As Green as Grass Growing Up Before, During and After the Second World War
Emma Smith
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For my beloved family, as usual, with gratitude for kindnesses too many to mention.
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PART ONE BEFORE
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W
e have said goodbye to the rocks and cliffs and sands and the rough seas of the north Cornish coast, and exchanged them for a Devonshire village ten miles inland on the very edge of Dartmoor. The reason why we have moved so far away from Newquay, the small seaside resort where I was born twelve years ago, is because my father has been transferred by the Midland Bank to one of its bigger branches in Plymouth. Daddy says it means he has been promoted, but I think that secretly he misses the importance he had in Newquay, where he was the only cashier to be working behind the bank’s high shiny counter. Perhaps, though – probably, in fact – he still is unique, even in Plymouth, no matter how many cashiers there are, because of having a DSO after his name. Our father, as we well know, is a war hero. For me and my older sister Pam the main difference about our new life – apart from losing the sea – is that we shall be going to a real school. In Newquay, instead of school, we shared lessons every morning with a group of three or four other girls. Our teacher was called Miss Howard, and our classroom was in her minuscule flat, situated at the top of a steep narrow staircase behind a grocery shop, a short distance from the harbour with its fishy smells, and close by the glamorous distractions of the Victoria Cinema. We wore our 3
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ordinary clothes at these morning lessons in Miss Howard’s flat, and were free each afternoon to do whatever we wanted. During the summer we did nothing much. What my sister Pam and I wanted then was simply to spend hours and hours down on the Great Western Beach. But now, besides wearing a uniform, we will be having lunch at school, and staying on there all day, and not getting home until teatime. Plymouth has a cathedral, and is consequently more than just a large town; it counts as a city. And as if that weren’t enough grandeur for Plymouth, it is also, we have learnt, a chief port of the Royal Navy. The brochure provided by Moorfields (the school we shall very soon, according to Mummy, be attending) informs us that its particular purpose is to educate the daughters of officers and gentlemen. Our father, of course, isn’t a naval officer; he is merely a clerk in a bank. But we Hallsmith children have had it impressed upon us most forcibly all our lives by Daddy that in spite of his lowly employment he is – and we must never forget it – a gentleman. So this makes it quite all right for Pam and me to go to Moorfields, which, although expensive, our mother has chosen in preference to the Girls’ High School, where the pupils might not necessarily be the daughters of either officers or gentlemen. Yesterday Mummy took us by bus the ten miles into Plymouth so that we could be fitted out in Dingle’s Department Stores with the required uniform: a navy-blue gymslip, navy-blue blazer, white shirt and a silky striped scarlet-and-navy tie; black shoes and stockings; a round navy-blue velour hat, and – mysteriously – things called galoshes, which I have never seen before. Also a satchel. We are now equipped for school. I am thrilled. I have always wanted to have a uniform. In Newquay I used to observe the girls who went to Thelema School or the County School and envy them the distinction that, it seemed to me, their 4
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uniform bestowed on them. And the fictitious girls in such Angela Brazil novels as I succeeded in borrowing from Boots’ Lending Library – they too wore gymslips in the illustrations I pored over, and now I shall be able to feel I am the same as those heroines. The name of our village is Crapstone, and the semi-detached house we have just moved into is called Melrose. Semidetached means a building that is joined on to another house exactly like it: a sort of mirror image, or an identical twin. My older brother and sister, Jim and Pam, are twins, but not identical – quite on the contrary. Except for both being fairhaired and blue-eyed (I wish I had blue eyes) they aren’t in the slightest bit alike. Our new next-door neighbours, Mr and Mrs Brown, have three children. They live so close to us we are able to hear their muffled voices and footsteps through the partition that separates our hall from their hall. Laurence Brown is about the same age, I think, as Pam and Jim, and Phoebe and Philip Brown are not as old as me, but older than my younger brother Harvey, who was four in June. Their house is the last in the road, with a much more extensive garden than we have. Beyond its boundary wall stretches a wilderness of gorse and heather: the actual beginning – or, if you were going in the opposite direction, the end – of Dartmoor itself. We don’t really have a garden at all. How can you have a garden if there aren’t any flowers? The only flower bed is a weedy triangular patch of ground squeezed into a corner on the farther side of a short gravel drive that leads up to a garage at the back. Since our house, Melrose, stands on a higher level than the road running past it, the overgrown unkempt lawn in front is also on two levels, connected by a steepish daisy-strewn slope intended, Harvey thinks, 5
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especially for him to have the fun of rolling down; which he does, at every opportunity. Instead of the customary border display of pinks and pansies, hollyhocks and snapdragons, what we’ve got, on the upper lawn, is a single exotic shrub: a pampas grass. Huge and flamboyant, its clump of long thin trailing green leaves – resembling a monster’s wild uncombed hair – is topped by spikes of beautiful silvery-golden plumes. Pampas grasses, being tropical plants, usually grow in hot countries, Africa or India, not on the edge of Dartmoor. I’ve always loved flowers, and I’m truly sorry we haven’t any, but who would not be proud to possess, as we now do, a plant so remarkable and distinguishing. When we children first arrived and were shown what was to be our new home, I had felt a twinge of disappointment, I must admit, because of the rather dreary grey colour of its blotchy plaster façade, and its peeling paintwork. But my disappointment was gone in less than a minute. In addition to the spectacular pampas grass, Melrose’s other redeeming features were immediately obvious: a balcony, jutting out from the floor above, and supported on a row of wooden pillars, has the effect of creating a shady veranda underneath; and French windows (that is to say, double full-length glass doors) open on to the veranda from one of the ground floor rooms. We have never before lived in a house with a balcony, and a veranda, and French windows, and a pampas grass on the front lawn. Nor is this all. When we went inside and upstairs yet another marvel awaited us. The previous tenants of Melrose have left behind them in the attic, either on purpose or else from sheer forgetfulness – wonder of wonders, a ping-pong table! Nothing in the world could have so surprised us or given such promise of enjoyment in the days ahead as a pingpong table. These novel and entirely unexpected assets more 6
