Chewing the Cud (11 page)

Once a year the butcher came and killed a bacon pig for our own needs. Everything about a pig is of use, they say, except the squeal, though we never could face the trotters. In Tytherington days I had once lodged at a pub where I took my meals with the landlord, whose favorite food was pig's trotters. He was a surly, shambling, soap-shy man with a glass eye, and he ate the pig's feet with a big horn-handled clasp knife, spearing each one and holding it upright to gnaw and lick meditatively at it while the grease put a shine on his chin.

On the first occasion that we ate together, I supposed that the tumbler of water that stood beside his pint pot of cider was a chaser, but not so. With a deft pinch of finger and thumb, out came that glass eye from its socket and plopped into the water to leer knowingly at me throughout the meal.

So trotters were out, and so was chitterling, but Gladwyn loved both. And the heart and the lights and a whole host of oddments went into the cats and dogs, even unto the tail.

A pig's tail hung upon the wall of the old disused sty where we mixed up their food. I had once gone to feed a pen of big baconers to find that there had been a bit of an argument where someone had got right down to the root of the matter. I picked the trophy off the floor and nailed it up, and it hung there for years, looking just like the bellpull of Owl's that Pooh noticed after Eeyore's accident.

It was the perfect emblem of the whole business — the ultimate end of the pig.

I
was very close to my four grandparents, and they were all important to me in my childhood. Two of them lived very near, two in South Wales. To visit the latter meant a journey from Bristol to Cardiff, by rail
through the Severn Tunnel, whereas I could walk to my father's parents' house in ten minutes. So I'll begin with them, the closest.

Grampy K-S had married a girl called Alice Keep, whose family firm, Keep Brothers, were importers and exporters, Birmingham-based. Despite that thin trickle of Charles II's blood, we were, the Victorians would have said, “in trade.” More of Granny K-S in a moment (and there
was
more of her too), but first more of Father's father. He was a small, slight man, who had lost most of his hair when I first came to know him and sported a drooping scrubbing-brush sort of a mustache, the middle of which was stained by the nicotine of many cigarettes. He was a Methodist by religious persuasion and a teetotaler, whether by choice or because of his faith I don't know. Every morning there would be, for family, any guests, and all the servants (cook, housemaids, parlor maid), morning prayers in the big dining room of the large imposing house called, by virtue of its position highabove the village, Bitton Hill.

I'm making Grampy K-S sound a bit boring, but he wasn't in the least. There were twinkly blue eyes behind his pince-nez, and he loved jokes, especially feeble jokes, and the best sort of puns (which are bad ones). Setting out for a nearby suburb of Bristol, he might say, “I'm on
my way to Warmley.” Pause, a sort of giggle, and then, “I shan't go as far as Chile.”

Sometimes, perhaps for a birthday, he would write me a letter, always ending: “Yr affec G Father, Chas King-Smith.” And affec he was, I know now, though never demonstrative, and I remember with pleasure the things we enjoyed together, just he and I, away from Granny K-S's all-embracing presence. We would quite often, in the school holidays, play golf together, I in my midteens, he in his late sixties. I would hit the ball long distances, but seldom in the right direction. Grampy would drive straight down the middle, no more than 100 yards probably, and progress to the green in similar fashion. I don't remember ever beating him.

Once we made a never-to-be-forgotten expedition together, just the two of us. He was a keen lepidopterist, with a huge collection of beautifully mounted specimens of butterflies and moths, kept in a handsome walnut cabinet with dozens of shallow drawers, and I, inspired by him, was a keen butterfly hunter. What drew me was the thrill of the chase, dashing, net in hand, after the fluttering, jinking insect and, with luck, catching it with one well-aimed swish. Grampy had an enormous variety of different types of butterflies and moths in his collection, though of course there were several native species that he had never caught.
One of these was a little dingy brown butterfly called the Lulworth skipper, first found at Lulworth Cove in Dorset in 1832. In 1932, Grampy and I set out to catch one.

At that time he owned a squarish rather upright motorcar called a Clyno, which I'm sure was capable of traveling at more than thirty miles per hour, but not in Grampy's hands, for he never exceeded this speed. So the journey from Bitton Hill to Lulworth Cove must have taken a good many hours, but we arrived at last and set off, nets in hand, around the steep heathery slopes. On that warm summer's day, there were plenty of butterflies about, but nothing that looked remotely like our quarry.

Then, just as we were about to give up and return to the Clyno for the long, slow journey home, I saw a little dingy brown butterfly flittering about among the heather tufts, and I rushed after it and swung my net and caught it! Cautiously Grampy, a man so gentle that he would not have harmed a fly, transferred the captive from net to stink bottle, wherein it quickly died.

“Is it?” I panted. “Yes,” he answered, “it is a Lulworth skipper! Well done!”

I had come. I had seen. I had conquered!

He was a lovely old chap, was Grampy K-S. I doubt if ever, in his long life, he raised his voice in anger. I don't remember that he ever addressed his wife as Alice or that she ever called him Charles. Instead, they always used the names that Father's generation of the family had saddled them with. He was Potie, she was Motie.

