The Sun in the Morning (63 page)

Tacklow bought each of us a season ticket to Kew Gardens, and since the main gate was so near we spent a lot of our spare time there; mostly in the enormous glass hot-houses where the tropical plants grew, which provided a lovely bolt-hole on wet or windy days. The gardens were really charming, and armed with those season tickets we almost felt as though they belonged to us. But I was more interested in Kew Palace than the gardens, and liked to imagine Queen Caroline and her children walking along the gravel paths between the formal flowerbeds, or taking the air on the terraces while her husband, the dotty King George III, chased Fanny Burney through the ornamental shrubberies. But my chief recollection of that time is of Susan…

Susan was our cook-general, a large, fat and comfortable woman with a bright red face and a heart of the purest gold, who came to the house for five or six hours every day except Sundays. She had, she told us, been ‘walkin' out', with someone she always referred to as ‘my intended', for three years; but though still not officially engaged, she remained blithely optimistic that they would get married ‘one of these days'. When dressed in her Sunday best (Sunday was the day on which she ‘walked out' with her swain) she was a truly impressive sight. She asked Mother to take a photograph of her ‘in me best' and was so pleased with the result that she had an enlargement done for her intended. We learned a lot about him and were enthralled by her
stories and her glowing description of this paragon; though we never actually met him and there were times when I wondered if he really existed or if she had made him up. I hope he was real and that he did marry her in the end. She deserved to be happy. And in addition to that heart of gold, he would have won himself a first-class cook!

Not that Susan's knowledge of culinary matters did not have its limits, for I remember Mother staring in surprise at some peculiar off-white substance that lay scattered all over the rubbish heap in a corner of the garden, and on stooping down to take a closer look, realized with horror that it consisted of a pound of recently purchased and very expensive ground almonds that she had bought to make marzipan for the Christmas cake. ‘Oh
no
!' wailed Mother and rushed off to the kitchen to inquire how it got there … ‘
That
stuff?' said Susan comfortably, ‘oh, you don't ‘ave to worry about that, m'lady, it's only a lot of mouldy breadcrumbs wot I found in one of them tins o' yours.' It seems that she had never come across ground almonds before. She also had an endearing habit of advising Mother, whom she insisted on addressing as ‘m'lady', on what she should and should not eat, and I well remember the day when my parents entertained a small but distinguished gathering of the Heaven-Born to luncheon, and Susan, dumping down a dish before Mother, said in an encouraging but painfully audible whisper: ‘
Rhubarb
, m'lady — so good for yer bowels!' And on a similar occasion, warning her that there were spring onions in the salad, adding the loudly whispered admonition: ‘You be careful now, m'lady; they do
repeat
so!' Mother did not think it was nearly as funny as we did.

One of the few things that I learned from our stay in that really horrid little house was to be very careful in the matter of interior decoration. There was only one bathroom in the house, and since the bath (an old-fashioned iron affair standing on claw feet) was badly discoloured, we tried scrubbing it with something in a packet that was supposed to make bathrooms and kitchens ‘sparkling white in next to no time'. As that didn't work, we bought a tin of white gloss paint and a brush and gave it a couple of coats, one on each of two consecutive days, and were charmed with the result; the dingy old relic looked spanking new. Unfortunately, we hadn't realized that we should have made the coats of paint far thinner, instead of sloshing them on with a fairly lavish hand; for as a result of this error the paint
slithered unobtrusively down the sides to settle a good deal more thickly on the bottom. The surface felt perfectly dry when we ran a hand over it before putting on that second coat (which naturally obeyed the laws of gravity and did the same thing), and as we admired our handiwork, we had no idea that though the paint on the sides was paper thin there was a lake of it on the bottom; smooth and shining and, on the surface, as dry as a bone. We gave it two days in which to dry out, just to be on the safe side, and then, since we reckoned that the Master of the House had probably suffered the most from having to strip-wash at a basin, we gave Tacklow the honour of the first bath…