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than compensate for my hasty first impression of our new home’s dingy outside appearance. A ping-pong table! People have been calling on us and leaving little two-inch cards with their names and addresses printed on them. This never used to happen in Newquay, but it’s what they do here, apparently, whenever there’s a new arrival in the village. It isn’t in the least like playing ludo or snakes and ladders, but it strikes me, nonetheless, as being a sort of grown-ups’ game, with a set of clear, although unwritten, rules. This is how the game is played: Somebody we don’t know, a Crapstone resident, who usually turns out to be a wife – she seldom brings her husband with her – rings our bell and is invited in for tea and biscuits. She doesn’t stay more than fifteen or twenty minutes: a very short visit (subsequent visits can be longer). We find, when she has departed, that the silver salver in the hall has had one or two, or perhaps even three, little white cards deposited on it, like the eggs a hen has laid and left in its nesting box. Ever since Daddy was presented by Newquay Tennis Club’s Committee with a sparkling expensive silver tray in appreciation of the work he put into being the Club’s Honorary Secretary, we have wondered what possible use there could be for such an object. What was it for? Well, here we have the answer: it was, and is, intended for the reception of visiting cards. After about a week the call has to be returned. Our mother, wearing gloves and a hat, and probably taking Pam (but not me) with her, calls on the caller, and leaves her cards. Once this is done, all the participants are deemed to be officially acquainted: we now know each other. And so now, if we should chance to meet in the road, say, outside the post office, we can stop and chat; a conversation it wouldn’t have been 7
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correct for us to have had before the completion of the cardcalling game. During the summer, while we were still living in Newquay, our mother was warned by old Mrs Mulroney that because of the village we were moving to being so close to the Royal Naval port of Plymouth, only ten miles off, this is the way things would be done; and that’s why Mummy prepared herself by having cards printed, and why she has no difficulty, it would appear, in following the rules for Crapstone visiting. Moreover, she listened to the advice her strait-laced imperious old Irish friend gave her on other matters as well. Nor did Mummy protest when Mrs Mulroney reprimanded her quite severely – I was present, and heard the rebuke – for not fulfilling the duty she owed her husband (‘the dear brave man, God bless him’) by failing to bring us four up in a manner befitting the sons and daughters of an English gentleman. She had been deeply shocked, Mrs Mulroney declared, on learning that the family’s general factotum, Lucy Coles – (my dear Lucy) – was allowed to refer to the Hallsmith children without the deferential prefix of a Miss or a Master. Standards had to be maintained; had, indeed, to be enforced. If the lower orders were not reminded constantly that they were the lower orders, the resulting loss of respect, in Mrs Mulroney’s opinion, could spell disaster. Look at Russia – bloody revolution! Our father, it’s true, has always fervently believed his rightful place in society is that of a gentleman, whether English or Scottish, but it isn’t a consideration which has ever much bothered Mummy – not until our removal to Crapstone. She must have remembered and pondered on her old friend’s words, and come to the conclusion that perhaps there was reason in them; that Mrs Mulroney did, perhaps, know best, after all. For when our move, a few weeks ago, 8
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had been finally accomplished, and Mummy set about hiring a sixteen-year-old girl from the nearby village of Buckland Monachorum to be our daily cleaner, Mary Northey was instructed to call my brothers Master Jim and Master Harvey, and my sister Miss Pam; and I am to be spoken to, and of, as Miss Elspeth. Furthermore, on the trip to Plymouth, having bought the necessary school uniform for Pam and me, Mummy went on to buy a selection of lacy caps and little frilly aprons for Mary Northey to change into once she had done the morning’s cleaning and scrubbing and furniture polishing, and finished washing up the dirty dishes. Mrs Mulroney’s parlourmaid had been trained to wear just such a frilly cap and apron, freshly laundered, when serving afternoon tea. It feels funny to me, being called Miss Elspeth. Mary doesn’t seem to think it funny, but I do. I shall have to get used to it, I suppose. Generally I look forward to change, and expect it to be exciting. But with some changes, I’m bound to say, I don’t feel altogether comfortable. Pam and I have started going to Moorfields, our new school in Plymouth. It’s the second half of the winter term. We weren’t able to start at the beginning of the first half because that was when we were moving from Newquay to Crapstone. I think it’s a considerable disadvantage for a new girl to have to begin at her new school halfway through the term. It makes it much harder, somehow, to fit in. Although actually, if I’m truthful, I’m not sure that I’d have fitted in anyway. I had thought that school would be exactly like the Angela Brazil books I’d been reading, but I was wrong; it’s not. It isn’t like them at all. Every day we have to gobble our breakfast down in order to catch the eight o’clock bus that stops to pick up passengers at the Crapstone war memorial. Pam always does catch 9
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the bus, but I’ve sometimes fallen asleep again after she’s woken me at seven o’clock, and as soon as I’ve rushed, helterskelter, out of Melrose and got to the end of the Browns’ garden wall, I can see that I’ve missed it. There it goes, trundling off without me over the moor’s flat empty landscape, disappearing into the distance. In another half-hour Daddy will be driving to his work in the Midland Bank, but a lift with him would come too late. I must make the best of a bad job, covering the two miles to Yelverton on foot as fast as I can run, so as to reach the crossroads in time to clamber, panting, aboard the next bus, a double-decker travelling from Tavistock to Plymouth. Never mind that in the scramble to get dressed I may have completely forgotten about the essential stripy tie; or that a shoelace may have to do as an emergency replacement for my hair-ribbon, blown away on the windy moor. Never mind! – it could be worse! By catching the Tavistock bus I ought, if I’m lucky, to be able to creep, dishevelled and breathless, into Form 2’s classroom, where morning Assembly is held, and join a line of my classmates a few desperate seconds before Miss Bailey and Miss Pocock enter, closely followed by their staff of teachers, filing in, one by one, glumly, to position themselves under the notice board. Despite some semi-muffled sniggers, I will, by the skin of my teeth, have avoided utter disaster. But if I’m not so lucky I shall find on arrival – as I have twice miserably done – the door already shut, and hear Miss Carlisle banging out a tune on the piano, and voices singing the opening hymn. Any lateness here is disgraceful, and such extreme lateness inexcusable. It will mean – has meant – that I am unworthy to be a pupil in this punctual, bell-ringing, uniform-wearing, pukka establishment. It means that I’m a failure. I had never imagined that I should be a failure, going to school, but I am. 10
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The future looked altogether different on the Saturday before half-term when Mummy took me and Pam to meet – or, rather, to be inspected by – Miss Bailey and her friend, Miss Pocock. Miss Bailey is the owner and the chief headmistress, and Miss Pocock is her second-in-command. ‘Oh, what a charming house!’ our mother had exclaimed as we approached the wide flight of shallow steps leading up to a pillared porch. ‘Don’t you agree, girls?’ And yes, of course we did. Everything we saw was charming: the velvety smooth lawns under spreading beech trees, the big windows, framed in climbing roses and ivy – everything. And here my sister Pam and I – lucky us! – were to go to school! A delightful prospect, we thought it then. The disappointments came later. We were ushered inside, into an elegant drawing-room, and introduced to Miss Bailey. And straight away I thought how very odd it seemed that Miss Bailey, this fat little unsmiling person, didn’t at all match the house or the garden. I decided, immediately, that I didn’t care for her, and I could tell at once that she didn’t care for me. But it’s my belief now, after several weeks of observing Miss Bailey, that she doesn’t, in fact, care for children; not for any children, no matter who they are. Which really is extremely odd. Because, if so, why did Miss Bailey choose to have a school for girls? I hate school. I hate everything about it. Well, almost everything. It isn’t that the girls in my class are horrid; or not exactly. Mostly they take no notice of me. They ignore me, as though I’m some sort of an outsider who ought not to be there. It’s only Monica Harris who goes out of her way to be as nasty to me as possible. I don’t know why she does, unless it’s to amuse Doreen Cohen and make her laugh. Doreen Cohen is really, I think, by nature quite amiable – or she 11