Granny K-S spoiled me rotten, and nothing was too good for me. What one first noticed about her was her face, pink-complexioned, unlined, almost childlike, including the baby-blue eyes, even in her sixties. She wore her white hair scraped back and done in a bun. Her clothes, it seemed, were always the same — a pale-colored blouse and a skirt of a khaki shade. Ankle-length the skirt always was, so that the sight of her feet was the only proof that she had legs. Whatever her shape may have been as a young woman, she was now pear-shaped, as though gravity had caused everything to drop. Outdoors, on the croquet lawn, let's say, she always put on (whatever the weather) a long coat with a kind of feather-boa collar and fastened to her hair with long pins one or another of a collection of large ornate hats.

I have a photograph of her dressed thus, in the company, believe it or not, of the wife of King George V. During the war, Queen Mary was staying with the Duke of Beaufort at Badminton (where she supervised a gang of men whose sole work was to pull the ivy — which she hated — from every building, wall, or tree), and she came one day to inspect the Golden Valley Paper Mills. One of Granny K-S's long-held, but seemingly quite impossible, dreams was to pour tea for Queen Mary one day. That now she did, in the mill canteen. What a pair they must have made, both wearing enormous hats, one regal, one very respectful yet in her way equally majestic, both as tough as old boots.

Granny K-S wore the same uniform for church (Church of England for her), where I was usually expected to accompany her. During the sermon she would feed me candy. Despite her sweetly gentle appearance, she was the complete matriarch. To see her sitting at the head of the very large dining table — at Sunday tea, say, when there might be fourteen or even twenty of us on parade — you knew you must mind your manners. The reward for good behavior was a simple square of Bournville plain chocolate, dislocated from its large bar by the senior grandchild present, using one half of a pair of broken scissors, an instrument know as “Pecker.”

Granny wasted nothing. No string was ever cut from
a parcel, but always untied and re-coiled. The brown paper from that parcel would be carefully smoothed and folded for later use. When letters were received, their envelopes, if in good condition, were kept for service at a later date, when they would be sealed by strips of sticky paper, carefully removed from the borders of sheets of stamps. When Sunday tea was over, and the men had gone to play billiards, the women to tend their small children, the larger children to play croquet, and the maids had cleared away the plates empty now of salmon-paste sandwiches and biscuits and a variety of cakes, Granny K-S's heavy figure would be moving ponderously around the table, in her hands a wooden dust-pan and a wooden brush. She carefully swept up every crumb from the cloth '“For the birds, boykie” (as all grandsons were called). Even in the war, Granny always began her letters to me in Italy, “My darling boykie.”

Croquet was an important part of the ritual at Bitton Hill. As a family, we liked playing games. There was a tennis court, and a clock-golf green, and there was the billiard room (children not allowed), but we played an awful lot of croquet. Granny K-S always played with the black ball and always sought to save it from being knocked away, by the red or the blue or the yellow, by pleading for it, as a mother might plead for her child's
life: “Oh, don't hurt my little blackie, darling! Spare my blackie!” Which only resulted in us bashing the black ball away into the rhododendrons at every opportunity to the sound of Granny's plaintive cries.

An indoor game that was very popular was called Five Square. It consisted of making five-letter words, usually in the form of anagrams, by placing cardboard letters in a certain order as they are called (by the caller, dipping into a bag — Granny K-S was always the caller). Twenty-five letters were called in each game, making a matrix of five words across, five words down, thus five square.

UESHO
makes
HOUSE
, for example.

Certain combinations were tricky. Should one of us make ASTFR, it was always read out as RAFTS. Granny wouldn't have known the alternative (beginning with
F
), but she might have asked what it meant. How delighted we were when, sometimes, she herself made a combination of

HERWO
. She knew that one and wouldn't speak it but simply point at it and say, “Such a nasty word, darlings, but it's worth ten points.”

It's a great game, is Five Square. Far better than Scrabble, and my wife and I still play at it against one another at teatime every day. Now of course we can make a number of very rude words of which Granny would never have heard.

However, there was one game that Granny and I played regularly, deux, called
L'Attaque.
This was in essence a battle between an English army and a French one. Each army fielded a number of different ranks, thirty a side, I think, ranging from field marshal or
chef d'arme
to mere privates. Each soldier was painted upon a little cardboard backing, standing in a metal foot. Each challenge between an English and a French soldier was decided by rank, and of course each player could only see the backs of the opponent's troops.

I am not proud of the scheme I dreamed up, which meant that Granny always lost. First I established that I would always be English and she French. Then, secretly, I made very small distinguishing marks — a little
x
perhaps — on the backs of her more important officers, the
chef d'armée
, a general or two, the colonels, so that I knew just the right soldiers to attack. I always won. Until one day Father came into the room as we were playing and — horror of horrors — stood behind me and watched as the battle progressed.

Afterwards, on the way home, he said to me, “You marked her cards, didn't you, old boy?” And of course I had no option but to admit the truth. The next time we went to Bitton Hill together, he made me confess and apologize. I felt dreadful. Granny K-S only smiled her
sweet smile, but I'm not sure we ever played
L'Attaque
again.