Owning Up: The Trilogy (29 page)

Ginny Duckworth, the ‘paying guest’ who sat up with me the night ‘dear little Bill’ had his brush with death, was the daughter of Lady Lacon, Maud’s friend who ‘didn’t care for children’. She was a tall girl of about twenty with enormous brown eyes, very long legs, and an interestingly sulky expression and, after the Duchess had left Parkfield, she was the next person I fell in love with.

Despite the fact that he was always perfectly friendly, I hated her boyfriend, Larry Rathbone. He was actually a distant cousin of my father’s, but for me, with his loud laugh and swept-back blond hair, he was simply a rival with every advantage on his side. When they had a row – and they had quite noisy rows – I was ecstatic. Despite my calf-eyed devotion and gifts of Black Magic chocolates, Ginny seemed quite fond of me. She would let me sit and talk to her while she wandered round her bedroom in her underwear and pulled on her stockings.

By the time I was twelve I was allowed to stay up for grown-up dinner and, as my parents were out at least three nights a week, Ginny and I often ate alone. She didn’t get on all that well with Maud, who thought her ‘moody’, and Ginny was sometimes quite critical of her. I found this wickedly exciting. No one, except the Griff, had ever found any fault with Maud in my hearing except, by inference, Mr Twyne, and that I took to be in her favour. Ginny, for instance, pointed out that, when my parents weren’t there, Maud took a lot less trouble about what we had to eat. In particular the puddings were almost always based on the banana. Sometimes these were mashed with cream, sometimes cut in two with ice-cream down the middle, sometimes chopped up with nuts. I called these puddings ‘Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson’ because they were always bananas in different disguises. We had quite a few little shared jokes of this sort at poor Maud’s expense, but I would have gone to any lengths, any treachery to please Ginny. Before I went up to bed and the ‘daily chat’ she let me kiss her a tense goodnight. In the end she married Larry Rathbone and I didn’t see her any more.

I was already at Parkfield when we moved to Sandringham Drive. One night I slept surrounded by rolled up carpets and packing cases at Ivanhoe Road, and the next in the new house. I was quite excited but, several times during the first few weeks, if I wasn’t concentrating, I’d find myself crossing Parkfield Road and be halfway down Ivanhoe Road before I realised I was going the wrong way.

17

Once Bill was born we no longer spent the summer holidays in boarding-houses at seaside resorts. From 1933 on, unless invited for a week or two at Tent Lodge, we went for a month to North Wales followed by a month in Trearddur Bay, Anglesey.

The reason we went to North Wales was that, following his stroke, Uncle Willy had no further reason for taking a shoot in Yorkshire, but instead rented a series of large houses in the Clwyd Valley with nearby trout and salmon fishing for the benefit of the family. This was very unselfish of him as he no longer fished either, nor indeed ventured out. As far as he was concerned he might as well have stayed at Chatham Street and saved his money. As it was, he just sat in a chair chain-smoking his Turkish cigarettes, drinking his whisky and soda, saying little beyond. ‘How’s yourself when you got there and ‘Look after yourself when you left, and eating his hasty pudding. It was his sister Eva who ran the place, ordering the enormous meals, supervising the linen, arranging the flowers and, for her own pleasure, painting watercolours and spending hours on end over her great jigsaws.

The older members of the family – Gangie and Gampa and Old Nell – were in residence the whole summer, but the next generation – the Leathers, the Rawdon Smiths and us – were invited to the house for a week or so and then, if we wished to take advantage of the fishing, were expected to rent a farm or cottage in the neighbourhood, although this didn’t preclude going over for as many meals as we chose. It was a reasonable and amiable arrangement. The first year Willy took a huge house called Bodrhyddan belonging to an Admiral Rowliey-Conway. It was so big that the Admiral didn’t have to move out, but simply confine himself to one wing. He in no way imposed himself, but now and then you would catch a distant glimpse of an erect red-faced figure with two King Charles spaniels at his heel crossing one of the clipped yew walks in the large formal garden.