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would be if it weren’t for the bad influence of Monica Harris. They are bosom friends, inseparable, although they look, and in every particular are, complete opposites: Doreen Cohen being dark and big and lazy and clumsy, whereas Monica Harris is fair-haired, quick and smallish, with a very turned-up nose and a permanently spiteful expression. She has nicknamed me Spitty, not because I spit, which I don’t, but because my name is Elspeth Hallsmith. And she calls me Teacher’s Pet whenever I’m top of the English or History or French lists that are pinned on the notice board at the end of each week. And once, when we were sitting side by side during Geometry, she stuck the point of her compass into my leg, on purpose. When I said Ow! very loudly because of the surprise, and because it hurt, everybody looked at me, and Mrs Eliot, our Geometry teacher, paused in the middle of chalking an isosceles triangle on the blackboard and asked me crossly – she’s always cross, anyway – what was the matter. ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘It was nothing – I’m sorry, Mrs Eliot.’ I felt ashamed for interrupting the lesson and attracting such disapproving attention to myself. I couldn’t explain that I had yelled out because Monica Harris had stuck the needle of her compass into my leg. When we lived in Newquay and had lessons each morning from Miss Howard, my sister Pam and I used to enjoy learning. We wanted to learn. It never occurred to us that being taught was boring, or a waste of time. In every lesson we tried to please Miss Howard, our teacher, by doing as well as we could. And when we did manage to do well, she was pleased. Which meant, of course, that we were too. But now if I get good marks at school, and beat the other girls, they think I’m showing off. It would be better, I’ve realised, to give up trying altogether; better to get low marks and be considered a dunce, 12
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than to get high marks and be unpopular. And since I must endure somehow, as best as I can, life in this hateful school, I’ve decided to stop working hard; to stop, in fact, making any effort to succeed at anything – with the exception, that’s to say, of my two favourite subjects. Apart from them, instead of attempting to be top of the weekly lists, I plan in future to be bottom. With English Literature, though, and English Grammar I shan’t – I can’t – give up trying to learn. I don’t mind if that beastly Monica Harris or anyone else calls me Teacher’s Pet. Miss Ruddock (nicknamed Ruddygore) is our English teacher, and I love her lessons. I only wish they were longer and that we had them more often. At present in our Literature class we are studying Silas Marner, the story of an old miser and a little orphan girl he adopts, and when my turn comes to read a paragraph aloud I feel positively dizzy with the sheer pleasure of it. So at least there is something that I do truly enjoy and look forward to in school; something, after all. Lady Astor has been taken on a tour of Moorfields by Miss Bailey, finishing in our classroom, where she talks to us for ten minutes or so about being Plymouth’s elected Member of Parliament, and how it’s only recently that women, thanks to the Suffragette Movement, have been allowed to vote at all, let alone sit as Members in either the House of Commons or the House of Lords. When we girls are older, she says, we must be sure to use our vote: it’s up to us to see that more women are elected to Parliament, instead of it being simply men, as now, who make the laws and govern the people of this country. She is quite old, Lady Astor, but still beautiful, and beautifully dressed, and she smells divine. She has an American accent, because she’s an American, although married to Lord 13
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Astor, who is English. She doesn’t put on airs or try to be superior, but smiles and laughs, and waves her hand at us when she leaves. Miss Bailey is puffed up and almost bursting with pride at the honour she plainly feels the visit confers on her. But as she must so greatly desire her eminent visitor to receive a favourable impression of Moorfields, it would surely have been advisable to keep her well clear of these scruffy back premises on the tour of inspection. Lady Astor will have arrived at the front of a house my mother described as charming, although, unlike Mummy and me and Pam, she was no doubt driven up the tree-lined avenue, and between the velvety lawns, and under the spreading beeches, by a chauffeur in a Rolls-Royce. The charms I glimpsed on that memorable afternoon of our interview with Miss Bailey I have not seen since. For it is by way of the tradesmen’s entrance, opening off a side street, a rough narrow cul-de-sac, that I and the rest of the pupils come daily to school. The cloakroom where we hang our coats and change our shoes and go to the lavatory is a square brick shed squeezed into and occupying almost the whole space of what would once have been a backyard. Inside the school’s back door, directly ahead, is a short flight of linoleum-covered steps leading into the dining hall, bare except for its long tables and benches of scrubbed wood. Immediately to the right a dark passage vanishes in the direction of invisible kitchens and sculleries and servants’ quarters, while to the left lies the cramped classroom of Form 1, where the youngest pupils, eleven-year-olds, are taught; and beyond this is my Form 2 classroom. Its high windows, pointed at the top, are the same shape as the windows in churches, which makes me think it must originally have been a private chapel. Certain rich families in times past had the habit, I’ve heard, 14
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of tacking on a convenient chapel to their own residence, thereby saving themselves the trouble of having to traipse off to wherever the nearest proper church might be; and before Moorfields became a school for girls it was indeed the home, I’ve been told, of just such a wealthy family. This would account for everybody nowadays trooping through Form 1 and crowding into my classroom every morning for Assembly. If my Form 2 classroom was previously a chapel it would naturally be chosen as the appropriate place, whether crowded or not, in which to sing hymns and say prayers. On further reflection I’ve come to the conclusion that Miss Bailey, who must have been extremely unwilling to conduct her guest away from the elegant atmosphere of the main building down to the makeshift muddle of our school’s nether regions, did so because, and only because, Lady Astor asked especially to speak to Elizabeth Drax, daughter of Admiral Sir Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax; and Elizabeth, as it happens, is in my class, Form 2. Since moving from Newquay to Crapstone my sister Pam and I don’t any longer have much to do with one another, either in or out of school. Pam was fifteen in October, so she went into the top class at Moorfields, joining company in the Fifth Form with the head-girl, Louise Turner, and the prefects, amongst them Mary Dawkes, whose father has just retired from being Bishop of Plymouth, and a second Pam – Pam Prince. Their classroom is at some distance from mine, on the far side of the main school building, overlooking the gardens. Most of the Fifth Form seniors are as tall, or nearly as tall, as my sister. I see them strolling round the playground during morning break, in groups of two or three, sometimes arm in arm. Pam doesn’t ever stop to speak to me. She doesn’t so much as glance at me in passing. You would never guess we were sisters. 15
