Daughter of Empire (7 page)

Belinda wasn’t always serious, though, and together we were prone to fits of giggles and madcap schemes, such as the occasion during my second year when we decided it was high time that
all the girls in our dormitory ran away. We plotted in hushed tones at lunch and tea and spent the whole of the next week stuffing our elasticated knickers with bread rolls. On the appointed
evening we went to bed as good as gold – no doubt alerting the teachers straight away that something was amiss – and at the prearranged hour, we dressed furtively then sneaked out one
by one into the corridor. But I was paralysed by a sudden thought: who would look after Sunshine if I didn’t go back home? As a special treat Sunshine had been allowed to come with me to
school and was housed at the local stables. ‘Come on, Pammy,’ hissed Belinda, ‘what are you waiting for?’ She gave me a shove. ‘I can’t come,’ I said,
‘I can’t leave Sunshine.’ ‘Don’t be such a chump,’ she replied, pulling me along. But what did she know? She didn’t have a pony and couldn’t possibly
understand. I shook myself free, handed over my bread rolls then went back to bed, feeling like the worst traitor ever. It wasn’t long before the other girls came back too: they had made it
as far as the roof before they were caught and sent straight back to bed.

At Adsdean, my family was coming to terms with two recent tragedies. The first involved some of my German cousins. Cecile, my cousin Philip’s older sister, was married to Don, Uncle
Ernie’s son, and they had three children with another on the way. Cecile had been so kind in Germany, when we were living with Aunt Onor and Uncle Ernie, even writing to me in England,
enquiring as to the health of one of my dolls. I was looking forward to seeing them again at the wedding of Don’s brother Lu Hesse to Peg Geddes. The Hessian family – including Aunt
Onor (Uncle Ernie had recently died) – was travelling to London, and there was a great sense of anticipation with all the family coming together. They set off by plane from Germany but in
thick fog they crashed into a brickworks’ chimney in Ostend and everyone on board was killed. Cecile’s little girl Johanna had been left in Germany as she was too young to come to the
wedding, and I couldn’t stop thinking of her now all alone, without her parents or her brothers or her grandmother.

Then, one afternoon as I was going into the drawing room, Patricia said: ‘Don’t go in there just now, Pammy. It’s Grandmama. She is writing a letter . . .’ She paused,
realising she hadn’t given me enough of an explanation, ‘. . . and she’s crying.’ There was nothing I could say after the shock of this revelation so I went into the garden
to play with Lottie. I had never seen a grown-up cry before and I didn’t like the feeling it gave me. I knew why she was in tears, for her son, my father’s brother Georgie, had died
from cancer that spring, just before my birthday. There seemed to be all sorts of bad news around, and at that time the grownups never seemed to be totally free of worries. Knowing that our
grandmother, usually so strong and resilient, was in tears made me very unhappy.

Maybe you couldn’t be sure of the world after all. There was talk of war too, a rumbling undercurrent of unease that ran through the snatches of conversation I overheard between my
parents, Bunny and their guests. Too young for anyone to explain the facts to me, I was unsettled, as if I didn’t know what I would wake up to the next morning. I didn’t like this
feeling one bit.

5

E
ver since the beginning of 1938, my mother had been heavily involved with the nation’s preparations for the war that seemed increasingly
inevitable. She joined the Red Cross and attended first aid and anti-gas demonstrations and accompanied the King and Queen to air-raid precaution lectures in London. Most local boroughs had started
to stockpile gas masks and conduct public air-raid demonstrations. My father secured masks for everyone at Adsdean and carried out his own drills. In the park below the terrace where we all
assembled, gas masks covering our faces, the danger of an attack seemed far away. In London, the atmosphere was much more tense.

For me, at school or at home, the signs of the impending crisis were few and far between. That summer, Cousin Philip often came over to stay, which was always good fun. He was my first cousin,
the son of my father’s sister, Princess Alice of Greece. Eight years older than me and three years Patricia’s senior, he was the inspiration behind all the naughty, boisterous games we
played, including vicious bicycle polo matches with my father. Philip was very handsome, and even though he was my cousin, hero worship blossomed during those innocent months. I was in awe of
him.

It was in September that pictures of the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain – the peace settlement in one hand and his black umbrella in the other – appeared all over the
newspapers. The house was alive with adults discussing the newspaper headline ‘Peace in Our Time’. I had to catch Patricia one day to ask her what it all meant. She explained that the
prime minister had gone to Germany to have a meeting with their leader, Adolf Hitler, who said that, after the horrors of the First World War, he didn’t want to go to war with us. That
sounded good to me, so I was confused as to why my parents were cross with the prime minister and kept telling everyone that they were ‘anti-appeasement’. In fact one day at tea, when
Zelle casually mentioned that she had been stopped in the street by someone collecting for ‘Appeasement’ and, having been persuaded that it was a good national cause, had given him
quite a bit of money, my mother cried, ‘No, Zelle! That won’t do any good at all.’ I listened then as my father patiently explained why they believed appeasement was wrong,
thinking that Hitler could not be trusted.

