The Girl from Station X (42 page)

I understood her pleasure over this (thinking of my own first published article, in the
Guardian
, when I was twenty-three, and how pleased my mother had been, though my father had
teased me) and felt sorry again that she did not become a professional writer or journalist.

Her diary restarts in Comillas, four months later, and this holiday lasted two whole months. There is no reference now to my father’s doing a job of any kind – he drove the car out
to Comillas from England while we all flew, my mother noting that she missed him. She was now pregnant with Nicky. At Comillas, she quickly met friends made the previous summer: Viviana, a redhead
who had shown her the best prawning, now taught my mother to surf properly, something she later passed on to me.

My mother’s diary is full of details about me and Raymond. He fell down in the sea, then kept asking:
‘The sea won’t hurt me?’
But soon he
started sailing his boat in the rock pools.

August 12th 1953.

Great excitement on the beach, as three very Moorish children (I remember them from last year) stole Elisa’s ‘boatie.’ Juan
[the new
chauffeur]
very cleverly persuaded them to give it back by appealing to their sentimental side and saying that it belonged to children like themselves who were crying like anything
because it was lost . . . Elisa had been very philosophical about the loss of her ‘boatie,’ saying ‘I don’t suppose we shall get it back, as boaties are lovely things to
play with.’!

How tender and sweet my mother was then! The childlike side of her – the way she used our baby word ‘boatie’ in her own private diary, meant that in those days she identified
with us, her small children.

On 14 August, the large picture of the son of
the Duquesa
(presumably the owner of our house) fell from the wall and smashed a coffee cup and saucer, the glass of a
table and the picture’s own glass.
I hope it is not unlucky, but only because the cord has not been looked at for years and years. Luckily it fell whilst no one was in the room,
as it hangs just above where my mother usually sits on the sofa.

A picture falling off a wall is often said to presage bad luck. My mother would later see the occurrence as having been a warning of Raymond’s drowning. She noted that if the picture had
fallen in the daytime or early evening, my grandmother would have been injured as she always sat in that chair – strange, I thought, when it was she who, through carelessness, would later be
responsible for the death of her grandson.

It was only now, reaching the end of Anne’s diaries, that I began to appreciate how awful my grandmother’s role had been, and awful for her too.

During the long holiday my father was bored, and furious that no English newspapers had arrived, due to strikes in France. Had my mother yet realised it was bad for him not to be working? After
all, she, for much of her life, had been used to leisure, whereas he had experienced only a disciplined and structured existence.

Despite my mother’s enjoying herself again at Comillas with me and Raymond, it seems to me now that my parents were already slightly adrift. Did they expect to be on permanent holiday,
even back in England?

My grandmother had told me that my father, after Madrid, had confessed to her that he was lazy, and had begged her to make him work. She said he had thought of trying to be an MP, but that my
mother had dissuaded him, saying that he saw things too much in black and white. I do not think that he was ever actually employed properly again (though I recall a rumour of a brief office job in
London), but, from 1957, he ran our small farm in Sussex and busied himself with my mother’s financial affairs.

Of course, as a three-year-old I knew nothing of all this, and, because of the tragedies that would later befall my family, my mother’s diary entries about that last
Comillas holiday for me have an elegiac quality.

August 31st 1953. Spain.

Almost the hottest day since we’ve been here. No wind. On the beach this morning. This afternoon, my mother, Gig and I took the children to Colveces beach . .
. Elisa and Raymond played alone for hours on the beach in and out of a pool, splashing and shouting with laughter. Elisa bathed, but only on the edge as the waves were enormous and there was a lot
of ‘resaca’. I bathed Elisa this evening and she said ‘That was the nicest day in the whole world!’ Dear little love. Raymond was cute too and full of mischief. Juan loves
the children and they him. This evening, it was so warm that I sat out after dinner listening to the waves breaking and the noise of the cicadas, which I find very soothing. There was a glow worm
with a very bright green light outside the front door tonight and the lights from the fishing boats were bright across the sea.