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The playground, situated across the little cul-de-sac road at the back of the school, is an area occupied first and foremost by a netball pitch, its cracked and blackish macadam surface badly in need of repair. Beyond it, higher up, are two tennis courts, one grass and one hard. Both courts are out of use at present, because it’s the wrong season for tennis. What we play at school this term, and next term too, apparently, is netball, and, once a week, hockey. Although neither she nor I have played netball before, Pam at once achieves renown as a champion shooter of goals. Her height is a distinct advantage, enabling her almost, when reaching up, to drop the ball coolly and calmly into the net. I can tell, simply by watching, that my sister is a fully accepted member of the Fifth Form; is, in fact, popular. On Tuesday afternoons a coach, hired for the purpose, transports us juniors – that is to say, Forms 1 and 2 – together with Miss Stewart, our games mistress, to a sportsground outside Plymouth, where we play hockey. This also is a new game for me: a wonderfully exhilarating game, better than rounders or cricket on the beach at Newquay. Because I run very fast I’ve been allocated the position of left-wing. So now I’ve discovered something else the school provides that I can enjoy and look forward to; something I may, perhaps, without the risk of scorn, excel at. Not that speediness on the wing will win me much, or any, approval from my team, since, unfortunately, I’m the only girl in Form 2 who really does enjoy playing hockey. The others groan when it’s Tuesday afternoon again, and make up all sorts of excuses so as to be let off an activity they consider both exhausting and a bore. Tuesday’s midday dinner is always just a bowl of soup, the least hunger-satisfying meal of the week. I don’t know who decided that soup by itself is the best preparation for a strenuous hockey-playing afternoon. By the time I catch my bus 16
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home to Crapstone at the end of Tuesday afternoons, I’m absolutely ravenous. I have another problem regarding food at school. Four baskets, loaded with currant-buns, are placed by the kitchen staff on the dining-hall tables at eleven o’clock when the bell clangs for morning break. Every girl snatches a bun for herself; every girl except me. Currant-buns are an extra on the school bill, and my mother, having decreed that it is a quite unnecessary extra, has struck it decisively off the term’s pay-in-advance account. When asked, as I frequently am, why I’m not behaving the same as everybody else by helping myself to a mid-morning bun, I say I don’t like them. This is a fib. I do like currant-buns, very much indeed. Another extra on the bill disallowed by my mother is elocution, a subject which gentle stooping apologetic Miss Grace Pocock teaches. She also teaches drawing; but whereas Drawing is not an extra, Elocution is. I am the only girl in my class who doesn’t take Elocution. As a consequence, during this Monday morning period I am obliged to stay sitting mutely at my desk, pretending to do alternative work, while all around me my classmates are reciting, singly or in unison, the magical lines of Walter de la Mare’s poem ‘The Listeners’. Of course I too learn them by heart. How can I not? But I must remain dumb, head bent, the words I yearn to utter echoing inside it, unheard, unspoken: words I am sure – sure – I could render more passionately than Barbara, or Cynthia, or Tamsin, with their plodding sing-song repetition: ‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller/ Knocking on the moonlit door . . . It is a sort of agony for me, not to be free to spring to my feet and declaim them aloud. Why, I wonder, if every sixpence is of such crucial importance, why did our mother choose to send her daughters to expensive Moorfields instead of to the cheaper High School? And now we are here, does Mummy think, or hope, that she 17
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can make atonement for an unjustifiable extravagance – and her conscience be soothed into the bargain – by economising over currant-buns and elocution lessons? Why, otherwise, having inherited from her Uncle Stewart several years ago sufficient money (we don’t know how much it was) to lift the Hallsmiths out of penny-pinching poverty and grant us a lifestyle, certainly not of affluence, but at least enough to count ourselves modestly well-off – why should she now refuse to sanction these insignificant items added to our school fees? Has she any idea how humiliating it is for me to be the only girl in Form 2 not to have elocution lessons or a currant-bun each morning? No! – my good kind mother has no idea. And I can’t explain my feelings to her. Impossible! I’ve been chucked out of Form 2 singing class. Mr Wexford, our singing master, is a tall severe rather frightening old man who doesn’t have children himself, being unmarried. He lives with his sister somewhere on the outskirts, as it happens, of Crapstone. Once a week – every Thursday – he travels in to Moorfields by bus and spends half an hour with each of the five forms in turn. Last Thursday morning, in the middle of an exercise of trills that we, his Form 2 pupils, were practising together, he quite suddenly told us all to stop singing. Mr Wexford didn’t say why we were to stop. But then, to my surprise, he came close up to where I stood and commanded me to sing, on my own, the single notes of what is called a scale. And when I did – or when, at least, I tried to do as he said – with him towering over me, and the rest of the girls clustered, silent and staring, round about, he accused me, as though I was committing a shameful crime, of singing flat. He said I was singing off key. As I don’t know what a key is, I may very well have been singing off it. He made me repeat the same notes again and again, growing crosser and crosser by the 18
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minute, until, when I couldn’t make another sound come out of my mouth, I started to cry; not much, but a few tears trickled down, and I didn’t have a hankie. Mr Wexford wasn’t a bit sorry for causing me to cry. He said, disgustedly, that I was tone deaf, and as it would be a waste of his precious time to try to teach me to sing in tune, in future I was not to attend his singing class. He told me to leave the group, and to go and sit at a desk by myself while he continued the singing lesson without me. What Mr Wexford obviously doesn’t understand is that I want to sing. I love to sing – I always have loved to sing – just as I love dancing; and I think that if I’m doing it wrong, as he says I am, then I’m the one girl in his Form 2 class who is most in need of teaching, and he’s a teacher of singing, so it’s his duty to teach me. It was, I have to admit, a truly mortifying experience, which I wish I could completely forget; only I can’t. Mr Wexford is a horrible man, unkind, and I would like everybody everywhere to know that he isn’t any good as a teacher. I haven’t, however, so far informed even my parents of Mr Wexford banning me from his singing class. The fact of the matter is, my feelings were too badly hurt for me to have been able to mention the episode to anyone yet, including my sister Pam. We are in the middle of the Christmas holidays and life has taken a turn for the better; has altered, in fact, amazingly. My brother Jim was away at his Exeter boarding school when we moved to Crapstone, and because of the general upheaval of settling in, our parents thought it advisable for him to stay on there throughout the half-term holiday. So it’s not until now that Jim has had a chance to see his new home. The idea of change – any sort of change – which I view as exciting, has always disturbed my older brother, and from 19