The water, which came from one of those terrifying gas-powered geyser things, was steaming hot, and Tacklow lowered himself gratefully into it: and stuck fast to the bottom. It took his united family to get him out again, mainly because we were all rolling about with laughter, and to this day I can't think how he managed to escape with a whole skin. We had begun to think that we'd have to send for a doctor and a plumber to pry him loose, when the bath suddenly released its grip on him and he was free. After which we left it severely alone for a few more bathless days, and had no more trouble with it — if you don't count the fact that it bore the clear and unmistakable imprint of Tacklow's posterior, stamped as firmly on it as the handprint of some film-star on the concrete slabs in front of Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. Nothing short of a sand-blaster would have removed it, so we left it alone. And since that bath was the kind that was made to last, it may still be around; though I doubt it, for all the spare iron that England possessed — including the beautiful gates and railings of her public parks and gardens — was melted down to make guns during the early years of the Second World War.

The next Do-It-Yourself interior decorating disaster cannot be blamed on anyone but myself. Given permission to do what I liked with my own bedroom, I looked out at the rain and fog of what was proving, even for England, to be an exceptionally lousy spring, and decided that a bit of sunshine was what was needed to brighten up the general greyness. I therefore painted every inch of wall-space and every scrap of woodwork, including the furniture, a cheerful shade of yellow; made myself matching cotton curtains and bedspread, and wheedled Mother into buying me a set of bright yellow china for the
washstand. I can't remember what we did about the carpet, but I bet I insisted on that being yellow too. It certainly brightened up the room and seemed to make it a lot warmer and cosier. But Mother Nature, suddenly deciding to make up for that dreary spring, gave us a really good summer and threw in a heatwave for good measure. My yellow room became a furnace and I swear that the colour sent the temperature up by at least ten degrees; I could feel that glare of yellow even at night when the lights were out and my eyes closed. I learned a lot from that room about the use and misuse of colour, and found that the knowledge came in very handy in future years.

Editing
The Near East and India
kept Tacklow occupied and interested; though I don't imagine it paid very well. However, every little helped, and he must have been grateful for it. But he still hankered for green spaces and quiet, and in spite of our proximity to Kew's famous Gardens, soon grew tired of that poky little semi-detached house with its pocket-handkerchief lawn and single flowerbed; so he advertised for an ‘unfurnished house to rent in the country, within easy commuting distance from London, required by retired Indian Army Officer and family of four' — he put in that last because he said it would stop people with two-bedroomed cottages, or those who wanted exorbitant rents, from replying.

His advertisement drew a surprisingly large number of answers and we spent a good many weekends driving around the outskirts of London looking at dozens of houses; none of them quite what we wanted. And then one day a middle-aged couple called on us at the Kew house and explained that they had answered Tacklow's advertisement, and had been greatly taken by the fact that he had bothered to reply. (He had thanked them for their letter and said that, though their house sounded charming, he much regretted that his Indian service pension wouldn't run to paying the rent they were asking.) They had both decided that he was the kind of tenant they wanted, so would he please come and look at the house before deciding that he couldn't afford it? Their car was large enough to take us all, and it would not take long to drive there and back again. Tacklow protested that they would only be wasting their time since he truly could not afford their price, but in the end, because we liked them and they insisted, we went with them: ‘but only to look at it'! And that
was how we came to live in Three Trees.

We had honestly meant just to look at it and to enjoy the drive. But it turned out to be one of those houses which welcome you with open arms and in which you immediately feel at home and comfortable. The Chinese have a name for that; they call it
Feng Shui
, which means the spirit of a house. Or its soul, if you like. They believe that every house has one and that it is vital for one's happiness and well-being to live in a house whose
Feng Shui
is right for you. No true son or daughter of the Celestial Kingdom would dream of building a house without a priest or an astrologer deciding which way it should face in order to have the right earth currents and the right spirit. And as one who loved China and anything Chinese, Tacklow was a great believer in
Feng Shui
, and Three Trees possessed that intangible asset not only for him but for all of us.

