Barstow My Animals (and Other Family)

A rural childhood 1937-1956
1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-1-910723-67-8
Verlag: Merlin Unwin Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

Falling truly, madly, deeply in love with one animal after another was a recurrent theme of the author's childhood, actively encouraged by her beautiful, impetuous mother as she single-handedly held the family together during the war's darkest days. While her husband's regiment battled through the Tunisian desert to Italy and Austria, she criss-crossed beleaguered Britain with children, ration books, and an unwieldy train of rabbits, dogs, cats and ponies, dreaming of land of her own. But farming can't be learned overnight, and translated into the reality of 400 acres of hilly, rain-lashed Radnorshire, that dream became a challenge for all ranks. Dragooned into acting as unskilled, unpaid labour for jobs that would make today's Health-and-Safety freaks blench - burning rushes, driving tractors, riding on Land-Rover bonnets and towering haywains - the children came to look on boarding-school as a rest-cure, though they retain from those days of carefree, unregulated farm life a treasure-house of memories. This elegant memoir, told with disarming honesty and gentle humour, follows the development of a lively, headstrong, self-effacing young girl into womanhood.

Phyllida is the author of My Animals (and Other Family), a Job for All Seasons and It Happened in Gloucestershire. As D.P. Hart-Davis, she has also written a series of highly-acclaimed sporting thrillers: Death of a Dealer, Death of a Selkie, The Stalking Party and Death of a High Flyer all of which are published by Merlin Unwin Books. After a career in magazines and journalism, Phyllida was the fiction-buyer for the Mirror Group. She's also had 16 novels published and was a columnist for the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail, as well as for several country magazines. Married to author and journalist Duff Hart-Davis, she lives on a small farm in Gloucestershire.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Barstow, Phyllida

Leseproben

CHAPTER ONE

Chapel House

THE SECOND WORLD WAR broke out just before I was two years old, and my first plunge into the dark soup of early consciousness in search of a flashback of memory finds me lying in a rumpled nest of clothes and rugs on the back seat of a car on a hot afternoon, thirsty and sticky, looking up into the anxious eyes of our nanny, Celia, shoe-horned into the luggage compartment among the suitcases and longing, like me, for the journey to end.

She was beautiful, gentle and beloved, and though there was no getting away from her strong personal aroma I knew exactly how she was feeling, tired of being cooped up and jolted about, but also like me, uneasily aware of tension emanating from the front seats, where my mother and brother were arguing over the map. She knew as well as I did that we’d better keep quiet because any complaint was liable to provoke an explosion. When I had begun to whine some time back I had been told in no uncertain terms to shut up and go to sleep, but how could I when their voices were getting ever louder and snappier?

‘That can’t be right,’ Mummy exclaimed.

‘It is! I’m sure it is,’ insisted Gerry, on the brink of tears.

‘But we’ve tried that way already.’

‘We didn’t go far enough. There’s another turning,’

‘There isn’t.’

‘Then we’re lost,’ said Gerry gloomily, and the word hung in the air with a dreadful finality. I wanted to cry, but knew it would be a mistake to attract attention. So long as Celia and I kept quiet, we wouldn’t be – what? Blamed? Shouted at? There was nothing either of us could do to improve the situation. The safest option was to keep a low profile.

For the past eternity, it seemed, the car had been moving in short spurts then halting, reversing, making about-turns and sudden changes of direction, but now it had been stationary for several minutes although the engine went on girning away, puffing out evil fumes. Sprawled on the back seat, I could see sky and trees and a signpost leaning drunkenly and I was dimly aware that it would be a calamity if the engine stopped. There was something wrong with the battery. Only that morning it had taken several men to push the car downhill before Mummy let in the clutch with a jolt and, calling ‘We’re off!’ had driven jerkily away from the hotel where we’d spent the night. Now the sun was beating on the roof, the heat in the back was building up and along with the thermometer, tempers were rising.

As soon as the long-expected, long-dreaded war broke out, the even tenor of our nursery routine in London – meals, walks in the park, play with parents, bath, bed – had become unsettled, as nannies and nursery-maids came and went. Gerry and I never knew who would be looking after us next. Mummy volunteered for the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) and became an ambulance driver. Daddy put his legal career on hold and, being already a territorial captain in the Honourable Artillery Company, was soon appointed major in the 12th Regiment (HAC) Royal Horse Artillery, guarding vulnerable points in London.

By late summer of 1940, when my mother was expecting a third baby, she applied for a discharge from the FANY so that she, and we, could follow the drum, perching in a series of chilly and uncomfortable boarding houses as Daddy’s regiment was posted first to Hertfordshire and then to the East Coast, the car becoming more battered and our possessions more scattered with every move.