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the moment he heard that we were to leave Newquay, Jim grew increasingly upset and anxious, and his stammer got worse. But now that he’s here and has been able to investigate for himself every inch of our new address, his doubts have evaporated, and as to his stammer, it’s hardly noticeable. In his declared opinion (influenced, I daresay, by the ping-pong table), our present home, Melrose, is a distinct improvement on the one we had before, and he actually prefers the village of Crapstone, and the landscape of Dartmoor, to Newquay, with its beaches and cliffs. He doesn’t miss the sea at all, as Pam and I do. For us, losing the sea was like losing a part of ourselves. But Jim, of course, never did care much for bathing: the Atlantic Ocean was too rough and too cold for him – it made his teeth chatter and his skin go blue and goose-pimply. A surprising number of boys and girls who are also, the same as Jim, away at boarding schools during term-time, were suddenly, at the start of the Christmas holidays, visible in Crapstone; since when the Twins and I (our brother, Harvey, is still too young) have been invited again and again to have tea and play indoor games – Monopoly and racing demon, and charades – with Charles and Sam Pyne, Roger Hammick, Michael and Sylvia Syson. In Yelverton we have got to know Terence Dewar, the son of Admiral Dewar, and in Douseland the Monroes, and Phyllida Wharton. Every day we seem to be introduced to somebody else of our age group – a lively group into which we have been unreservedly welcomed. I perceive, with a lift of the heart, that no matter how awful my school days are, the holidays will be entirely different: they will be fun! This delightful enlargement of the social scene is restricted, however, to us children; it doesn’t apply to, or include, our parents. In Newquay they were seldom at home on winter evenings. We were left then with Lucy Coles in charge of us, 20
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while they went off to committee meetings, or bridge foursomes, or perhaps to a rehearsal for the next amateur dramatic production. Following what she used to describe deprecatingly as her little windfall – the inheritance of her Uncle Stewart’s money – our mother had become something of a local celebrity, much in demand for opening fêtes and delivering after-dinner speeches: performances at which she not only shone, but immensely enjoyed undertaking. Nor was our father, although a lesser star, wholly eclipsed by his wife’s successes. As a decorated hero of the Great War, he had his duly acknowledged and respected position in the firmament of a thriving seaside resort. I don’t believe they realised, my parents, that in saying goodbye to Newquay they would be saying goodbye to all of these flattering small-town triumphs. Crapstone bears no resemblance to Newquay. How does Crapstone’s adult population spend its evenings? We don’t know. The male half of the residents are mostly, it seems, connected in some capacity with the Royal Navy: with the naval dockyards, or possibly with Keyham College where young men are trained to qualify as naval engineers. Whatever occupation it is they are engaged on, when the menfolk drive out from Devonport at the end of a working day, having entered their houses and shut their front doors behind them, they are no more to be seen. Crapstone grown-ups don’t, as far as we children can tell, visit one another after dark; they don’t, at any rate, invite Mr and Mrs Hallsmith to visit them. The ladies who were punctilious in coming to call and leaving their cards on our sparkling silver salver must have thought they had fulfilled their duty by carrying out everything the rules of correct behaviour required. We had supposed it was the initial step in a subsequent flowering of friendship, but we were mistaken: it was nothing of the kind. Our mother, on her way to the village shop, will daily 21
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exchange with, it may be, old Mrs Batson or Mrs Orr-Ewin, trivial remarks about the coldness or otherwise of the weather. They bow and smile; speak, and pass on. And that’s the whole neighbourly extent of it. I understand the uneasiness of the situation my parents find themselves in. It’s a situation not dissimilar to my own at school. They are treated by the inhabitants of Crapstone as the outsiders they plainly are; and as newcomers, who are neither needed nor desired by a circle already complete, they are politely ignored. These friends of ours, which the holidays have so magically conjured out of nowhere, are like unexpected Christmas presents; but presents given exclusively to us three children: ours, not theirs. Although Mummy has plenty of recently made village acquaintances, there are none who count for her as the sort of real friends that we now have, and she is lonely; I am sure she is. I can feel her loneliness, her disappointment. And as for my father, what has happened to his alldevouring, passionate ambition to be a world-famous artist? In the weeks, the months we’ve been living here he hasn’t set up his beloved easel once; hasn’t unpacked his sandalwood box of oil paints, his brushes, his canvases; hasn’t touched a piece of charcoal. If we three, the Twins and I, have avoided returning the hospitality shown to us, hoping we won’t be thought rude and ungrateful not to invite back to tea in our house any of those whose invitations we have so gladly accepted, it is because we are too embarassed to usher our cheerful highspirited new friends into an atmosphere at home darkened by Daddy’s prevailing mood of brooding dissatisfaction, his angry sideways glances, his bitter silence. I think friendship is very important. I think you have to have at least one friend you can share your thoughts with. Having 22
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just yourself isn’t enough. Last term I did try to make friends with Kathleen Crowther, mainly because she seemed to be the only other person in my class who, like me, was quite on her own. Kathleen Crowther has two long brown plaits, and spectacles, and a terrible squint, and her voice is so husky and low it’s difficult to hear what she’s saying. She is musical, and plays the violin. But whenever I said anything in the way of conversation, instead of answering she would blush bright red and look as if she was afraid I might be planning to attack her; as a result of which I gave up attempting to make a friend of Kathleen Crowther. After the Christmas holidays I went back to school in the gloomy expectation of it being as hateful as it had been the previous term. But I was wrong again. School isn’t hateful any more, and the reason it’s not is Alice Winslow: my new best friend. Alice, and her sister Cynthia, who is a year-and-a-half younger and therefore in the form below us, were absent from Moorfields last term, visiting relations in America. They themselves are American: their father, Mr Winslow, is the American Consul in Plymouth. He has only one hand, the left; he lost his right hand in the Great War. Both Alice and Cynthia have cornflower blue eyes, and each of them has two short fat blonde pigtails, but whereas Cynthia is rather plain in the face and extremely naughty and disobedient, not giving a hoot for any rules or regulations, her older sister, Alice, is distinctly pretty and as good as gold, rather solemn – a serious girl. She pays attention during lessons, and works hard, and nobody calls her Teacher’s Pet. And because she is esteemed by the other girls in Form 2 as someone out of the ordinary and special, I have ceased to be cold-shouldered, an outsider. I’ve been accepted. Monica Harris wouldn’t dare to stick her compass point into my leg now that I’m the best friend of Alice Winslow. 23
