Rosie Read online

  Then, of course, there was the sea and its shoreline of deep rock pools. In Treyarnon Pool, we lined up to dive from a slippery flat rock. I can still feel the fear and excitement of these dives, the thrill of the icy water. This was a different universe from Chelsea baths, dangerous and wild, with the screech of seabirds above and the sea crashing in just over the headland.

  We learned to surf in Constantine Bay. My surfboard had a picture of a dancing seal on it. We got bolder as time went on, taking our boards further and further out, till Jane and Eileen came and stood at the edge of the water, calling us in, and Eileen’s Pekinese dog joined them, barking at the waves and the wind.

  In the wet sand left by the receding tide, Jo led us all in making sand sculptures. Hers were beautiful: mermaids with realistic fish-scale tails and Botticelli hair, seabirds with spread wings. Mine were lumpy, sometimes starting out as known animals and ending up as creatures nobody recognised. And it amused Timmy, who thought sand sculptures girlie and stupid, to jump on mine and break them apart. When the weather was too bad for diving or surfing, we were consigned to a playroom housed in some kind of annexe or garage and almost entirely taken up by a ping-pong table. Timmy was, predictably, good at ping-pong. He used to hit the ball so hard, it bounced away into the jumble of cast-off things: broken deckchairs, golf clubs, hammocks, cardboard boxes, old thermoses and gin bottles. We’d spend as much time looking for the ball as playing. And boredom lay heavy on these days of storm.

  One summer, the circus came to St Austell.

  Auntie Eileen bought tickets for us all and we counted the days to this moment of thrill and cruelty. None of us had ever been to a circus, but we knew that there were going to be lions, and trapeze artists dressed in spangles, flying through the air. We knew that the lions might escape from their cage and maul the ringmaster. We knew the trapeze performers might fall. In our heartless children’s dreams, we wanted them to fall. It promised to be the most exciting thing any of us had ever seen.

  Then on the morning of the St Austell day, I was summoned by Jane. She told me that I wouldn’t be going to the circus after all. I wouldn’t be going because I’d been ‘difficult’. I had to learn to fit in better and be nicer to everybody, including Timmy. If I didn’t learn this lesson, then my life would not really amount to a life. I would be no one.

  I slunk away, crying, to the room I shared with Nan. Nan told me she’d go to ‘Mummy’ and plead for me. Telling me I would be ‘no one’ was, in Nan’s vocabulary, ‘rotten’. Yes, I had been cross and sulky. Even the kindly Glad Eyes had complained about me. But Nan understood that staying in this friendless household was difficult for me, so she’d go to Mummy and Mummy would relent.

  But Mummy didn’t relent. Everybody went off to see the man-eating lions and the death-defying acrobats, and Nan and I stayed behind. Nan was missing the circus too, but of course she didn’t complain. She was a person who hardly ever complained about anything.

  For our supper, we had boiled ham and bread and butter with salad cream. And the following morning I woke up to find a scarlet mess all over my pillow. I thought I’d been weeping blood, but it turned out that a vessel in my nose had burst – a tiny red mark on my face I’d had for years and which, on the night of the circus, had exploded. When Jane saw me the following morning, all she said was ‘Why does Rosie look so pale?’

  Although Jane and Auntie Eileen presided over our Cornish holidays, almost all our out-of-school activities in London were done with Nan. The one exception was riding lessons.

  These were organised for me and my friend Jane McKenzie by our mothers when we children were eight or nine. They took place in Wimbledon, and I can remember that Jane McKenzie and I travelled there in the back section of the Morris Traveller and annoyed the mothers by staring backwards out of the little lumpy car and making ugly faces at the motorists behind. This behaviour the parents described as ‘dreadfully common’.

  At first, I looked forward to the riding lessons. I liked my outfit: yellow polo-neck jersey, trim jodhpurs, little tweed jacket, yellow gloves, a velvet-covered riding hat, a whip. I felt privileged and thrilled.

