The Sun in the Morning (58 page)

Poor Aunt Bee! How can one tell what had happened to her to make her so cross and belligerent? There must have been some reason for it; some unspoken tragedy. A love-affair, perhaps, that went wrong? Or one that had gone wrong for her in England before she set foot in India, and led to her being sent out to Jhelum to help her get over it and in the hope that she might meet and marry some Indian-service officer or a rich ‘box-wallah' — or even a poor one? (For she was, after all, in her mid-twenties when Mother first knew her, and any unmarried woman of that age was regarded in those days as being at her last prayers.) It was, too, a time when few jobs were open to women of her type except teaching or caring for other people's children. And life had not fitted her for either. She may not have had the qualifications that would have enabled her to teach; and she certainly lacked both the temperament and the patience! So,
faut de mieux
, she settled for the second option; which was bad luck on the children involved and possibly even worse for herself. How she must have hated it!

Years later, when she was old and crippled with arthritis and had been reluctantly re-admitted to a nursing home that she had been thrown out of once (they had only agreed to take her back because none of the long list of nursing homes that she had subsequently tried
and ended up being expelled from would have her back, even though by then she was dying), she said bitterly to Mother: ‘They say I'm rude to the nurses.
Really
Daisy! How
can
they say such a thing? I've never been rude to anyone in all my
life
!' And this, mark you, reported Mother despairingly, on the heels of being outrageously rude to the unfortunate nurse who had just brought in her tea-tray. What does one do with someone like that who really
believes
that she has never been rude to anyone, ever? ‘Oh dear,' sighed Mother, ‘poor Bee — poor, dear Bee!'

Poor Bee indeed. But poor us, too. It is not easy to like anyone whose tongue is permanently dipped in acid. Yet she took on all the drudgery of finding and hiring suitable lodgings for our holidays, of fetching us from and taking us to London to catch the trains that would bring us from school or return us there, and of seeing that we went back each term with our school trunks full of the clothes we would need, all carefully listed and marked with name-tapes sewn into every garment. With her we spent three holidays on the Isle of Wight — a winter and a spring one in a house called ‘Nesscliff' in Shanklin, and one on the outskirts of that town in a house on the cliffs surrounded by open country, where in the company of several other children whom she was looking after we spent a long summer holiday.

Two of these other children were her nephew and niece, both much younger than we were: Maxine and ‘Sprag' Mitchell, whose parents, like ours, were in India. Sprag, nicknamed ‘Spraggen' after a character in
Pickwick Papers
, was only a baby and we all spoiled and adored him. But Maxine developed a tiresome passion for us and insisted on following us around like an adoring puppy, carrying a bucket and spade from which she refused to be parted. The handle of the bucket was rusty and it squeaked mercilessly as she panted along the seashore in our wake, driving us to distraction. Aunt Bee was annoyed by our efforts to lose this maddeningly persistent shadow, and on the only occasion that we succeeded in doing so she gave us the mother and father of a dressing-down and sent us to bed without supper. We had told the trusting Maxine that if she lay on a certain patch of lawn under a rug with her eyes shut, and then counted to five hundred, slowly, she would find herself on the other side of the world in Australia. The credulous innocent did so; believing that we, the big
children,
must
be right. And as soon as she was safely hidden under the rug we tip-toed away and fled to the beach and our own ploys; free at last. Poor Maxine lay where we left her for what must have seemed like hours, dutifully counting, until at last she ran out of fingers or lost count, removed the rug and found herself alone and not, as promised, among the kangaroos. Whereupon her disappointed howls brought Aunt Bee at the double, breathing fire and slaughter.

Another two Aunt Bee summer holidays were spent on the South Coast. One in the top storey of a tall house on the pebble beach near the top of the steep road that leads up to the seaside town of Folkestone: the same steep road that Mother had walked up when she and Alice went up to Folkestone's Leas to meet the Kentish boys when she was barely fifteen. The other summer was spent in ‘rooms with board', in a cottage on the outskirts of the little village of Shaldon on the west bank of the River Dart where it runs into the sea. The owner of Myrtle Cottage was a dear old thing who was very proud of the fact that she had won some local award for ‘the prettiest cottage garden' three years running. And she deserved it. The garden was exactly like the English cottage gardens that one sees, or used to see, on the covers of chocolate boxes and birthday cards; tiny and packed with flowers, and smelling of lost Eden.

