Sail Upon the Land (3 page)

When and if Cook came up to the drawing room, she would stand with her large flat feet in broken-backed slippers comfortably spread, arms folded and head on one side. Claire would ask vaguely about the coming week’s meals with an air of being above all that sort of thing.

‘Yes, my lady,’ she would say. ‘Yes, the leftovers of the joint. I’ve minced it and we are having rissoles as usual.’

Sarah shuddered. These indeterminate, tasteless cylinders were granular and greasy from being boiled in much re-used oil – beige on the inside, black on the outside. She had to put up with them every Monday.

Her father never seemed to notice the ruination of the vegetables cultivated by the gardener in the old walled kitchen garden. She preferred her Daddy, who looked and smelt like and indeed was a farmer, to her Mummy with her silly airs and graces. At least he never tried to get her to call him Papa. Daddy seemed quite sufficient for him. Before she was even awake, unless it was a very sunny morning and she went too, her father was out and about supervising the milking, even taking a hand if they were a milker short. Her mother just sat on a sofa all day.

He dressed indistinguishably from his men, right down to tying bits of binder twine around his trousers just below the knee to keep them out of the slurry in the byres. When Sarah went to stay with schoolfriends, their fathers looked very different as they set off in the mornings to travel into the City. They wore bowler hats, striped trousers and black coats for jobs as stockbrokers, lawyers or physicians. They carried umbrellas and copies of
The
Times
. At weekends, a concept unknown to Abbots Bourne, they wore smart tweed jackets and flannels. Sarah had never been close enough to judge, but she was sure they did not smell of cowpats and cigars.

She wasn’t sure she didn’t prefer their neat, warm, well-run, well-lit houses on the edge of Home Counties villages to the vast and ramshackle chaos of Abbots Bourne. Her friends’ mothers were brisk, their version of the done thing seemed a lot more practical. They were out serving on committees, playing Bridge or golf, while Sarah’s mother was marooned on a drawing-room sofa all day long: something about having four big babies so quickly Sarah had heard Nanny whispering to Cook. She didn’t understand but it sounded shocking. Everything to do with having babies provoked the grown-ups into tutting and dropping their voices.

Sarah returned from visits to schoolfriends sighing with frustration and longing for a different kind of mother. Many of them had served in Flanders as nurses behind the front line. They didn’t talk about it much, but she was inspired by her friend Alison’s mother saying the best thing had been taking a filthy, mud-plastered casualty into the ward, stripping and washing him, dressing his wounds and making him comfortable in a clean white bed.

At home, the paying guests had decidedly pre-war ideas. Like Sarah’s grandmother, many of the older ladies wore corsets and long skirts, toques perched on their curled front hair pieces, in the timeless style of their much admired Queen Mary. But Sarah wasn’t interested in the past. At seventeen she burned and ached to escape into her future.

As a child she’d liked running about with her younger brothers in the more wooded parts of the extensive neglected park, building camps and climbing trees. Now, on her solitary walks, she came upon the tumbled remains of a cemetery that she and her brothers had set up among the rhododendrons. There they had buried anything dead they came across, however small or smelly. There was a good supply of slates that had fallen off the roof, and she and Diggory, the eldest of the three boys, would write with broken bits of slate the right sort of things, such as ‘In Memoriam’ and ‘RIP’ copied from the churchyard. The two little boys would scrawl their versions of skeletons and skulls.

There had been screams of guilty pleasure when they found a possibly dead beetle (although there was a scuttling reluctance among the beetle population to be buried), whiffy skeletal bird or poor naked nestling. They would fall upon the remains with glee, knowing a long afternoon of cheerful rituals lay ahead: the making of elaborate shrouds from leaves, the collecting of flowers for wreaths and the burial, in a grave dug with a stolen spoon. This was accompanied by the funeral service as heard when they were walking past the church wall one afternoon, and subsequently looked up in the prayer book.

‘Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, bones to bones, mud to mud, earth to earth, grass to grass,’ Sarah would intone.

She’d been six when Stephen, her youngest brother, was born. Old enough to remember with pleasure how tiny he had been. At the same time he had looked in his bath like the naked fledglings that fell from the sparrows’ nests in the wisteria. Transparent, and a bit purple.