  The hot, sweet smell of horses was alluring to me, and their beauty has always struck me as exceptional. But mastering them takes courage and strength, and the paths we rode on Wimbledon Common were stony and uneven, full of places where the horses might slip or slide. At Linkenholt, when Jo and I and the cousins took it in turns to ride Mr Daubeny’s pony, I’d felt no fear at all, only colossal excitement and joy, but now, in Wimbledon, some agitation about falling off and breaking my neck started to creep into my mind. This increased as we progressed to learning to jump, a feat I felt proud of doing and yet was definitely afraid of.

  Jane McKenzie was a neat and competent rider; I was told by my mother that she had ‘a very good seat’, and the memory of her rod-straight little back going up and down on her horse is a tender one. In contrast, I was informed that I looked ‘like a sack of potatoes’, that I lacked spine. This classic put-down, coupled with my increasing fear that riding would somehow end my life, should have been enough to stop me continuing with the lessons. But I wanted to keep up with Jane McKenzie and the other children at the riding school; I refused to admit my fear to anyone, even to Nan.

  Over time, this bravado became an increasing agony to me. I would wake on the morning of the riding lessons feeling sick. When we went into the stables to lead our horses out, the sweet scent of them would now be tainted with the smell of terror.

  It was, in the end, about five years later that I told my mother I didn’t want to go on with riding lessons any more. Knowing nothing of the fears of her spineless sack of potatoes, she had no sympathy to give. I just remember her complaining that it had all been a colossal waste of money.

  Before our lives in London ended, something happened between me and Jane that directly concerned money.

  This series of events has always remained a mystery to me, a mystery that makes it harder than ever for me to understand why Jane was the kind of mother she was.

  One of our grandmother’s sisters, Marie Michell, a rich eccentric who lived with a female companion in a cavernous house in Norfolk, had agreed to be godmother to me. We hardly ever saw Marie Michell. Jo and I were taken out to tea at the Hyde Park Hotel from time to time by another of the unmarried sisters, Great-Aunt Annie, and the youngest of the siblings, Great-Aunt Violet, once or twice turned up at Linkenholt for Christmas. But Marie had her own woman-centred life at Kenninghall; she wasn’t remotely interested in our family or in godmothering. My birthday was never remembered. At Christmas, sometimes a hated box of handkerchiefs would arrive, With love from Aunt Marie. And I was made to write ‘a proper letter of thanks’ to her. But mostly, she just chose to forget us all.

  Then, on my tenth birthday, just before Keith left us, a cheque for £100 was sent to Jane by Marie, to be spent or saved for me, acknowledging that Marie had not been a good godmother and hoping that this would make amends.

  This was 1953. A hundred pounds was a large sum of money then, too large – obviously ridiculously too large – to be given directly to a ten-year-old child. So I was summoned by Jane and told that with a little of the money she would buy me a new bicycle (I had now outgrown Jo’s cast-off Raleigh), and the rest would be ‘put somewhere safe’ for me, to have when I was grown up.

  We bought the bicycle: another Raleigh, shimmering blue, with a new chrome bell. It was a good machine and I loved it and kept it for years and years. The sum I think this cost was £14 or £15, thus leaving £85 to be put into the promised safe-keeping.

  I forgot about this money. Great-Aunt Marie probably forgot about it too. But years later, at a time when I was struggling financially in my twenties, I suddenly remembered it and asked Jane if it had been invested for me – in a Post Office savings account, perhaps? I realised that £85 would have transformed itself into a much larger sum in the twelve or thirteen years that had passed, and that this might conceivably reli
eve my financial stress. But no. Jane admitted that she had just taken the rest of the money and used it for herself, seemingly without a qualm. ‘I’m sorry, Rosie,’ she said to me, ‘but I’m afraid Aunt Marie’s money coincided with a difficult time for me. You had your bike. I honoured that. The rest just went.’

  It went. It was mine, but Jane never seemed to care about what was mine. (In a later house move, she threw away all my teenage letters, all my school reports bar one, and a collection of my early poems.) She cared that Jo and I would be honest and upright in our own dealings, but in so many ways she was dishonest and cavalier, both with the things that belonged to us and with our feelings.