Two successive Easter holidays with Aunt Bee were spent as paying guests with friends of hers; a pair of elderly sisters who lived in a pleasant house standing in an overgrown garden near Bushey Heath, where we met an equally elderly gentleman who wrote books about birds. His name was Cherry Kearton and Bill was greatly impressed at actually being able to talk to the great man; for at that time, boys by the thousand bought or borrowed his books and attended his lectures. As a result of meeting him we spent every spare moment of those holidays bird-watching in the woods and on the heath. We also, though I don't remember in which year, were taken to tea at a house near Bushey Heath where we met a small, pale and rather pudgy little boy whose name was Peter Scott. I knew all about his father — everyone in the country knew about Scott of the Antarctic; so of course I was interested to meet him. But not nearly as interested as I was at being shown a portfolio of small water-colour sketches of snowfields, icebergs and frozen seas, and being told by my hostess (Peter Scott's mother? grandmother? aunt? — I don't remember who
she was) that they were painted by the expedition's doctor who was, I think she said, Peter Scott's godfather and had left them to the child in a Will found in the snowed-in tent in which Scott and his companions had died. I thought that was a most moving story and I often meant to write to Sir Peter and ask if I'd got it right:
^*
were
those pictures left to him, and where are they now?

Some of the Aunt Bee holidays were fun; in particular those two springtime ones at Bushey Heath, because the old dears whose paying guests we were were just that: old dears. One of them was a talented artist in the Art Nouveau line, and both of them liked and understood children. So did our landlady at Myrtle Cottage who, despite a tendency to get a bit crisp over such matters as seaweed in the bedrooms and damp sandy footmarks in her minute and specklessly clean hall, was a darling. Other holidays included one in a house in Lyndhurst in the New Forest that stays in my memory chiefly because in the course of it King George V's only daughter, Princess Mary, got married with all the fanfare and ballyhoo that attends a royal wedding. Bets and I discussed it endlessly with the cook and the ‘daily help' whom Aunt Bee had engaged for the duration of the holiday, and who, like us, thought the whole affair was wildly romantic. This view seemed to be shared by the entire press of Great Britain, for the newspapers and women's magazines were full of articles by dewy-eyed news-hens disclosing ‘exclusive' details about the royal love-affair (that nobody but the Princess and her betrothed could possibly have known about) and speculating endlessly on the design of her wedding-dress and where the happy couple would spend their honeymoon. Half the country (or the female half of it, anyway) appeared to be light-headed with romance and orange-blossom. And this notwithstanding the fact that, judging from the newsreels and all those photographs in the daily papers, even the most gushing of sob-sisters could not pretend that the bridegroom was anything remotely like a handsome fairy-tale Prince. Physically, like it or lump it, he was clearly just another frog. She had obviously kissed the wrong one.

I remember being equally disappointed with her wedding-dress, and saying so to some expensive friend of Aunt Bee's who lived in a large and beautiful house near Ringwood and had asked us all over to
luncheon. Our hostess had laughed and said that she had been told by a friend who went to the same dressmaker, that according to its designer by the time that Queen Mary had had her say, and the Queen Mother
^*
had had hers, and ‘Mary had had her little whimper', there wasn't a trace of originality left in the dress. I had a soft spot for the poor Princess Royal from then on. The only other thing I remember about that holiday is the rain. As usual there was lots of that. The New Forest is a lovely place when the sun shines, but it is not much fun when the rain is pelting down; and too much of that holiday was spent cooped up indoors.

Except when Mother was able to come back to England, which was roughly once every two years, most of our school holidays were spent in the care of Aunt Bee. Though thankfully not all of them: the exceptions were like manna in the wilderness. We spent two whole holidays and part of a third at Croft House in Kidderminster, the home of Tacklow's best friend at Winchester, Cull Brinton. The Brintons were everything that we were not: spoilt, clever, attractive, extrovert, rich and afraid of nothing and nobody. We admired them enormously and a holiday at Croft House was always the greatest fun. They were the sort of family who were, one felt, perfectly capable of suddenly saying: ‘There's nothing to do here — why don't we go to Tangier? or Timbuctoo?', and actually
going
there. Heady stuff for children like ourselves who could seldom afford a bus ticket to the nearest High Street.