As Nanny, who’d looked after their father, was too ancient to venture into the more distant reaches of the park, Sarah wore a highly valued pair of breeches which she had found in a drawer in the old servants’ hall, held up with a snake belt removed from her brothers’ room. These treasures she kept in a hollow tree. She would slip off her skirt whenever she was out of sight of the grown-ups and into the dampish, slightly mouldy freedom of the breeches. Her father had spotted her once, she could see him hesitate peering through his thick glasses, but then he shrugged and walked on, gun broken over his arm.

When her brothers were small they had accepted her leadership without question. The four children had played games of Lost Boys to her Peter Pan. The youngest was, at the outset, hauled around with them in a wine crate filled with cushions and roped to an old pram chassis. In Sarah’s memory it was a perfect, golden time. They were out in all weathers, only coming in for lessons with the Belgian governess or for meals. That was until the outside world intruded when Diggory turned eight. He was just a year younger than Sarah, and he was packed off with his trunk and tuck box to St George’s Court prep school by the sea.

He swaggered in his grey uniform blazer and shorts, cap and shiny brown lace-ups. The shooting brake was ready to take him away, trunk roped to the wooden rumble seat. Sarah, as she stood waving uncertainly on the drive, could see he was trying not to cry. Before this moment she had always done things first as she was the eldest.

While Diggory was away, it was sort of all right, but he’d been her friend and she missed him. So many jokes and long days outside. The younger boys were not quite as close to her and started to go off by themselves, leaving her behind. The first inkling she had that things were not at all the same, was when her younger brother Michael told her that he was Peter Pan now and she should be Wendy. She was so angry that she stalked off in protest and never rejoined their games.

Diggory came home for an exeat. She could see at once that he’d changed. With uncertainty in her chest, she bounced at him and he recoiled. The awful sensation she’d had when she saw the shooting brake bear him away came back and she knew that, however much she pretended otherwise, she was different from the boys and would be treated differently. Not as well in fact. Boys went out into the world, girls stayed at home. Diggory was only home for two days. She overheard him say to his brothers, who flocked about him like sparrows: ‘None of the chaps at school play with their sisters. You wait. School’s good fun. No girls.’

She burst into the boys’ bedroom and jumped on him, banging his head against the floor until Nanny came in and broke them up. Shame, disgrace and loneliness followed as the two younger ones were rapidly dispatched in their brother’s wake. All the boys together at St George’s Court and Sarah left behind. The woods were not the same without her brothers and there was no one else to play with. The cemetery was neglected. Even a blackbird on its back, yellow beak gaping in death, failed to rouse her interest. She would see the village children playing on the green and long to join them as she walked past with Mademoiselle practising her French conversation. She didn’t understand why she wasn’t allowed to play with the children who went to the village school, but there seemed to be a kind of barrier between her and them and she didn’t know how to cross it.

When Diggory was about to leave St George’s Court for Rugby, and Sarah was fourteen, her mother roused herself sufficiently to realise her daughter was bored and unhappy. A cousin of approximately the same age was invited to come and stay in the holidays as her parents served in India. Sarah was extremely suspicious to begin with, but Jemima, who went to a girls’ public school, was friendly. Best of all she had a suitcase full of Angela Brazil’s school stories which she was happy to share. Sarah was swept into a world from which parents were absent, and where there were lots of girls who shared her longing to be free from the stifling ‘old days’ that crept the dusty passages of Abbots Bourne.

In Brazil’s world, the Dulcies and Irenes with their breathless enthusiasms and excitements, plans and pranks, made her feel normal. Constantly being hushed by her grandmother or told she was talking nonsense gave her an itch under her skin, a desire to break free and run away or – shockingly – to slap someone hard. The world of boarding school seemed like liberation and she longed for it. By the end of the holidays, Sarah was begging her parents to send her away too. Jemima had converted her to the joys of female company and the pain of her lost boys began to recede.