There followed another extended period when my parents were both away – my father on naval duties and my mother on a challenging adventure with Bunny along the newly completed Burma Road
to China. She wrote to tell us how her presence had astonished the Chinese officials, as she was the first woman to travel along the road. Apart from the fact that she could never find a
woman’s toilet, she didn’t encounter any problems along the way, even though there were hostilities between the Chinese and the Japanese at the time. In May 1939 – she missed my
tenth birthday – she came home with two wallabies, Dabo and Bobo, a gift from New Guinea. When my mother had asked what she should feed them, she had been told, ‘Oh! Too easy, too easy.
Just give them orchids and they will be fine.’ Eventually it was established what alternatives would suit them if orchids were found not to be abundant in England.

In the summer of 1939, as war rapidly became a certainty, my mother volunteered to take in some evacuees. Her father had recently died, bequeathing Broadlands to her, but as there were more
important matters at hand, and many of our staff had been conscripted, my parents decided we should remain at Adsdean for a while. In August, twenty-four children and two teachers came down from
Wimbledon. They arrived looking completely underdressed for a large, cold country house, shivering away in their skimpy cotton dresses and short trousers. Rationing was beginning to test even the
magical powers of Mr Brinz, but these children melted his heart. As they were from London, he decided that fish and chips would be the most familiar food and he dished them up a large quantity for
their first tea with us. The children looked at their plates in great confusion, then looked at each other, looked at their teachers and promptly declared the feast inedible without vinegar or
newspaper.

On 3 September, my sister and I were sent for. As we came down from the nursery to join our parents, we could sense by the stillness in the house that something of great significance was
happening. We sat in silence, listening to the declaration of war as Mr Chamberlain’s bleak voice was relayed from the wireless. I had never heard an announcement on the radio before and I
lay in bed that night wondering what it would be like to wake up in the morning ‘at war’. The next day, however, nothing had changed, and after a few more days my father came back from
HMS
Kelly
at Portsmouth and took Patricia, Grandmama and me for a picnic lunch at Maiden Castle in Dorset. Scrambling up the tremendous grass mounds at the castle and looking down at the
undulating fields and forests below, I felt like a medieval knight looking out for invaders.

I had now inherited Patricia’s pony Puck, who was bigger than Sunshine. One morning my father was waiting to be recalled to the
Kelly
. As he knew that he was due to go to sea at any
moment he wanted to enjoy a last ride, so he decided to take Patricia and me in turn, leaving the other to stay close to the telephone and act as a ‘dispatch rider’. It sounded rather
thrilling. During Patricia’s ride I had never prayed so much for something to happen, and after watching the phone for what seemed like ages, I went to the stables to make sure that Puck was
tacked up, ready for the off. When I heard our butler, Frank Randall, telling Mr Birch, the head groom, in an urgent voice, ‘You must saddle up and ride out to find his Lordship,’ my
heart began to pound. ‘But Mr Randall,’ said Birch, ‘his Lordship has left strict instructions that Miss Pamela should act as the courier.’ ‘Oh, I don’t think we
can have Miss Pamela going up there on that little pony. No, Mr Birch, you will have to go.’ Horrified that the moment might be denied me, I cried, ‘No, no, Frank. Daddy wants me to go,
that’s why they left me here.’ I ran past him, leapt on to Puck and careered away before he could stop me. It took quite a while to catch up with my father and Patricia, and Puck
– who by now was gone in the wind – was making a lot of noise by the time we reached them. I could hardly speak with excitement: ‘Daddy, the telephone call has come. You’ve
got to go back to your ship!’ Knowing that I had done something important all by myself made me feel giddy with triumph. As my father and Patricia galloped off, Puck and I stood together in a
cloud of dust, wheezing and puffing for a while, until I collected the reins and we turned for home.

This was the last time I was to gallop across this stretch of the Downs, for while I was at school that autumn, my parents left Adsdean and moved to Broadlands. When I came home for the
half-term holidays, I was astonished to discover that my new house was a proper stately home, set among 6,000 acres of land. Despite the beauty of the inside of the house, it was the outside that
captured my imagination. The River Test flowed by beside the front lawn, and through the magical gardens that had been shaped by Capability Brown for the 1st Viscount Palmerston in the eighteenth
century. Mr Brown had constructed an ornamental canal along which there were some spectacular features, including the Ornamental Dairy, designed for the delight of the Palmerston ladies and their
guests. Here, like Marie Antoinette, they could play at milking and butter-making. When I discovered it for the first time I was enthralled – it was like entering a museum with all the old
churns, large china bowls and wooden spoons lying around, and as I picked them all up, I felt as though I were being transported back in time.

From the dairy you had a choice of where to go next. You could either return to the house by following the canal that disappeared by the old icehouse into a tunnel below the lawn, re-emerging
beyond the house to run through the pleasure grounds and finally join the river. Or you could turn left up one of a flight of paired stone steps through some decorative gates and into the walled
gardens. The steps met at the top in a wide stone plinth upon which my grandfather had carved on the left-hand side ‘Lest We Forget. The Great War 1914–1918’. The right-hand side
was empty, and six years later my father was sorely tempted to have carved ‘As We Forgot. Second World War 1939–1945’. There were three gardens enclosed by the wall. The first had
apple tunnels on two sides and a greenhouse, and the walls themselves were covered in espaliered plum trees. Here too was a pool with mulberry trees planted by King James I. The next was a flower
and vegetable garden and, farther on still, a section that had once been my step-grandmother Molly’s white garden. Beyond and below all three was a tranquil Japanese Garden with a decorative
bridge and a summerhouse over a pool. I loved the large bronze sculptures of a stork and a heron that stood in the water.