  It came to me in later years that she envied us. We hadn’t been sent away from home at the age of six, with nothing but a beautiful coat to keep our hopes of love and affection alive. We hadn’t gone through the war. We hadn’t known what it was like to lose not one but two beloved brothers. And we’d had the luxury of an affectionate nanny – paid for by Jane. We were a thousand times more fortunate than she had been, and it was as if, in her arithmetic, she decided: Jo and Rosie have got quite enough already, thank you very much! I endure Linkenholt for their sakes. I fill their Christmas stockings. They don’t need me to make financial sacrifices for them. They don’t need me to love them.

  I think that when we were around her, she didn’t feel as though she was living. We made too many childish demands on her. She had to have hopes and expectations for us, which wearied her. As girls in a man’s world in the 1950s, what could those hopes and expectations possibly be? And if she thought them up, then she’d have to begin worrying that we might not fulfil them.

  When we were safely away in our cold dormitories at Crofton Grange, she and her friends could forget all about their children’s future. Instead, they could go to plays, go to films, go to restaurants, get drunk at lunchtime, flirt, shop, swear, take taxis, waste money, go dancing, have sex, and wander through London in the dawn light, laughing, determined to forget the war that had stolen their youth and so many of the people they’d loved. They were making up for lost time. With disintegrating marriages, they knew that life was slipping by for them, but that for us – the bloody children! – it was infinite. We had years in an apparent peacetime wonderland ahead. It wasn’t fair.

  A friend of Jo’s, Lois Crane, who later became head girl at Crofton Grange, told me some years ago that her mother had witnessed a distressing send-off scene at Liverpool Street station, where we assembled for the train taking us back to school. My mother and Pam McKenzie dutifully kissed my friend Jane and me goodbye, ignoring any weeping that might be gathering in us, then, before the train had left the station, linked arms and turned away, saying, ‘Good! Now we can get on with life!’fn4 But what was that life? A roll-call of the things I’ve listed above, ending with the London daybreak shedding a harsh light on all of them.

  It has always felt to me that my mother’s generation of women, born just before the First World War and suffering painfully through the Second, had been dealt a difficult hand. Those who survived well bucked the constraints imposed on their aspirations and found purpose and sanity through work. But Jane was not one of them. Her greatest human weakness was to care a lot about the way people looked, but to be too emotionally and intellectually lazy to attempt to understand what they felt. Heartbroken as a young child, she cursed, drank and chain-smoked her way through a life that passed in a kind of peculiar, pampered dream, unexamined, never completely understood.

  Angel

  She was one of eight children, two of whom had died young. The six who remained were Sissy, Madge, Lilian, Judy, their brother Colin, and Vera, our beloved Nan. Sissy was a widow. None of the other sisters had ever married. Their father had been a family doctor and left them each a little money. Two of them found work in nursing. Vera became a nanny. Early in my life, she said to me: ‘Never do this. Whatever happens to you, don’t become a nanny. It’s too heartbreaking.’

  Before coming to us, when I was born in 1943, she’d worked for another family and doted on her charge, little Peter Taylor. But when Peter got older, she was no longer needed. Nan mourned for this lost child. She had to begin all over again with us. Peter Taylor was twelve and at boarding school. Instead of him, Nan was faced with dreamy, curly-haired Jo, aged four, and baby Rosie, rather plump and prone to dribbling.

  Until the war ended, we lived in a small cottage, David’s Cottage, on the Linkenholt estate. (It’s here that I locate the memory of lying in my pram and seeing birds landing on telegraph wires.) There is a photograph of us all, including Great-Aunt Violet, taken on my first birthday in the garden of David’s Cottage. I appear to be holding a tiny book, or perhaps somebody’s wallet or diary. Jo looks down at me in distaste: who is this fat baby who cries in the night and already shows off in the daytime? Cousin Johnny looks on in bemused wonder. Cousin Rob, not even one yet, is held up by his nanny. It’s a summer’s day, 2 August 1944. Jane has her famous white-rimmed dark glasses on, but Granny wears a coat and hat. Nan, in a white blouse, has her back to the picture, which was taken, presumably, by Barbara, Johnny and Rob’s mother.

  Of course there are no men there. Michael Dudley and my father were fighting in France. Were either of them thinking about us on my first birthday? Who knows? They knew, or presumably hoped, that we were safe. During the Blitz, a bomb fell on the corner of our road in London but spared our house, and now we were far removed from London. And our wartime life, because of the proximity of the Linkenholt farm, was never a desperate, hungry one. As the men suffered and died, we were gathered on rugs and in deckchairs in the sunshine. My bet is that Jane had made cucumber sandwiches for tea – the cucumbers grown in the Linkenholt greenhouses by Tom. And I was as safe as I was ever going to be. I was near to Nan.

