Bertie, May and Mrs Fish

At Five Acre gate he calls the horses … Come on … come on, girls and boys … teatime … teatime …

I climb the elmwood bars and say … What is a collaborateur …

He says … Not now … not now … keep your mind on one thing at a time … look out … here they come … a fine sight if ever I saw one … open the damned gate … get a move on … don’t stand there coffee-housing like the bloody French … off the bars … I am in no mood to pay for new hinges … that’s more like it … have a leg up onto Glory Boy … then lead on. The rest will follow … if we’re lucky.

I ride bareback up Rickyard Lane astride my father’s tall chestnut and look over the Cotswold grey-stone wall built on Calfpen bank to our hills and woods. He pulls fistfuls of linseed barrel nuts out of his green corduroy trouser pockets. Loose horses follow and push and shove to nuzzle his pockets. We pass the twin stone barns tall as churches and turn down into the farmyard.

My mother’s Irish money buys our Elizabethan farm in 1941, the second summer of World War Two. My father’s Inns of Court regiment is fighting a mock battle on the Cotswold hills and from a high point he looks down and sees what he thinks is a small village or a hamlet in a hollow. He tells his armoured car driver … Head downhill … we’ll make a quick recce … His car roars down Homefield and he finds the deserted farm.

A doll’s house face under triple gables looks at a farmyard circle of stone barns and stables spreading to cattle sheds and lanes. A front door path is between two green squares of lawn edged by sprawling pink roses on a drystone wall. The garden swerves away past a cherry tree and south around two apple trees to the wicket gate at the damson tree by the Rushy Brook stream. The house faces north because Elizabethans believe flies spread the plague and sun shining on windows attracts flies. They are wrong. Xenopsylla cheopsis, the rat flea carries the plague and fleas are brought to England by black rat hosts from China.

He telephones my mother at her Corps headquarters at Camberley south-west of London and says … God willing I’ve found the Bears a home.

My mother has joined the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry – FANYs – created in 1907 to train English girls to gallop on horseback onto battlefields and give first aid to wounded soldiers and carry the injured to field hospitals in horse-drawn ambulances. In the 1930s FANYs become a mechanised Women’s Transport Service. Upper class girls drive and service transport lorries and motorbikes and chauffeur army personnel and chant:

I wish my mother could see me now,With a grease gun under my car,Filling the differentialEre I start for the sea afar,A-top a sheet of frozen iron, in cold that would make you cry.

I used to be in Society once,Danced and hunted and flirted once,Had white hands and complexions once,Now I am a FANY.

She says to me when she is an old lady … I was never lost or behind schedule driving my brigadier-general … even in the blackout on the very long journeys with no car lights, when we went from the north of England all the way down south to Devon.

My father telephones her FANY HQ in summer 1941 and tells her … Steal a tank of petrol and concoct some excuse to drive down here p.d.q. This is a land of milk and honey. I give you my word. Take the London – Oxford A40 road past Burford and Northleach. On the ridge look left-handed across open country. A single clump of trees on the far horizon is the farm boundary. Stay on the A40. Look for a red iron gate in a line of beeches. If you fetch up at Seven Springs crossroads you’ve gone too far. The drive is half a mile of bloody awful potholes. If I’m right – and I’m damned sure I am – this is a home for us for ever. Those old boys knew how to build to last. No flies on the Elizabethans … and no flies on us. We’ll be sheltered on all sides. The Almighty had his eye carefully on our future when the War Office boffins planned today’s regimental exercise.

In their khaki uniforms in his armoured car they dash across the farm. My mother says … It all looks so terribly neglected … could there be something wrong with the land … I wish I knew more about these things … the Valley is nicely sheltered for horses … and the house does have lovely proportions.

White stones scatter the hilly land. Fences are broken walls or cut and laid hedges grown wild into tall bullfinch thorns. Gaps in walls are wide enough to drive a tank through. Gates and stable doors hang off hinges. Water is pumped by a windmill reservoir two miles away at Needlehole at the far end of the farm. Purple thistles and yellow poisonous charlock flower on grassland. Nettles spread inside barn doorways. Wild cats stare from stable drains. Rats run along house walls. In the drawing room a soldiers’ campfire has burnt a hole in the ceiling.

My father says … We will rise above any minor problems … we’re not about to start playing windy buggers. Not now we’ve found this heavenly place … quite right we’re not … no siree. We’ll invite your bank manager to a slap-up lunch at the Cavalry Club. A bank manager lunching with a bloody colonel in Piccadilly … he will think he is going up in the world. We’ll never look back … you mark my words.

