FULL MARKS FOR TRYING (9 page)

4

I have to hand it to my parents – they returned from life in Flagstaff House, Poona, with Dad as an acting-general and servants waiting on them hand and foot, to live in our grandparents' house in Fleet once again. Last time we'd stayed there, Dad had been in the Indian Army, but now it was 1948, he had no job and there were none available – the demobbed soldiers of the British wartime army had scooped up most of them, and the Brits who returned from India the year before us had got the rest. The only work my father could find was as eighth cowman on a farm. (One of his friends, an ex-admiral, became a lavatory attendant at Waterloo station.) I never really heard Mum and Dad grumble or complain or look back to the Good Old Days; Mum, especially, was homesick for India (she was not burdened with the terrible memories that haunted Dad), but they launched themselves into their new lives. Dad would set off for the farm on his second-hand motorbike at crack of dawn every morning in time for milking; it was tough for a middle-aged man, he lost weight and started getting boils, but Dad believed in getting on with things – we were brought up with his advice for life ringing in our ears (though why it was always said in French has been a perpetual mystery to me): ‘
Il faut saisir les occasions quand elles se présentent
', which basically means seize the day (it's the reason Tessa and I found ourselves in a helicopter in the Vietnam War, but I'll come to that later). Dad's other rule in life was Never Take No for an Answer – which, put together with his great charm, meant that shops were persuaded to let us in if we'd arrived late and found them closing, we always seemed to find seats even if the cinema or theatre was full, and he once talked our way into going behind the scenes at London Zoo to meet the chimps after their tea party.

Mum, who had never had to do anything in a kitchen before, tried to cook (she became good at it in the end) and she started a little kindergarten at home for a handful of kids so that Tessa could go to it. (When the children recited the alphabet they couldn't wait to shout out K is for KEENAN!)

I was sent to Miss Seed's, a small school in Aldershot where I was teacher's pet and had to make her Camp Coffee every morning (Camp Coffee was – is, because I believe it still exists – a kind of sweetened coffee syrup that you diluted with hot water or milk).

One of my fellow students from Fleet was an ‘illegitimate baby', as the children of unmarried mothers were known then, called Anthony. We all felt sorry for him, and one day when he was crying because he'd lost his lunch box, I said, ‘Tell your mum it was my fault.' Next day at the bus stop there was a furious, shouting mother demanding to be paid for a replacement, so I had to ask my parents for the money which got me into trouble with them too. That was the first time I realised that no good deed goes unpunished.

Mum used to tease me by saying ‘Moira is the emerald in my crown, Tessa is the ruby and you are the little bit of glass that got in by mistake'; but she did it laughingly, and in such a way that I knew the little bit of glass was extremely precious to her – perhaps (I liked to think) even more precious than the others.

Something quite important to me happened at that time. For some reason I came home early from school one afternoon and no one heard me enter the house. I was approaching the kitchen and about to call out when I heard my mother and my aunt talking about me – ‘It's a pity Brigid is such a desperately plain child,' one of them said, and the other agreed. I had no idea what ‘plain' was, but it didn't sound good, so I crept back and re-entered making a lot of noise. Later I asked Moira what ‘plain' meant. ‘Oh it means something that's almost, but not quite ugly,' she said. I thought about this for years: Moira was attractive and clever and witty, Tessa was very pretty and funny, and I realised that I was going to have to do something – go for glamour, eccentricity, criminality, character, a career –
something
, so as not to end up at the bottom of the pile. There is a moment in her autobiography when the great beauty Lady Diana Cooper looks in the mirror, is disappointed by what she sees and says to herself, ‘Now it's got to be nap on personality.' I had the same sort of revelation, but aged nine.