We were living at Skegness in what we called the Mungle Bungalow when news reached my mother of the British Expeditionary Force’s retreat from Dunkirk. Fear of an immediate German invasion prompted the authorities either to remove roadside finger-posts or turn them the wrong way round in the hope of confusing the advancing enemy, and this well-meant initiative made a nightmare of our long slow cross-country journey from East Anglia to Chapel House, my grandparents’ house in Wales. Daddy and his regiment had vanished in conditions of secrecy without even saying goodbye, and Gerry, only two years older than me, was pitch-forked into the role of man of the family.

Along with the heat and the smell, I remember feeling hopeless and helpless as tension mounted in the front of the car, and the cowardly way I squeezed my eyes tight shut when Mummy asked, ‘How’s Phylla?’ and Gerry peered over the back of his seat to report, ‘Asleep,’ adding with a tinge of envy, ‘Lucky thing.’ No doubt he wished he could shed his responsibilities as easily.

I lay doggo, hoping to escape further notice, feeling a strong bond of sympathy for Celia, though our immediate needs were different. I was longing for a drink, while she was bursting to be milked, but we were both scared of triggering one of Mummy’s sudden explosions. Patience was never among my mother’s many virtues, and at this moment she had enough fears and frustrations to justify an outburst of wrath.

With my father, along with most men of fighting age, in uniform, swept up in the war machine that was stuttering fitfully into action, her own future must have looked bleak and uncertain, and although she was good at giving a positive spin to circumstances – looking on the bright side, as she would have said – it can’t have helped to know that Daddy’s new life showed every sign being much more dramatic and enjoyable than hers.

This was not only unfair; it also upset the dynamics of their marriage, pushing each of them into an unfamiliar role. Hers was the quick, bold, enterprising spirit whose love of adventure verged on recklessness and whose threshold of boredom was correspondingly low, while my father, calm, steady, tolerant, good-humoured and nine years her senior had always acted as a brake on her impetuosity and gently teased her out of her wilder enthusiasms.

Now it was up to her to behave sensibly and responsibly – virtues which she instinctively despised. Fun, along with food and petrol, was in short supply. The threat of a German invasion hung over the country like a black cloud and the whole family was tormented by anxiety about my father’s younger brother, Oliver, who had not been in touch since the retreat from Dunkirk.

At this pivotal and terrifying moment of English history, staying in the depths of the country to look after small children was an unappealing prospect, and now she couldn’t even find the right road.

‘All right, we’ll try your way,’ she said in an exasperated tone that boded ill for Gerry if he was wrong. The growl of the engine grew louder as she revved, the car jerked forward a few yards, and then to my dismay, it faltered, coughed a couple of times, and died.

‘Thank you, God, for a lovely day,’ said Mummy bitterly into the silence, and at that point my flash of recall cuts off as abruptly as an eyelid closing.

Did it happen? The memory is sharp and vivid, but even a cursory check casts doubts on certain points. For a start, could a three-year-old remember in such detail? Isn’t it more likely that I have run several different journeys together and come up with a composite scenario? Certainly we did drive for three days across the breadth of the country during the blackout, with Gerry asking passers-by for directions because the signposts had been removed, but what about the goat? Would the hotels we stayed in have put her up too? Would there even have been room for her along with the suitcases and the rest of our clobber in BYK 2, our little Standard 9?

Whatever the truth, she is firmly there in my memory as a comforting presence when the rest of the world seemed chaotic and frightening, and even nowadays the slightest whiff of that half delicious, half disgusting goaty smell brings my wartime childhood instantly to mind.

Celia was a handsome British Saanen, white all over with a sensitive aristocratic face and ears that pricked alertly like a sheep rather than hanging spaniel-fashion. Her fine silky summer coat was soft and warm to the fingers, her tail flicked jauntily upward, and her neat small rubbery hoofs were almost prehensile in their ability to scramble and cling. Though svelte of figure, she had a prodigious appetite and she liked the best of everything – the youngest, most succulent leaves and shoots, the unopened buds of flowers, the newly-baked cake on the kitchen table.

Contemptuous of thorns, she made short work of roses and, balancing on her hind legs in a heraldic pose, she could reach up to strip the lower branches of most garden shrubs, which did not endear her to gardeners. She was meant to spend her days tethered to an iron peg firmly hammered into the ground, with a revolving ring and a long light chain attached to her broad leather collar, but Mummy worried that she would tangle the chain and garotte herself. She therefore spent much time and energy constructing secure areas where Celia could roam free, but from which she always managed to escape.

‘Diana! Your goat’s in the garden!’ was a frequent cry from the house-proud owner of wherever we happened to be staying, for Celia was a Houdini par excellence, and naturally enough preferred the delights of the potager to the rough grass and brambles of her official diet.

Gluttony was her besetting sin, and nearly cut short her career when, in her giddy youth, a rare over-estimation of her digestive powers inspired her to binge on rhododendron...