry and we would be ravenously hungry (after a morning spent playing in the garden, trying to climb hayricks or building dens in the spinney, but cleaned and brushed up by Jane), we would cluster in the drawing room and Johnny and Rob would sing, in their sweet boy-soprano voices: ‘The Minstrel Boy’, ‘Molly Malone’, ‘Oh Shenandoah’ …

  What worlds of memory did these songs evoke in Granny? Had Michael once sung them, or poor little Roland? It interests me to recall that, as far as I can remember, Roland was never talked about. He must have died in about 1926 – thirty years before. So did the sheer weight of time cast some oblivion on him? Or had he perhaps been a weak boy, of whom Roland and Mabel were very slightly ashamed, whereas Michael had been large and loud and strong?

  And when Mabel looked at Jonathan and Robert, who did she see? I like to think she saw these children only for who they were – these deeply individual souls – but I fear the ghost of one or other of the dead sons hovered always round their heads. Robert had a tomboyish look, laughing brown eyes, hair wild, clothes slightly out of order. Jonathan was tall, athletic and beautiful. He was, to some extent, their ‘golden boy’, but his young life was made difficult by a debilitating stammer, brought about, it seems, by the tragic loss of his father.fn3 Rob, who had no such affliction, managed to steal their hearts with his jokes and his laughter.

  I don’t remember that Jo and I were ever invited to join in with the singing sessions, but I’m pretty sure we didn’t mind. The cousins brought fun and daring to paradise. We loved them. We only tried to puzzle out, I recall, what on earth or where on earth was Shenandoah.

  Johnny and Rob were quite skilled at tennis, and Jo and I, already given tennis lessons at the Hurlingham in London, were good enough to play children’s mixed doubles with them, all of us tutored by Jane, who kitted herself in a white pleated skirt, white plimsolls and white-framed sunglasses. She was thin but strong. Her high-kicking serve could sometimes take even Johnny by surprise. Tennis was one of the few activities she deigned to engage in with us.

  Above the tennis court was a summer house, where Granny occasionally came to watch us play and keep murmuring, ‘No, no, no …’, as though everybody was doing everything wrong. The summer house was full of cane furniture, once brown and shiny, now faded to lichen grey and slowly dismantling itself, like sinews falling from dead bones. Granny laid herself down on these bones and stared at us and at the wrecked tennis court, its asphalt blackened and broken apart by weeds, its chain-link fencing rusting in the sun.

  We once asked Jane why, when everything else at Linkenholt was kept in such pristine order, the tennis court looked like something from an urban slum. But we probably knew the answer before we asked the question. ‘Michael,’ she said. ‘Michael loved to play tennis. Now, no one plays.’

  We played. But who were we? I suppose we were the ‘no ones’.

  But we were real to many others.

  One of these was Mr Daubeny – a neat and energetic man with, ironically, the physical colouring of a fox – who cared for the chickens.

  The coops were set out over two grassy fields. Mr Daubeny used a pony and cart to make his rounds of feeding, watering and egg collecting. This pony and cart was so beguiling to us, I used to dream about riding in it. But I think it was Rob, also fascinated by the idea, who eventually plucked up the courage to ask Mr Daubeny if we could ‘help’ him. He said yes. And so, instead of just watching Mr Daubeny work, we gained access to all the paraphernalia of caring for hens: untying great bales of straw to spread fresh in the coops, rounding up birds that had escaped into prickly hedgerows, searching for eggs, topping up the grain feeders and the water troughs. We were farmers at last.

  We probably caused more chaos for Mr Daubeny than he ever admitted, but he seemed happy to let us follow him, bundling us all into the cart as we moved from one part of the field to another, and – miraculous event! – letting one of us ride on the pony as we went.

  If we went there towards the end of the morning, we would get to ride down to the farm buildings where the pony was fed and stabled at lunchtime – over the two fields, down a chalky track, then onto the road, where in the 1950s almost no cars ever came, but which gave us a wild feeling of excitement and daring. The road was steep and narrow, with tall hedges on either side. Once, we met a Green Line bus and everything came to a standstill. Did we turn the pony and cart around, or did the bus back away down the hill? I can’t remember. I just recall that Rob was riding the pony, and when he saw the bus, he let out one of the expletives that used to blue the air in conversations between Grandpop and Mr Carter.

  Then we’d trail back up the hill to the house. Did one of us own a watch, or did we just tell the time by the hunger we felt or the positioning of the sun? As I recall, none of the grown-ups showed any anxiety about us. Perhaps this is one of the excellent laws of paradise: that time is no longer an enemy, but a watchful friend, steering you home before anybody misses you, before any rule has been broken.

  We went pounding in, remembering to take off our wellingtons at the door, our cheeks long cured of their London pallor, our clothes pricked here and there with bits of straw and feathers. Jane would lead us away to the bathroom, perhaps complaining that she was missing her third glass of sherry, that we stank of chicken manure. In her slender hand would be a hairbrush.

  When I was nine, our grandmother fell ill.

  Children were not told the names of serious illnesses in those days. We only knew that Granny had taken to her bed.

  Douglas and the maids came and went with cups of broth and glasses of Sanatogen. It was winter. The cousins weren’t there to sing to Granny, so Jo and I were taken into her suite of rooms, to st
and quite far away from her and try to remember the words of ‘Oh Shenandoah’. This wasn’t a bit of the house where we ever normally went. But I remember finding it beautiful, painted in soft greys, with a grey carpet and ornate cherrywood furniture the colour of honey.

  Granny had stomach cancer. Grief, cigarettes, sherry, arthritis and overeating had made her body slightly grotesque. Now she seemed shrunken – a different person. She looked at us sadly but intently from her mound of pillows. She said she would like to hear ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’. It was as though she’d noticed us at last, knowing she wouldn’t have to be bothered by us for long.

  Jo and I were strangely disconnected from the idea of her death. Johnny remembers Granny as a kindly person, much liked by all those who worked at Linkenholt. But we didn’t like her very much. My most tangible memory of her was when, walking along the lavender walk with us, she would lean on me, to steady herself, and the weight of her hand, pressing down on my shoulder, would get heavier and heavier until I wanted to scream with pain, but knew that I couldn’t.

  Apart from this remembered torture, surrounded by the lavender-scented air, I think Granny had never really been fully alive for us, just a cross, ghostly presence who had given us a paradise to inhabit and then withdrawn from it.