Mum told us that, through Granny's family, we were descended from Edward III, via his son John of Gaunt (the brother of the Black Prince). When I married AW I proudly informed him of this, but he once glimpsed the family tree at a reunion of cousins and became deeply sceptical. ‘I have redrawn your family tree more accurately,' he said to me afterwards, and gave me a piece of paper which looked like this:

I laugh every time I think of it. In the meantime I have discovered that genealogists believe that 80 per cent of the English could be descended from Edward III because he had nine sons, so there wasn't really anything to boast about in the first place.

Dad was only eighth cowman on the farm but he had to take the cows up to London for the Dairy Show and watch over them all night in their pen or byre or whatever it was. His farmer-boss, a rich, landowning lady, used to introduce him to everyone proudly as her ex-general cowman, but quite soon Dad decided to train for a new career as a land agent. We stayed on in Fleet while he went away to the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester to learn his new trade, and every night Mum and Tessa and I knelt and prayed for him to pass his exams: the family desperately needed him to be working and earning a salary. Dad did succeed, unlike most of his fellow students who were young landed gentry dashing to London in sports cars to have Fun in their spare time.

When we didn't have to pray for Dad any more, we prayed for the Russian people to be liberated from Communism. Britain and America were paranoid about the evils of Communism in the early Fifties and I caught the bug: Communism became my next anxiety. My dread was that it would take over England, and that Tessa and I would be dragged away from our beloved parents and put in some kind of Soviet youth retraining institution for ever – little did I know that boarding school would be more or less exactly that.

Because of its British and Indian Army connections, the area around Fleet and Aldershot was a brilliant hunting ground for all kinds of exotic textiles and bits and bobs from the former colonies brought back from their travels by people like us who'd spent lifetimes overseas – and had now fallen on hard times, or were dead. Mum became a regular at Pearsons Auctions in Fleet where Persian rugs, Kashmir shawls and lacquerwork, and intricately carved Burmese chairs and tables all came up for sale; she had a brilliant eye but hardly ever had the money to buy the things she spotted. If only we'd known then what we know now: one of the greatest textile experts and collectors in the world, Michael Frances, told me once – at a beautiful exhibition of old Uzbek
suzanis
he had put on in Bond Street – that a number of his best pieces had been bought at Pearsons. He was smart: as a young man he had worked out that where there were people retired from Africa and India, there were likely to be interesting things in the local auction houses, and he was right.

Our house, Landour, was in the middle of Connaught Road, three blocks from the high street (an easy bike ride) where there was still Madame Max's
patisserie
shop, as well as a new toyshop staffed by a wacky young man who would hide behind the door and fire at people passing on the pavement with a peashooter. We nicknamed him Peter Pan. Later he went to work in the lingerie store which was quite off-putting – it's a bit creepy buying a bra from a man who has never grown up. Closer to our house was a greengrocer's where, bizarrely, they sold a few books alongside the potatoes. There I found the object of my dreams: a craft manual which told you how to make things out of lavatory rolls and cotton reels and straws and felt. Being a worthy kind of book, I thought my parents would buy it for me but they wouldn't; I had to hand over my pocket money for weeks to get it. Truth to tell, though I felt resentful at the time, my mother's words came true: I did value it more because I'd had to save for it.

Down one side of our typical redbrick suburban road there was Sergeant Mitten who lived in a bungalow with a flagpole in the garden; every night he would lower the Union Jack to the ‘Last Post' played on a gramophone indoors near an open window, and every morning he raised it to ‘Reveille'. Occasionally we used to lurk nearby and watch this ceremony. Beyond the sergeant was the canal where my father once staged a brilliant detective game: it started with a phone call at home one Sunday, allegedly from the police, saying they were looking for a missing person and could we children help. Then various clues led us to the canal towpath where, eventually, we found Dad lying in the undergrowth with a knife smeared with ketchup on his chest – and his finger on his lips saying
ssssssh
to a group of traumatised walkers who had come across him before all of us had. I have just rung my sister Tessa because I suddenly wondered if this wasn't a completely false memory; she says she's almost, but not quite a hundred per cent, sure about the knife and the ketchup, but Dad in the undergrowth and the traumatised walkers is definitely true because she sometimes wonders how he hadn't been arrested before we arrived on the scene.