In September 1940 the Blitz begins and a year later my mother’s Irish Georgian furniture arrives at the farm in a horsebox with her motorbike-sidecar. My father has gone north to Yorkshire to train his Inns of Court lawyer soldiers – the Devil’s Own – to fight like hell when their time comes.

Her lights are paraffin oil lamps and she cooks on a knee-high coal range with a hot iron square over one oven. Her heating is paraffin stoves until she hammers a nail into a wall to hang a picture in the drawing room. My father comes home and says … Who’d have thought a nail going through a wall like butter would produce a magnificent Elizabethan open fireplace … and he sings … Praise my soul the King of heaven …

She sells her blue Rover and her motorbike and buys a Ford van painted British racing green and has her initials stencilled in gold on both doors and her Pytchley Hunt Point-to-Point Ladies Race silver fox leaping through a horseshoe is screwed on the bonnet.

My father is frustrated soldiering in England between 1940 and 1944. His Eleventh Hussar cavalry brother officers are fighting on the North African front. He is a colonel training lawyers to be soldiers. He writes home from Yorkshire barracks:

I can’t tell you how much I miss you and our lovely home and wish I was there to help … and then I can’t help wishing I was out there in the hunt for the Boche … so I don’t know what I want. I worry all the time you have too much to do and work too hard. Find some woman to help in the kitchen … or else it’s no fun when I come home on leave.

Never thought you would get the rye and the beans planted. A week with fair weather and the land warm with no frost and our seeds and wheat will all germinate and we shall be established for the winter. The new saw bench means you will be warm. Get lots of wood cut up. Did I remind you no one must touch the machine until covered under the Workman’s Compensation Act in our insurance policy. If someone cuts their hand off it is liable to be expensive!

I miss you and everything so very much and long to be home doing something useful. Have been on a damned badly run armoured battle. Sent up by the General on to the enemy’s position to view the attack and give an opinion. Such a bad show that I am at a loss what to say or do. Came back before the end in disgust cold and disheartened. All my love from your own lonely Big Bear.

She props a prayer written in Gothic script and illuminated gold and blue capitals on the kitchen dresser – May He support us all the Day long … Until the Shadows lengthen and Evening comes – and reads his next letter:

… As it was my birthday I was allowed by the Priest to choose hymns for our Regimental Armistice Day Service. We sang ‘New Every Morning Is the Love’, ‘Lead Us Heavenly Father Lead Us’, ‘Now Thank We All Our God’. I had the ‘Nunc Dimittis’ put in … the best of all those things and never heard unless one goes in the evening. I wished my Bear was with me at this time.

She learns to farm. Two thousand acres. A mile of valley. Horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, poultry. Snow in winter above the lintels of the downstairs windows. Her fingers swell. Chilblains. Long white kid gloves are wrapped round a leaky pipe in her bedroom knotted at the fingers. She has a lot to learn that no one has taught her. Accidents happen.

2 WARTIME (#ulink_183fc3fa-4edf-5e76-94c9-4c7e0dfa8601)

After two days leave at Christmas my father writes

… thank you for my very lovely and never to be forgotten first holiday in our new home and for all the happiness you have brought me. A terrible anticlimax coming back. I miss you and home as much as I used to as a small boy sent away to school. Our home is our own most perfect special Bears’ castle for ever and always.

His regiment moves further north to a barracks in Northumberland.

… your farmyard is a ballroom compared to my car parks up here. I am having cement roads built by charming German Jew refugees. A Sergeant in charge is Czech and was in an Austrian concentration camp with 20,000 others. A number were ordered to be hanged or shot by Hess for no reason at all. He has written three times to the Home Secretary to ask to be allowed to look after Hess for one night!!!

No more news now darling Bear except to send you all my love and to say how I long to be with you. How splendid about the big new Esse kitchen range stove. The perfection of our lovely home.

In the Pittville Nursing Home in Cheltenham, in snow, in February 1942, she endures a difficult birth and I am born … their Little Bear. My mother writes in her diary … I did not know it would hurt so much.

In springtime my father sends

… coupons for the calf with the usual unanswerable form. Here I am very lonely and far from my Bears and home. What a lovely Easter it was. Our first with our Little Bear and our new home. Both equally lovely. It is heaven and we are so lucky to be so happy. I’m sure few other people are as happy as we are. It all seems to be too good to be true. I have bought you a lovely birthday present Ralli-cart with yellow wheels and good tyres that will look brand new with a coat of varnish. I hope you will like it. When we find a nice pony and borrow a harness it will be a topper and very smart.

A pony is tied to an apple tree on a rope to graze the lawn in circles and I am placed in a wicker basket on the pony’s back. I have an eighty-year-old nanny – Annie Nannie – my mother’s Irish cousins’ nanny forty years before. I must have looked up at branches and apple blossom and warplanes.