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The Winslow family live in a big red-brick house on the hill above Yelverton, so Alice and Cynthia and I catch the same bus to and from school every day. But I think Alice would have become my best friend in any case. I don’t worry, when I’m with her, about anything. She’s always calm and smiling, even-tempered, never the slightest bit sulky or cross. It’s astonishing the difference one girl can make to a person’s life. Years ago, when Mildred Walker first got engaged to Mr Bruce-Payne, she promised me that on the day of her wedding, sometime in the future, I should be a bridesmaid; and she hasn’t forgotten her promise. This is why I’m travelling up by train to London now with Mummy for the ceremony. As it’s taking place at the very beginning of the Easter holidays, I shan’t be missing any school. The dress I’m to wear is beautiful, made of a stiff goldenyyellow taffeta silk with a full skirt and puff sleeves. I was measured at home for it, and the measurements were sent off to Mildred Walker, and then the dress arrived by post, ready to be worn. It fitted almost perfectly, only needing a few minor alterations, which Mummy was able to do easily. We are staying with rich old Mrs Bazin in her big house in Finchley, London. Mrs Bazin is Mildred Walker’s grandmother, and the mother of Elsie Walker, who comes to visit us regularly every summer. Before our mother turned into Mrs Hallsmith she was called Janet Laurie, and during the Great War she had been going to marry Mrs Bazin’s son, Geoffrey, and would have done if he hadn’t, unfortunately, got killed the same week he was due to return on leave from France to marry her. Old Mrs Bazin is obviously devoted to Mummy, who is the daughter-in-law she so nearly, but didn’t quite, have. Every year without fail she sends my mother on her birthday in July a pair of what, clearly, are exceedingly expensive gloves. 24
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The two other bridesmaids at Mildred Walker’s wedding are both grown up. Except for theirs being of a larger size, our dresses are identical, and we have all three been given a twinkly brooch of cut steel as a present from the bride and groom, which I do think is very kind of them. After the actual marriage ceremony in church there is a party for all the many wedding guests in Mrs Bazin’s extensive garden, with drinks, and masses of food, and the wedding cake, and speeches. Luckily the weather is fine and warm. I talk to a tall elderly man with remarkably bushy black eyebrows. His name is Sir Maurice Gwyer, and he has just been appointed, I’m told, the Lord Chief Justice of India. We talk about books, mostly, and I tell him I mean to be a writer. I like talking to him. We get on together extremely well. Peggy Burton has gingery-red hair, as does her father, Commander Burton (Retd), and she looks rather like him in other ways as well. Her face is pale and pinched, but unlike his it has a permanently worried unhappy expression. She is my age, a sufficient reason, it seems, for me to have been appointed her special friend who often visits her on Saturday afternoons. The arrangement – a parents’ arrangement – was made, I suspect, with the idea of me cheering Peggy up, and getting her to be jollier. But except for the coincidence of our ages being the same, we have nothing in common. Peggy doesn’t talk – she hardly says a word; and she doesn’t read books, unless they are to do with horses. Companionship with her younger sister, Dido, who is a great deal livelier as well as much prettier, would be preferable, but Dido has no need of a special friend to cheer her up, being cheerful already. It’s Peggy I’m invited to have tea with, and sometimes to stop on for supper with, and even once to stay the night with. She is the only member of her family whose mind is exclusively 25
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focussed on ponies. Her father, an ex-sailor, doesn’t ride at all; her mother gardens; and Dido has guinea pigs and rabbits for pets. The Burtons live in a sprawling red-brick house a mile or so outside Crapstone. It has a tennis court, and a stable wing, and what for Peggy is most essential: the paddock where she and I ride her two ponies, Darkie and Annabella, hour after interminable hour, trotting them round and round, and putting them over the low jumps of brushwood or planks that cause me, as often as not, to tumble ignominiously off. Luckily Darkie, the shaggy little pony I ride, besides being quite old, has very short legs, so that the ground, when I do fall, is fairly near. My mother regards these invitations as a splendid opportunity for Elspeth to learn how to ride, forgetting, or deciding to ignore, a previous equally splendid opportunity I once had during the week we stayed on her brother Andrew’s farm in Suffolk. There I was offered by a tribe of Laurie cousins any one of their ponies to learn to ride on; an offer I declined, my attention being fully engaged just then in the far more exciting enterprise of teaching myself to ride on one of their bicycles. Horses were a part of Mummy’s own childhood, and remain, I suppose, inseparably part of a cherished memory for her of these early lost years before James Laurie, her beloved father, agent for the Fawley estate, was drowned while sailing in Southampton Water. She – Janet – was twelve at the time; how awful that disaster, which changed everything, must have been for her, his favourite daughter. I think perhaps the dreamily faint recollection she has of a happiness long gone is why Mummy now persists in believing the Peggy Burton connection pleases me as much as it pleases her. When a parcel arrives in the post from Mildred Martin, (Daddy’s horse-loving, horse-owning second cousin) 26
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containing a pair of discarded but still serviceable grownup jodhpurs, my mother is overjoyed and gets busy immediately with scissors and sewing machine, reducing them in a few hours of drastic alteration to a size that fits me. (Jodhpurs, I’m told by Mummy, is the Indian name for the oddly shaped trousers, baggy above and tight below, that all real riders wear.) Thus it is, kitted out in authentic riding gear, and flicking carelessly at bracken fronds with the natty little riding crop also supplied by generous Cousin Mildred (and with which I will never flick at slow old Darkie’s flanks to make him go faster: the slower he goes, the better!) – thus equipped I set off on several Saturday afternoons to walk the two or so miles of deserted country road alongside Dartmoor’s ragged edge, in order that Peggy Burton may give me instructions in how to saddle a pony (make sure the girths are tightly buckled); the complicated way a handful of reins must be threaded between the fingers; and the mastering of an excrutiatingly difficult up-and-down rhythm to accommodate the seat of my jodhpurs to Darkie’s awkward bumpety-bumpety trotting motion. Peggy watches my efforts impassively; she doesn’t ever say Well done. To what extent are these dutiful visits, parent-enforced, a pleasure for me? Some aspects of them, yes, I do genuinely enjoy. For instance, the smell of harness and hay when the ordeal of riding is over and we are unsaddling our mounts in the dimly lit stables. I enjoy the romance of growing familiar with somebody else’s luxurious home; with the rooms of the house, and its gardens and outbuildings. I am grateful for, and respond to, nice Mrs Burton’s warm unfussy welcome; and I revel in the cosiness of the nursery, its drawn curtains and the blazing fire, and scones and cakes for tea. What I don’t care for, not a bit, is bumping about in excessive discomfort on Darkie’s broad back, and being scared I 27
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shall fall off at the next jump; and when the worst happens, falling off. The fact I can’t ultimately avoid acknowledging to myself is that I haven’t any instinctive affinity with horses; and they, of course, know it. I am aware of our being very different creatures, and the difference, the unbridgeable gap which divides us, alarms me profoundly. That is the actual, shameful truth. For a while I succeed in keeping up an outward pretence of developing an interest in ponies and riding and gymkhanas and so on, but it’s a pretence I can’t maintain. In my heart of hearts I know that, unlike Cousin Mildred and Peggy Burton, I am simply not a horse-lover; nor shall I ever be. I don’t know what it was gave Commander Burton, Peggy’s father, the sudden idea of organising a game of hockey to be played in the Easter holidays by as many boys and girls who might find themselves home from school and at a loose end, but however the idea may have occurred to him, his proposal has been seized upon with the utmost enthusiasm. The word got passed around, and I suppose friends must have told friends, so that on the second Saturday morning of the holidays quite a crowd of us, arriving on foot or on bicycles, or brought from further off by parents in cars, and each armed with a hockey stick, are gathered together on a patch of rough open grassy moorland not far from where the Burtons live. This conveniently open space lies to one side of the flat stretch of road I walk along by myself on those afternoons when I’ve been invited to have tea and to ride with Peggy Burton on her ponies, Darkie and Annabella. Today there is no sign of Peggy Burton, or of Dido, her sister. They don’t, it seems, want to participate in the hockey match their father has arranged. But both the Pyne boys, 28