  At the Harbourfront literary festival in Toronto in 1991, I met the South African fiction writer Carolyn Slaughter, who was training to be a psychiatrist. Over lunch together at a seafood restaurant (with hilarious plastic bibs tied round our necks to stop us spilling lobster thermidor sauce over ourselves, and glasses of Chablis in our hands), we both began talking about the past.

  Disarmed by Carolyn’s revelations about being abused by her father at the age of six,fn1 I eventually began telling her things I never normally discussed with anyone: the lack of love I’d had from my mother and father, and my emotional dependency on Nan.

  Our lunch lasted hours. The Toronto sun went down at the window. And I have never forgotten what Carolyn said to me in the course of it. She reaffirmed very forcefully to me something we all now know to be true: that any human life, if the childhood is devoid of adult love, will almost certainly be a troubled one. She reminded me that it doesn’t have to be the parent who gives this love; it could be an aunt or uncle or grandparent, or indeed a hired nanny. It just has to be someone. I was crying by this point in the conversation, but Carolyn reached out a hand and said: ‘Crying is good, Rose. Use the big table napkins, but, hey, don’t get lobster in your eyes. And listen to me: you were lucky. You could have been a depressive mess by now, or you could be dead from drugs or drink, but you’re not. Nan saved you. She was your angel.’

  Nan took us on our first great foreign adventure, to Wengen in Switzerland, in the summer of 1950, when I was seven and Jo was eleven.

  Our parents were in the South of France, where they went every summer, and they presumably felt slightly guilty at the idea of abandoning us in smog-bound London while they sunbathed and danced and drank on the Riviera, or else they decided that some mountain air would breathe fresh life into us – that they might like us more when we returned.

  I can remember snatches of the long journey: Nan getting down onto the station platform at Basle to buy food (there was none on the German train) and Jo and me calling to her from the window, terrified the train would leave without her.

  In the evening, a steward came round with pillows and blankets and we lay down on the hard leather benches and tried to sleep, but
sleep was difficult, for inside the pillows was straw, which rustled whenever you moved your head. I remember folding Piggy’s floppy ears over his eyes, which was how I imagined he liked to sleep, and wishing I was a stuffed toy, who didn’t mind about the rustling straw. In our compartment, there was a tiny blue light, which stayed on all night.

  The final trains must have been from Bern to Interlaken, then from Interlaken to Wengen, where porters waited in the sunshine with carts drawn by St Bernard dogs. In the distance was the great peak of the Jungfrau. We had never seen a landscape like this one. The highest we’d ever been before was Linkenholt Hill.

  Now, we were halfway to the sky, in a place where the war hadn’t trespassed. My most vibrant memory of that first trip to Switzerland is the shine on everything: on the snow-clad mountains towering over us, on the red geraniums planted in a hundred window boxes, on the water of the hotel swimming pool, on the tin tables of a tea room where raspberries were served with a sour-tasting cream (probably crème fraiche), and – most tenacious of all in my memory – on the blue-black carapace of a stag beetle, sunning itself on a white road.

  On one of our early walks above the Hotel Alpenrose, where Nan, Jo and I were sleeping in one ‘family room’, we discovered an old sawmill, where nobody was working any more but where piles of logs and planks lay strewn around among long grass and wild flowers. This became our favourite playground. We invented slalom games and balancing games, running in and out of the piles of planks and along the tops of the fallen fir trunks. It was high up, near the forest line, a strangely secret place that we soon felt belonged only to us. No other children ever came there.

  At the forest edge, where Nan loved to watch for birds and kept hoping she would see an eagle, she discovered a lush growth of wild strawberries, a tiny fruit we’d never seen before. And I can still remember, in that bright Swiss air, with the sound of cowbells in the distance, the taste and texture of a wild strawberry, sharp yet sweet, scratchy yet soft. Perhaps Nan rationed them, because they always seemed precious and exceptional to us, as though we were eating jewellery.fn2