Soon after this came a passage that confirmed my own powerful early memory:

September 2nd 1953. Lovely day . . . In the afternoon I took Elisa to San Vicente beach . . . I went in bathing, leaving Elisa playing on the edge of the waves. It
was v. shallow and I had to walk out for miles. She was
so
good, played around by herself and waved to me every now and again. When I started to come
in she walked out in the sea to meet me right above her waist! I was so proud of her and she is such a pleasure to take out.

My mother, I saw, had had no inkling of my terror that she would never come back out of the sea. I had known, though only three, that she had thought me brave to have waded so
far out to meet her.

My most intense memories of Comillas are of my mother happy, always smiling, her eyes very blue. I remember what must have been that last summer there: big white oxen pulling wagons, wild
foaming waves, Raymond and I running down the garden to the hydrangeas to see the Big White Ship on the horizon sail to Santander.
Sept 12th 1953: Raymond saw it from the garden and ran
to tell Doreen and Elisa that he had seen ‘a big white boatie’.

I can recall even now the smell of cooking blackberries. I read how my mother and my father took us blackberry-picking and on our way home, I told her of my night fears:

Elisa tells me that she doesn’t dream about the lost Train anymore, but that when the wind howls round the house at night sometimes she wakes up crying
because she is afraid that her crab (that she has in a pail) out on the balcony will be blown away. Now that it is back in the sea (she took it to the beach today) she won’t cry any more.
Dear little love.

One of her last entries, before we left Comillas forever, is this:

September 21st. The sea is making a tremendous roaring tonight and as I look out of my window (it is a clear night) the bay is long lines of white horses as the sea
thunders onto the beach.

Our privileged and happy childhood went on. In January 1955, my mother took us all to America on the
Queen Mary
– my father, Raymond, Nicky, my grandmother, Gig, Doreen, and our
cheerful black-haired nursery maid Margaret, whom Raymond and I called M’Paul. We drank Bovril on deck for elevenses, going up in the elevator and asking for ‘Promenade deck
please!’ There was a children’s party where a conjuror magicked chocolate milk into a cone. I recall looking through the ship’s porthole at night from my bunk and hearing the boom
of other ships in the dark ocean.

Aunt Dita had lent us her guest house in Palm Beach, the Dream House, and indeed, the visit was like a dream, particularly for children from England, used to rationing, porridge every morning,
meat with fat and gristle, ‘sitting comfortably’ for
Listen with Mother
on the wireless and a compulsory long walk with Doreen and M’Paul every afternoon.

Aunt Dita had a black gardener in a leopard-skin hat. Raymond and I loved to chat with him. In the garden of the Dream House were grapefruits and oranges, hot from the sun, and coconuts we shook
to hear the milk inside. Each morning we walked with Doreen and M’Paul to the beach by Aunt Dita’s house. We would pass an enormous tortoise, taller than Nicky, and watch him chewing
lettuce, his mouth moving sideways. We played on the sand and in the sea. There was no one on the beach except David, a boy of my age with red hair. My mother arranged swimming lessons for me and
Raymond in Aunt Dita’s pool. At the end, we would say to our teacher: ‘Thank you, Mr Holmes!’ ‘You’re very welcome,’ Mr Holmes would reply. I learned to
dog-paddle more quickly than Raymond and I even learned to dive.

Now, among my mother’s diaries, I find her entries about the holiday and am pleased how my memories tally with these:

February 22nd 1955. Palm Beach. Drove to the Dream House, where Aunt Dita met us. They have provided us with everything possible here, including a car and a
television. It is kind and it really is a Dream House! This evening the pelicans flew low along past the house and over the lake, with the sunset sky behind them back to their nesting places
farther up the lake. The children are thrilled with everything, especially the oranges, coloured people and coconuts.

My American godmother Leith and daughter Taffy, a little older than me, came to stay. Taffy’s fair skin was sunburnt and then covered with calamine lotion. There were little mixed packets
of American cereals. The raisins in the bran flakes seemed an unimaginable luxury, like the pink ice cream Aunt Dita gave us, which contained real strawberries.