Now she was home again, seventeen-years-old and having passed her Higher School Certificate, which surprised everyone given her earlier lack of education. It hadn’t been quite like Angela Brazil, she had never attained the status of Monitress or House Captain at St Cecilia’s School for Girls. She’d made good friends, learned that lacrosse was not her kind of thing, surprised everyone by enjoying some of the school food (it was the contrast with Mrs Jones’s offerings) and the pleasures of the adult world were just coming into focus.

Her parents had a vague idea that she might be presented in 1939, which at least meant she could leave Abbots Bourne for a bit. William’s sister Phyllis was willing to do the honours as Claire had never been presented herself, even after her marriage. Aunt Phyllis had brought out her own daughters and knew the form to Claire’s relief, and there was a plan that Sarah should go and stay with her aunt in London, and go to a few parties in the summer after the Drawing Room where she would perform her curtsey. There would be men at the parties and she might possibly have to marry one of them. That would be one way of escaping from Abbots Bourne but she wasn’t enthusiastic.

That wasn’t for a few more months. In the meantime Sarah was bored and lonely again, as her mother sporadically tried to interest her in arranging flowers and other ladylike ways of spending her time. There was some new freedom. Her bicycle, brought home from school, allowed her to cycle into Framham five miles away and go to the pictures. She did this regularly, devouring films that revealed to her a very different world from the one she inhabited. Every week she was drawn deep into a monochrome swirl of beautiful women taking control of their lives in exciting ways. They spoke with staccato certainty, ran ‘automobile’ factories, were writers and musicians travelling the world. They might fall swooning into the arms of the hero in the last reel, but before they got there they did a great deal more than arrange flowers and write letters. She was restless, wondering how she could grasp this new kind of life that seemed so impossible to achieve in England, when rumours of war started to penetrate even the self-sufficient world of Abbots Bourne.

She could see from the faces of the older generation how much they dreaded going through it all again. But for her at last it meant something was happening, and it wasn’t to do with putting some ostrich feathers on your head and curtseying to a stuttering monarch. It might be like the last war when women had proper jobs. Even Aunt Phyllis had worn a uniform and sat behind a desk.

As the possibility of war began to manifest itself, they gave over the vast and hideous Bachelors’ Wing to be a convalescent home for officers. It was unused for many years as the rooms were too small for the better class of PGs that Lady Elbourne preferred. For the family life went on pretty much as it had before.

The Red Cross started a First Aid course in the village hall, and Sarah volunteered, going on to the advanced level and considering joining the Voluntary Aid Detachment, so she could nurse casualties if and when she was called up. She was proud of her bandaging skills and enjoyed getting involved with the village and meeting up with the girls who, as children, she must have seen and envied playing on the village green. There was still a distance, and she felt shy, but when someone was bandaging you up as you lay on the floor, it was impossible not to giggle together.

One Monday morning in 1939 she found her mother in the drawing room pretending not to cry. Cook had just been in as usual to ‘discuss menus’ but she hadn’t wanted to go through her usual dirge of rissoles, cottage pie, steak and kidney. She had simply resigned instead. She’d been offered a job cooking for the garrison at the new anti-aircraft artillery battery that had been set up on the coast.

‘Poor soldiers,’ thought Sarah, rejoicing at the opportunity. Her voracious reading and domestic science at school had taught her that there was more to life than eating the same menu every week.

It was clear to Sarah that her mother had no idea what to do, not even how to get the next meal on to the table, let alone feed a man properly.

Gaining access to the kitchen was a brief moment of great excitement and liberation for Sarah although, having studied hygiene, she was disgusted by the dirt and squalor she discovered below stairs. She couldn’t understand why they weren’t all dead from botulism long since. The Aga, purchased in a moment of enthusiasm by her parents five years before ‘to make Cook’s life easier’, was caked in grease. The worn brick floor was slimy and damp. In the evening, when you turned on the light, numberless reddish cockroaches flowed like unwholesome fluid into the shadows. In drawers she found ancient butter papers, stinking and rancid. Most telling was the complete absence of any kind of cookery manual. Mrs Jones had simply applied the same principle to everything that came through the back door. Get the scullery maid to chop it up, bring to the boil, add plenty of salt and leave in the bottom oven until convenient.