John, the only son in a family of five, was at Oxford (or possibly at Cambridge). The eldest daughter, Diana — ‘Dinnie' — who married an
avant-garde
artist called Rupert Lee, went out to India to stay with my parents and go sightseeing with Mother. Later she became secretary to the society that put on the first Surrealist Exhibition in London, where Dali sprang to fame by giving a lecture wearing a diver's suit and getting stuck inside it because the helmet could not be unscrewed. Noel, the second daughter, was a Bolshevik (the Russian Revolution was less than ten years old) and spent most of her time in Russia; and Anne and Hope were both still at school. The entire family had an endearing habit of deciding at intervals to dress up in togas made from sheets or table-cloths, swathing their brows with wreaths of laurel
leaves, and trailing off, bare-footed, to the woods to dedicate an altar to the Unknown God — Cull acting as the High Priest and conducting the proceedings in Greek while the rest of us lit vestal fires and intoned in chorus. A holiday with the Brintons was always stimulating in the extreme, and I was, of course, in love with John who was far too good-looking and didn't even know I was around. Best of all, no one at Croft House ever criticized, lectured or chivvied us — oh, the peace of it!

Then there was one truly magical holiday that we spent at the home of Bets's best friend, Betty Norbury, whose parents owned an old and beautiful Elizabethan house set in acres and acres of some of the loveliest countryside in England: green fields and flower-powdered meadows, woods and spinneys and copses full of primroses and nestling birds. All so unspoiled that one would not have been surprised to hear a horn blow and see the young Elizabeth Tudor and her courtiers come riding out of the woods dressed in green velvet and white satin, as they had done when they rode out a'maying from Hampton Court Palace more than four hundred years ago.

The Norburys' house, Wilmcote Hill, had been built on to a little two-storeyed cottage which, according to legend, had belonged to a Mistress Hathaway whose daughter, Ann, married a young village lad suspected of poaching — one Will Shakespeare. For this was Shakespeare's own county: beautiful, leafy Warwickshire; and the nearest town to Wilmcote Hill was the one in which he had been born, Stratford-upon-Avon.

It did not rain during that holiday. The air always seemed to be alive with the swallows who were building in the barns behind the house, for Mr Norbury farmed his acres; and I never see larch trees in spring without remembering the thousands of daffodils and narcissi that grew under the larches round the lake below the house.

Mrs Norbury used to take us into Stratford when she went shopping, and to matinées at the old theatre — which had not yet been burnt down, and was madly mock-Tudor in contrast to the modern structure that would replace it. Once she took us to a Sunday morning service in the little church where Shakespeare lies buried; and on another occasion to spend a long, sunny afternoon at Warwick Castle. But best of all were the hours and days we spent building ourselves a house in one of the Wilmcote Hill woods; a house that I described long
afterwards in a children's book called
The Ordinary Princess
which I both wrote and illustrated.

After I left school Bets continued to spend part of her holidays at Wilmcote Hill, and I was very envious when I heard that she and Betty Norbury had made friends with the Shakespeare Company. Bets did pencil portraits of some of the young actors which they signed for her; among them a future film-actor called Bramwell Fletcher, and the young John Laurie who, in old age, became a star all over again in a TV series called
Dad's Army
.

At last, in November 1925, Tacklow's tour of duty ended. And this time he stuck to his guns in opting for retirement and that little house in the country that he had always dreamed of. Though by now it was far too late for him to watch his children grow up. Bill, whom he had only seen once in the past twelve years, would be leaving Repton in the spring and going to ‘The Shop',
^*
for he had opted for the Gunners and, he hoped, the Indian Army. I too had only one more term to go before I left school and became an art student, and Bets alone had still to serve a year or two in the ranks while her brother and sister were demobbed. In mid-December, when the winter term ended, Aunt Bee took charge of us for the last time, and it was under her flinty eye that we three travelled out to Château d'Oex in Switzerland, to meet our parents and spend Christmas with them in the Hotel Rosa, high above the town.