Though I was only five I was aware that we were lucky to have gone to America. When we returned home, Miss Booth, my teacher, questioned me about Florida and the habits of the Americans. I was
aware that my mother had a kind of glamour, because of her connections there.

Our years in Spain, and in England until Raymond’s death, now seem to me a special time, surrounded with a kind of halo, and North Heath a place of enchantment. I recall,
in spring, outside our house, sweet-smelling polyanthus of all colours, and inside our front door a little trough of primroses in fresh earth. I had two guinea pigs, Syrup and Treacle, for whom I
made daily bran pies and fed crab apples, and I often played with Raymond under the big copper beech tree, and on the lawn with Nicky, a cheerful toddler. I recall the loud explosions of planes
overhead – ‘breaking the sound barrier’, the adults told us – and Raymond and I on ponies, Betty and Ginger, at a local riding school. There was nursery school, which I
started at four – the first day transcribing the letter ‘A’ over and over again by a picture of an apple – run by Miss Booth, who always made me feel clever and special; I
never again had a teacher I loved so much. And often my mother was there, playing with us in the garden, walking with us on the common, her own delight in our home making the place a ‘merry
meadow’ like the one in the book she would read to me at night, the meadow where there was always sunshine.

Then, within a few hours of us leaving North Heath, everything changed.

In that bag full of Raymond’s things is a small exercise book of my mother’s that, when I had first found it, I hadn’t felt like reading; it was too private, too anguished.
However, I did read a few sentences:
My son, without whom I find it almost impossible to live . . . After Roddy was born, I had everything and more than I had ever wanted, my husband
and four children, a happy house and garden. I asked for nothing more in life than this.

My mother was only forty-two when I, my father and my two remaining brothers lost her – to grief.

During our new life in Sussex, my father did his best. His adherence to the Catholic Church and its rigorous rules in the 1950s may have helped him during this difficult time.
He took us three children each Sunday to Mass at the newly built Catholic church next to the convent where I did my weekly catechism class with the nuns. He always strode to the front and would
give us orders throughout Mass in a loud voice: ‘Strike your breast, damn you!’, ‘Bow your head, you little fool!’ Various parishioners were given nicknames, such as
‘Half-wit’ (our doctor, who later diagnosed a broken rib when my mother had pneumonia, always at Mass with his five daughters) and ‘The Bespectacled Cod’, a woman always
first up to Communion, my father pointed out, as though this was a crime. After Mass he would drive us into the town to buy the Sunday papers; I would get a box of Maltesers with my pocket money
and eat the lot.

I loved Buzzy, my brown and black terrier, given to me by my mother’s new friend Audrey, whose only son had died and who must have realised that I would be lonely. I played with Buzzy,
walked him and took responsibility for his food and water. He slept in my room in a basket. When I finally went to boarding school in late 1961 – my brother Nicky had been sent already, at
seven – I was upset about leaving my dog. I told my mother this and she replied that she had preferred Raymond to any of us. Was this a childish – and brutal – reaction to my
implication that I would not miss
her
?

My human playmate was Nicky. Being four years younger, he was tractable. I induced him to join in my invented games – one about cavemen, another about a Scottish family – and each
Christmas I wrote a play and made him take part. Nicky looked up to me and I was protective towards him. My mother had more or less abandoned him during the period after Raymond’s death, and
our Irish nanny preferred the baby.

Nicky, having been robust and happy as a toddler under Doreen’s care, was now, as a boy, not tough enough for my father, and I recall picking up a knife in the dining room when he
attempted to hit Nicky. When Nicky was recommended to try for a scholarship to Eton, the only boy in his prep school ever to do so then, he declared: ‘I hope he’s not going to turn into
a ruddy little intellectual!’ He wanted him to learn boxing, something that Nicky and my mother disliked, and I remember my parents arguing about it. My father had been toughened up early,
first being sent to a Catholic prep school, then to Dartmouth naval college, where, he told us, boys jeered if they saw a schoolmate being kissed by his mother or sister.