I was too young to ask about the date of the house but from my memory of mellow red brick and slightly cumbersome renaissance detailing I’d guess it to have been built during the Restoration. Inside there were suits of armour and weapons arranged in patterns on the wall, and great bulbous-legged chairs with either embroidered or worked leather seats and backs. I had high hopes of finding a secret panel, but did not.

What amazed me about staying at Bodrhyddan was the breakfasts. I was used to vast lunches at Chatham Street but had never breakfasted there. Coming down that first morning I found porridge and every known form of cereal, boiled eggs on little stands, toast and four sorts of bread, but what really threw me was the long line of silver chafing dishes on the massive sideboard: bacon, fried eggs, poached eggs, scrambled eggs, kippers, breakfast trout, haddock, kidneys, sausages and kedgeree and, on the table, several kinds of marmalade, honey and quince jelly. I’ve always been greedy and loved breakfast. The amount I put away even aroused the interest of Uncle Bill. ‘You enjoy your food then, young feller,’ he said despondently as he shakily buttered a slice of toast.

The presence of Old Nell was a great help to the other grown-ups in keeping the children off their backs. It was her custom to purchase a huge quantity of plain white postcards and, with the help of scissors, stamp hinges and a box of water-colours, build a whole model village with a church, a pub, a wishing well, a manor house and several cottages. We would sit watching her for hours, occasionally encouraged to take over the simpler tasks although most often she had to do them all over again. Another thing that surprised me about Old Nell was that she could make a boiled sweet last for hours.

That year, 1933, I was considered too young to be taken fishing, but Tom used to let me go out shooting with him in the evenings and I was allowed to ‘beat’ for him, knocking the tree trunks on the far side of a wood to drive the clattering wood pigeons towards him. One day I found a cow’s horn in a field on one of these expeditions and fitted it on the end of a stout stick. I called this my ‘wandering stick’ and would set off by myself into the great park with its red and white chestnut trees to explore the surrounding countryside. I wore white that year and, on my head, a small kepi which I had purchased on a visit to Rhyl. White is not the best colour in which to remain unobserved by shy birds and mammals, but on my return, taking a leaf out of Romany’s book, I would pretend to have watched a vixen playing with her cubs at the den’s mouth or a badger, untypically abroad in the middle of the afternoon, rooting for grubs. I don’t suppose anyone, except Maud, believed me, but no one was so impolite as to call me a liar.

I spent a lot of time, too, exploring the outhouses of Bodrhyddan. If you opened the stable door quietly when the horses were all out in the fields, there were almost as many rats as in Disney’s
Pied-Piper
, swarming all over the mangers. I told Tom this and he used to go with me into the stable yard with his shotgun. I’d then fling open the top half of the stable door and he’d fire both barrels, sometimes killing four or five rats at a time. Once I found a beautiful plant growing behind an abandoned pigsty. It had lustrous black berries but I’d been told never to eat anything I wasn’t sure of. I took Gampa to look at it, who told me it was deadly nightshade.

Some mornings, very early, Gangie and I would go mushroom picking in the misty fields. They were added to the gargantuan choice at breakfast. When we didn’t go picking mushrooms, Bill and I loved to get into bed with Gangie and Gampa when they were drinking their morning tea. Gampa wore a night shirt and they both smelt of warm biscuits.

One Saturday afternoon at Bodrhyddan there was a fete. In the yew garden there was a big bush clipped to look like a blackamoor’s head. For the fete the gardeners had hung gold hoop ear-rings from its dark green ears and inserted big rolling eyes and white teeth. I’d discovered these objects in a loft and wondered what on earth they could be. I was told they were very old.

Gampa gave me five shillings in pennies. I rolled them down a shute on to a board with different numbers on it. If a penny came to rest on a number and not on one of the squared lines which divided them, you won. I was very lucky and won a pound. I rushed off to tell Gampa and found him chatting to Admiral Rowley-Conway who, for once, wasn’t hiding in his wing. Gampa said he was very pleased. Then I went back and lost the lot. When I told Gampa this he gave me a lecture on gambling. ‘Always stop when you’re on top,’ he said quite crossly. I’ve never been able to do that. That’s why I still gamble very little and always for an amount I’ve decided to lose in advance.