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Charles and Sam, are here, and so is Laurence Brown, who lives next door to us Hallsmiths. Also present are Michael and Sylvia Syson, and a girl called Daphne, and Josephine Pipon, and Roger Hammick, and Robert Winnicott; and Terence Dewar from Yelverton, and Rose and Xander Monroe from Douseland, and Phyllida Wharton; and others, too, whose names I don’t know, and some children I’ve never seen before; and Pam and Jim and me. Everyone is in high spirits, laughing and talking. Commander Burton, while not caring to ride horses or to take an interest in gardening – his wife’s passion – has apparently, as well as a liking for the company of young people, an overflowing abundance of energy and enterprises. Already he’s been hard at it, busily preparing in advance our improvised hockey field by marking out the boundaries, and using fencing stakes for goalposts. We cluster round him now, ready and eager to do whatever he tells us to do. Being a Commander (even though a Retired one), he is accustomed, we respectfully realise, to commanding. Consequently, when he appoints Terence as captain of the side that will wear distinguishing scarlet cotton sashes, and Xander as captain of the rival side, wearing yellow sashes, there is no question of any argument: the Commander’s word is law. And the two boys, taking it in turns, begin at once to choose their teams. Since I am probably the youngest person here, and certainly the smallest, it’s hardly surprising I should be chosen last of all. Nevertheless, I pluck up enough courage to beg Terence Dewar, captain of my team, to let me please be our leftwinger. He looks a bit doubtful, and as if he’s on the point of refusing. I expect he thinks it’s cheeky of me to ask. So I hasten to assure him that I am an extremely fast runner; which is true. (To be able to run fast is essential in hockey for players on either wing.) 29
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He still looks very dubious, but shrugs and turns away, saying: ‘Oh all right, then. Do the best you can.’ We spread out, and Commander Burton blows his whistle; and we’re off! It’s the greatest possible fun; a great deal more fun than school hockey, because of the mixture of ages, and there being boys as well as girls. At half time Commander Burton, who was tearing about like a madman, up and down the length of the field, blowing his whistle and yelling, produces a crate from his car filled with Corona bottles of ginger pop and bags of currant-buns. I believe he’s enjoying himself as much as we are. Terence’s team – my team – wins the match by three goals to two, and at the end of it he stops beside me and thumps me on the shoulder, and says, grinning: ‘Well done, Ellie – very well done indeed!’ I am so pleased – so gratified – that Terence Dewar remembered what my name is; and so glad he said Well done! I didn’t actually shoot any of our goals but he’s bound to have seen how extremely fast I really did run, dribbling the ball near to the goalposts again and again, which helped the centre-forwards to score. Our impromptu hockey match – Commander Burton’s good idea – has been a terrific success. Such a success that we’ve agreed to repeat it, and to meet here for a return match the following Monday morning. The popularity of Commander Burton’s hockey matches, instead of waning, has increased, to the extent where they have been accepted as a regular fixture. This is because our Easter holiday mornings were inclined to be rather empty. Holiday afternoons present no problem. We and our local friends can drop in at each other’s houses for tea, and games of Monopoly or demon patience or rummy; or a group of us may, alternatively, catch a bus into Plymouth 30
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and go to a matinée film. It’s the mornings that until now were rather dullish. Luckily Commander Burton seems not to mind how often we want him to take charge of the proceedings. Then, towards the end of our third exhilarating match something disastrous happens to me. Although the grass of the clearing where we play has been cropped short by the herds of wild ponies that roam freely over Dartmoor, the surface, unlike properly maintained hockey fields, remains uneven and tussocky. A ball, vigorously propelled, instead of speeding along the ground as intended, may well take off and become airborne. And it is just such a ball, soaring through the air, that hits me, shockingly, smack in the mouth. Conducted off the field by a kindly spectator, somebody’s mother, I sit in a bleeding sobbing heap on the sidelines while the last few minutes of the contest are played out to a triumphant finish for Xander Monroe’s team. (Terence Dewar, of course, has lost his left-winger.) I am given a lift home in somebody’s car and handed over to my own mother. Upstairs in the bathroom she sponges my battered face and admonishes me to be a man; and also to be brave as a lion. These are the two bracing phrases our mother, who once nursed wounded soldiers in the Great War, always employs when she thinks that one of her children is making a fuss about nothing. But how can I be a man, or be as brave as a lion, when I am in such excrutiating pain? My top lip is split, and the surrounding flesh discoloured and swollen. I can’t eat anything: impossible! I drink sips of water from a glass with difficulty. To speak is equally difficult. All I say – all I can mumble is: ‘It hurts, Mummy – it hurts. It hurts.’ Laurence Brown calls in to enquire how I am. A tremendous whack with his hockey stick was what did the damage. 31
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He is desperately sorry, he says; and he sounds, and indeed obviously is, desperately sorry. ‘Oh, good gracious, Laurence,’ says my mother, ‘it’s not your fault. Accidents of this sort can happen to anyone in a game of hockey. It looks worse than it is. Elspeth’, she says, briskly, ‘will be as right as rain tomorrow.’ But in the morning I’m not as right as rain. My pillow is covered in blood, and I am still moaning beseechingly that it hurts. My mother, after eyeing me narrowly, changes her mind and takes me on a bus into Plymouth where the dentist, who has the curious name of Mr Diamond, announces that, according to the X-ray, my top jaw is fractured, which means it’s broken; and that three of my front teeth have been detached from their moorings and are now hanging loose. Given time, he tells Mummy, the fracture will mend itself unaided, and because I am so young – still growing – there is a very good chance, he says, that if the loose teeth are pushed back up into the bone and held in place by a narrow band, or splint, of silver, they may, with luck, reattach themselves. We return to Crapstone on another bus, and as soon as we reach home my mother puts me to bed and draws the curtains across, and from then on treats me with as much tender care as though I really am a badly wounded Great War soldier. The one beneficial result, I discover, of a broken top jaw is that, without the shameful label of coward, I’m excused from – saved from – ever again having to spend hours and hours riding around Peggy Burton’s paddock on her pony, Darkie. The risk (which in fact is a certainty) of my falling off prohibits it. It’s now the summer term, and so instead of the school uniform of white shirts and navy-blue gym-slips we wear dresses of blue-and-white checked gingham, and our 32