Joe Rummings and Mr Griff and Mr Munday are farm labourers too old for call-up. Landgirls are seconded from their work at the Wills Tobacco cigarette factory in Birmingham. A lorry load of Italian prisoners of war is driven in for daily threshing and hoeing and fencing and stone collecting.

Mrs Griffin walks two miles from Kilkenny three times a week and cleans. She squeezes water out of used tea leaves and scatters handfuls on carpets and kneels and bristle-brushes up dirt stuck to the leaves into a red dented tin dustpan. She dusts and wax-polishes Georgian furniture and scours iron saucepans and changes linen sheets and talks and talks all the time to my mother and Mrs Fish and to herself. Mrs Fish walks two miles over the fields from Needlehole to wash and iron bedsheets and clothes two days a week.

He writes

… so pleased to hear you are fixed up with Italian prisoners. Worrying about it on the train I didn’t know how you’d manage. Have been thinking about you all day looking after our Little Bear and keeping the threshing going. Only wish I could be there to help instead of leaving it all on your shoulders. I know we are going to make a success. One always does if one’s heart is really in it and both our hearts are. All my love my darlingest. Soon a lovely holiday together.

The prisoners of war are forbidden to speak. Lined up in the yard in dark-blue jackets and trousers, they call out to me … Che bella bambina … cara … io te adoro … veni … veni qui. A man in dark-blue uniform has a gun in a holster and shouts … No talky … allez … skeddadle … go-go … follow lady on horsy. My mother rides into Homefield leading the line. Each prisoner carries a long-handled hoe over his shoulder. They walk to fields of kale and mangolds and turnips and swedes to hoe out weeds along the rows. In winter the Italians rub their hands and call out … È fredo in Inghilterra … molto molto fredo … è terribile … and my mother smiles and says … Yes … cold … molto coldo.

Landgirls live in the house on the top floor. They sit in the kitchen and smoke cigarettes and cry and turn the battery wireless onto the Light Programme when my mother is not there. A landgirl called Jannie is my nanny after old Annie Nannie goes back to Ireland. My mother barters cigarettes for herself and the girls on the black market in Cheltenham. She drives Merrylegs the dock-tailed Welsh cob seven miles down and seven back uphill every fortnight in the Ralli-cart, and trades homemade butter and fresh eggs and dead rabbits. Until the day she says to the landgirls … Getting us all cigarettes takes up too much time … I am stopping smoking … I shan’t be buying cigarettes in Cheltenham any more for anyone.

A landgirl says … We’ll have to get ours off the Yanks then, won’t we … American airmen are billeted at Guiting Grange. Our landgirls walk down the lane to the pub at Kilkenny in the evenings in gumboots and flowered cotton dresses and mackintoshes. They carry high-heeled shoes and get picked up in US jeeps.

Sometimes a girl comes home in the morning late for milking. One girl cries to my mother … I can’t have a Yankee baby … I told him … I swear I did … and my mother says … we’ll have to get you back home to Birmingham somehow. She writes in her diary … New landgirl up the spout.

My mother is pregnant again and has an abortion in the Pittville Nursing Home in Cheltenham. She does not tell my father. After a first difficult birth she is advised she must not risk having another child.

January and February and March are terribly cold months. One March an east wind blows and the weathervane fox above the granary gallops east for a week. My mother walks out of the house carrying her shotgun and loads two cartridges and aims at the fox. She fires both barrels and says … That should change things … We’ve had enough of this cold east wind. Grey tumbler pigeons fly off the barns and circle high in the sky and the copper fox pirouettes all morning. Joe and Mr Griff and the landgirls stop in the yard and watch the twirling fox. One by one tumblers fall wings closed to a barn and glide to a window ledge. By afternoon the fox slows down facing north.

Her diary says … Why can’t I be happy … I have everything I want … dear God …

He writes

… Eric Bates is having a bad turn. He has had a skin disease for months and that plus the fact that his wife is having a baby seems to have got him down. He sits by the hour with an ashen white face looking straight in front of him refusing to do anything. I try to knock some sense into him but it’s pretty tricky. His wife is in Scotland and due to foal next week.

Last night we played billiards after dinner and everyone got foxed. I broke several very old gramophone records over Basil’s head and he walked round the billiard table saying ‘I’ve never had that done to me before in my whole life’ as if it happens to everyone every day. We all laughed a great deal and it does a lot of good. I get very depressed and feel almost like Eric at times.

No more now my very special Bear. Not so very long to wait now till we see each other again after this lifetime apart. Soon now I shall be with you and we will be happy Bears together with all the spring flowers and sunshine and trees coming out and so much to look at and see with you. Keep your tail up. All my love my darlingest. Your one and only Big Bear.