At the other end of the street, a four-minute walk away, was the Catholic church, built like an ugly garrison church, in red brick. Because we were all Catholics (except Grandpa who was determinedly Protestant), this church figured large in our lives. The first priest we knew there turned out to be an abuser; he didn't abuse
us
, but we children were deeply suspicious of him – for one thing he often invited us to sit on his knee. The odd thing was that he was not in the mould of abusive priests, being English, an ex-vicar and a widower, but eventually he was found out and sent away, and Fleet was rewarded with a wonderful parish priest to make up for it: Canon Walsh, who remained a friend of the family for the rest of his life. (Twenty years on from this time in Fleet, he married AW and me, and twenty-eight years after
that
he married our daughter Hester and her husband.)

Religious services in the church in Fleet seemed to involve all of us children from Landour getting the giggles for one reason or another, and being helpless with suppressed laughter. Once it was because, late as usual, we entered a pew which was already full – we hadn't realised because they were standing up but when we all came to kneel it was bedlam – and once it was because an altar boy standing too close to the candleholder caught fire. No one understood what had happened; we were just flabbergasted to see the priest (it was the abusive one) suddenly turning on the boy and whacking him – not realising he was putting out flames.

As I have said before, for Tessa and me the main thrill of being in England was living in a house with our cousins. We shared a passion for jokes involving dressing up. One day, we all spent hours disguising our brother David as an Indian carpet seller – we painted his face brown, cut up hair to glue on his chin for stubble, tied a turban round his head, and he set off on his bicycle with Mum and Dad's rugs rolled up on the back to ‘sell' them to a friend of our parents. She was in the garden when he cycled in through the gate, looked up and said, ‘Hello David,' so that was a failure. A better effort was when we pretended that Simon was ‘Mary', a friend of Jinny and Prue's from school. He wore one of their school uniforms and a school hat with someone's long-since-cut-off plaits pinned to the inside. He/she came to tea (we used to have proper tea every day, everyone sitting round a table with our parents or aunts or whoever was in the house) and we were all in stitches because my father was completely taken in. At one point Dad said, ‘Mary, wouldn't you be more comfortable if you took off your hat?' and we fell off our chairs laughing and he was cross with us for being rude to our guest.

When Simon was about ten he painted an advertisement for Guinness – I think it was a picture of a man wrestling with a giant octopus on a beach with GUINNESS IS GOOD FOR YOU written underneath. Tessa and I were quite scathing of it, but he sent it off to Guinness and got back a boxful of goodies: little enamel pins of toucans (the Guinness logo) and foaming Guinness glasses, plus posters and pencils. We were sick with jealousy and quickly painted our own advertisements and sent them off – but we received rather sharp letters in return, saying, basically, not to bother them.

David, a decade older than us, had a stack of ancient 78 records which we loved listening to: ‘Buttons and Bows', ‘Miss Otis Regrets', ‘Bless You for Being an Angel' and ‘So You Left Me for the Leader of a Swing Band'. (I always wanted to be asked on to
Desert Island Discs
so I could hear these songs again but I have just discovered that you can find them all on YouTube.) We had no idea what a swing band was, and in fact half the time we misheard the words of the songs: there's a line in ‘Miss Otis Regrets' which goes ‘when the marb came and got her and dragged her from the jail'; I thought a ‘marb' must be some sort of policeman in the US, and then I grew up and realised it was a mob in an American accent. AW thought Elvis was singing ‘Pardon me, if I'm
second man
' in his song ‘A Fool Such as I', instead of ‘Pardon me, if I'm sentimental', and Mum once told us that when she was a child she thought the words in the Creed, ‘suffered under Pontius Pilate', were ‘shuffled him under a bunch of violets'.