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navy-blue velour hats have been replaced by lightweight panamas. We still play netball, but hockey is finished until next autumn. Each afternoon it’s the turn of one of the five forms to be given a tennis coaching session by Miss Stewart – Stewey – the games mistress. I don’t much like her – in fact, I don’t like her at all. She has a short thick ugly neck, which reminds me of a bull’s neck, and she holds herself very straight and rigid, with a habit of gazing over the tops of our heads as though she finds us too contemptible to be bothered to look at directly. I used to love playing tennis when we lived in Newquay, but I don’t enjoy being taught how to play it every Thursday afternoon by Miss Stewart. I don’t enjoy Geography any more, either, because it’s taught by Miss Joplin, who is fat, and quite old, with a bulgy red face and a disagreeable smell, always in a hurry and always appearing to be angry and offended – we don’t know why. Miss Ashford teaches Arithmetic. She has very stickingout teeth and seems, the same as Miss Joplin, to wish that she wasn’t a teacher. Botany is taught by Mrs Owens, who doesn’t live at Moorfields, as do the rest of the teaching staff, but arrives, usually late and in a fluster, from somewhere else outside the school. She’s nice, but my favourite teacher is dear little Miss Ruddock, the English mistress. At the end of this term, which is the end of the school year, there will be Parents’ Day, the occasion when announcements are made and prizes distributed, in the gymnasium. Every form is required to produce some sort of a brief entertainment: it could be singing, or dancing, or perhaps a gymnastic display. Miss Ruddock has suggested that Form 2 should perform what she calls ‘a sketch’, and that we girls ought to write it ourselves. Her suggestion is greeted with cries of dismay. Miss Ruddock looks at me. ‘What about you, Elspeth?’ she says, encouragingly. ‘Why don’t you have a go?’ 33
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And because, of course, I want to be able to do it, I say: ‘All right, Miss Ruddock – I’ll try.’ But once I’m at home, despair overwhelms me. What have I let myself in for? I confide in my father. To my relief, he immediately takes an interest, and in next to no time solves the basic problem of there being only girls to act in the sketch. Why not have an employer – the editor, possibly, of a women’s fashion magazine – sitting at her desk and interviewing a string of applicants, one by one, for a job on her journal? Oh, what a good idea! Yes – oh, yes! And in due course, having taken shape on paper, been approved by Miss Ruddock, and rehearsed obediently by my fellow pupils (thankful as they are to be saved from the nuisance of the threatened boring task), The Interview is presented as part of the Parents’ Day programme in Moorfields’ gymnasium on the last Friday of the summer term. It’s over very quickly, in ten minutes: a success. The audience claps, and afterwards I’m congratulated. How clever of me, Elspeth, to write such an amusing piece for the stage! What a talented child I am! But I know what nobody else knows: that it was my father, not me, who wrote The Interview. I had hardly anything to do with it. Daddy, whose idea it had originally been, took over the entire project, elbowing me out of the way. The construction, the dialogue, the jokes (which I don’t think are funny) are his. I copied it out laboriously at his dictation, but only the blobs of ink and marks of tears on the pages are truly mine. I ought perhaps to be grateful to Daddy, as I was at the start, for getting me out of a hole. Didn’t he rescue me? But my gratitude has gone sour. I feel ashamed and cheated – a cheat myself: mortified and miserable. The whole thing is a fraud. I know – I know – that I should either have done it, 34
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whether well or whether badly, by myself alone, or not have done it at all. Colonel and Mrs Batson are both very old. They live in the last house of a terrace that looks directly across a couple of hundred yards or so of rough common land to where the road from Yelverton reaches and skirts round the bus stop and the stone war memorial. Their house being at the end of the line, they have just enough space on its further side to include, before the boundary fence of the Sysons’ property, a tennis court – mossy and damp, and overhung by surrounding trees, but still, a tennis court. And Sam and Charles Pyne, who live a few doors up from the Batsons, have been given permission by them to use the court whenever they want in the school holidays, and to invite whatever friends they want as well. Since we three Hallsmiths, the Twins and I, play tennis, and are friends now of the Pyne boys, they invite us. Sylvia Syson and her younger brother, Michael, also tennis players, are also invited. Roger Hammick sometimes joins us there, and anyone else of the Crapstone fraternity who may have nothing better to do on a sunny idle morning or afternoon. We don’t, in fact, play tennis continuously, or even very strenuously, but throughout these weeks of July and August the Batsons’ grassy neglected court serves as a handy place to gather and discuss other plans for meeting: plans to walk or bicycle down to Denham Bridge, perhaps, taking buns and biscuits with us and bathing in the River Tavy. The Colonel and old Mrs Batson tell us that they like to hear the laughter and shouts of young people floating in through their open windows. For us children the summer holidays are as carefree and joyous as were the Christmas and Easter holidays, provided we can manage to spend the greater part of them not at 35
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home. We return to Melrose when, and only when, we must: for meals, and at night to sleep. Indoors we sit silently, imitating the silence of our parents. Harvey, aged five, chatters away uninhibited, but we, his older brother and sisters, leave our chattering and laughter outside in a jolly world existing beyond the dull grey garden wall of Melrose. With the arrival of September, which is the month when our father has his annual fortnight’s holiday, Daddy announces brusquely that he intends to travel to Switzerland for it, on his own, without his family. He does at last get out his painting gear: the brushes, the sandalwood box of oil paints, canvases, charcoal. He is going to paint landscapes, not portraits, and he means to set off alone. We glance from him to our mother, trying to assess her reaction. Surely she must feel as glad as we do – thankful to have gained a clear fourteen days absolutely unshadowed by the wretchedness, the manifest ill-humour of her husband, our father, which has been hovering like a black thundercloud over our family life? Surprisingly, Mummy doesn’t seem to be pleased at all. Instead, she is not merely upset by this decision of his: she is mortally offended. She weeps, appearing to be cut to the heart by Daddy’s total rejection of her, and us, for his fortnightly vacation from the despised Midland Bank. We overhear sounds of rage and despair as she pleads with him. Her tears, though, have not the slightest effect on our father, except maybe to cause his angry brow to grow even darker. Grimly, he packs his bag, straps together his painting equipment, and is gone. It will be for two weeks only, the briefest of respites. But however brief, we children rejoice at this break in the clouds, ashamedly hushing our merriment for fear of wounding yet more profoundly our already stricken mother. * * * 36
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First published in Great Britain 2013 Copyright Š 2013 by Emma Smith The moral right of the author has been asserted No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the Publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. This is a work of non-fiction based on the life, experiences and recollections of Emma Smith. In some cases names have been changed. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury Publishing, London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4088 3561 6 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
9781408835616 As Green As Grass (635h).indd iv
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