The house stood on the edge of a park in the grounds of what had once been a stately home, Hillingdon Court near Uxbridge, whose owners, like the owners of many of England's great houses, had been so badly hit by the First World War that they could no longer afford to keep it up and were forced to sell. The house itself had been bought for a nunnery, and various people had bought plots of ground on the estate on which they built houses for themselves. A good many of the plots, including the one on the left of the house, were still not built upon, while the park on its right was to remain a park for good — or that was the idea at the time. Three Trees, like most of the other houses on the estate, was a modern one and it had been built with love by the daughter and son-in-law (or perhaps the son and daughter-in-law?) of the middle-aged couple who had driven us over. The son (or son-in-law) had been in the Navy, and he and his wife had planned the house for several years; cutting out from magazines of the
Homes and Gardens
genre anything that appealed to them, and designing their dream house to be just that: a dream. They had found an architect who was as enthusiastic as they themselves were, and who managed to incorporate everything they wanted in the house they meant to bring up their children in and live in for the rest of their lives. And then, when it was finished down to the last lick of paint, and all they had to do was furnish it and move in, something happened…

After all these years I can't remember what it was. A car crash, perhaps? Anyway, an accident of some kind in which they were
fortunate enough to die together. Their house passed to their grieving parents, who could not bear to live in it: and in any case did not want to, since they had their own house. Yet they could not bring themselves to sell it, so they decided to let it furnished until they had made up their minds what to do with it. But they wanted a certain kind of person to take it and not just anyone: no one that the two young people who had built it would not have liked. They had already turned down several applicants when they had seen Tacklow's advertisement, and something about the letter he sent them in reply to theirs had made them decide to drive over to Kew and see him, and if they liked him, to urge him just to come and look at the house.

He looked and was lost. He couldn't afford the rent they were asking, but he went up on his maximum figure and they went down on their minimum one, and we furnished Three Trees and settled down to … what? To live happily ever after? I think that is what Tacklow would have liked to do; for in spite of its sad history, no trace of sadness lingered in any corner of the rooms or the garden of that pleasant, friendly house; and had it not been for us — Mother, Bets and myself — I believe he would have been only too happy to end his days there. Perhaps if he had been able to buy it — ? But he could not possibly afford to do so. And anyway it was not for sale at that time, so there was never any question of our being able to own it. Then there was the added expense of having to furnish it; for apart from pictures and ornaments, a few rugs, and things like china and glass, a certain amount of silver and masses of books, we hadn't a chair or a table to our name, let alone beds and cupboards and all the hundred-and-one things that one needs when moving into an empty house.

Bets went back to school and Bill went off to Woolwich; and Mother and I took on all the cooking and housework, because what with buying furniture and paying more than we had meant to for the rent, we could not afford a ‘daily', let along a living-in cook-general. I well remember the horror with which I noticed for the first time that Mother's pretty hands had become red and wrinkled from washing dishes and scrubbing floors. And the day that the first of our neighbours decided to pay a call on Lady Kaye, and Mother, who had been in the kitchen cleaning the silver — or to be strictly accurate, the silver plate — answered the doorbell wearing a duster tied round her head,
a vast and rather grubby cooking apron over her dress, and with her hands blackened and her face liberally adorned by the dark smudges that an amateur at the job is apt to acquire when first trying her hand at cleaning either silver or brass.

Confronted by two elderly, grey-haired ladies dressed in their best, hatted and gloved, armed with calling cards and inquiring in impeccable upper-class accents if her mistress was at home, Mother said baldly: ‘Yes.' And, having ushered them into the drawing-room, fled upstairs, whipped off duster and apron, washed her hands and face and applied a dab of powder and lipstick, and returned after a few minutes looking as serene as any lady of leisure, apologizing for keeping them waiting. Believe it or not, they never realized that the ‘maid' and the ‘mistress' were one and the same. Either because they were very short-sighted or, more likely, because they belonged to an earlier generation in which ‘the gentry' often did not notice servants.