I loved being at Bodrhyddan. I think that year we stayed the whole month. The house was so big we didn’t have to move out. There was room for any number of Mellys, Rawdon Smiths and Leathers. I told everyone at breakfast on our last morning that I’d decided I ‘preferred the country to the seaside’. They all laughed, but I did, and still do.

Uncle Willy didn’t take Bodrhyddan again. For the next four years he rented a house called Hafod. It was a yellow-washed manor with a stable yard and a tennis court, but it was nowhere near as big. Most years we stayed at a farm nearby, but in 1937 Tom rented a rather ‘modernistic’ villa called Lount Cottage on the outskirts of Denbigh. Almost every morning Gampa sent the car over to take us into Rhyl or Prestatyn to swim in the big open-air baths. Sometimes Gangie and Gampa came too. Afterwards we usually went back to Hafod for lunch and spent the afternoon there.

Once I went out sketching with Gangie and Aunt Eva and they had a splendid row. Gangie chose to paint part of a barn and a bit of field beyond. It turned out very well. Aunt Eva took on a wide panoramic view with woods and distant hills and it went wrong. She was already gobbling like a turkey-cock with irritation when Gangie, never exactly noted for her tact, said rather smugly that perhaps she’d been ‘over-ambitious’. Aunt Eva, mottled with rage, knocked over her spindly little easel and threw her paint-box in a ditch. They didn’t speak for two days.

John Leather was at Hafod one year. He had an airgun. We discovered that if you suddenly raised the lid on the corn bin in the harness room there was always a mouse scurrying about on the top of the hard shiny corn. It immediately began to burrow down into it, but if you were quick to aim the muzzle at its fast-vanishing backside and pulled the trigger it more or less disintegrated. We always felt guilty about this afterwards, but it didn’t stop us doing it again. We spoke hypocritically of ‘keeping down vermin’, and I tried to think it was just the same as Tom blasting off at the rats at Bodrhyddan, but somehow it wasn’t.

In 1935, for the first time Tom and Gampa took me fishing, something I’d begged them to do every year. We drove down a little lane one fine afternoon and Kane had to stop the car when a mother duck and about six babies in her wake emerged from the grass and waddled processionally across. We got to the fishing hut by the River Clwyd .and Tom and Gampa put up three rods. They tied on flies for themselves and a big worm for me. I sat on the bank watching my float and listening to them bickering as they fished. Tom was the more impatient. He cast all the time. Gampa reproached him. ‘What’s the point of flogging the water, Tom? Wait for a rise.’ I found it quite funny but a bit disorientating to hear my father told off like a small boy. Then my float bobbed. I did nothing. I knew from catching perch at Coniston that you didn’t strike until it went under. It was most likely to be an eel. Gampa said I’d probably only catch eels. The float bobbed again a few times and then moved steadily down towards the bottom. I struck and gave an excited yelp as the rod bent double and the line came screaming off the reel. Tom and Gampa, shouting advice, ran towards me along the bank.

Twenty minutes later my first trout, three pounds in weight, lay on the grass in all its speckled glory. How responsible was I for landing it? Very little I should think, but they never took the rod off me. I believe my father stood behind me, his hands over mine, guiding them as to when to reel in, when to hold, when to let the fish run. Gampa netted it. When we got back to Hafod, Gampa wrote down in his fishing book:

After that Tom taught me to fly-fish, but I didn’t have much success to begin with. The year we took Lount, there was a little stream at the bottom of the concrete gnome-ridden garden. I was convinced there were trout in it, and cast away there hour after hour. One day Tom told me he thought the trouble was there were too many leaves and too much rubbish floating down the stream. He bought wire netting and some posts and we spent a morning erecting a barrier across it, both at the top end and, more mysteriously, at the bottom. Two days later I hooked and landed a trout unaided. It was only six inches long but I had done it all by myself and insisted on having a photograph taken. It came out rather blurred, but you can just see the trout. I am holding it up by the tail, the rod in my other hand, and looking very proud and solemn. What Tom didn’t tell me for ages was that there were no trout in that stream. He’d gone out one evening to a trout farm and bought half a dozen. The wire-netting barriers had nothing to do with either leaves or rubbish. They were to prevent the trout he’d bought from swimming away.