The Sun in the Morning (61 page)

Oh well, for better or for worse it was over! The boarding-school era, that had loomed ahead like a threatening shadow during the last bright years of my childhood in India, was past, and life and love lay ahead. Romance, here I come! Yet there was a distinct lump in my throat as I joined in singing the hymn that always ended Prayers in the Big Schoolroom on the last day of term: ‘Lord, dismiss us with Thy blessing' … I don't think I had ever paid much attention to those words before, but I remember being struck by them that morning. ‘
Let Thy father-hand be shielding All who here will meet no more
…' Strange to think that I myself had at last become one of those who would meet here no more. Suddenly, it was a very sobering thought. Tomorrow I would be a grown-up; and all at once I was not at all sure that that was such an enviable thing to be! ‘
May their seed-time past be yielding Year by year a richer store; Those returning, Make more faithful than before. Amen
,' sang the assembled school. No more school. No more Clevedon. And with luck, no more Upton House — !

Upton House had been bought by my Kaye grandfather after my grandmother died at Oxford. And there he now lived in peaceful Victorian seclusion with Aunt Molly and her children; keeping bees and waging a non-stop war on the dandelions that persisted in coming up on his lawns. His new home was a large stone-built manor-house with mullioned windows, standing among lawns, flowerbeds and shrubberies, orchards, a tennis court and a large walled garden. The whole was surrounded by a high stone wall and set among sloping meadows full of wildflowers. Beautiful? Well, yes. I hated it! The whole set-up made me feel as though I had stepped backward in time, because Grandpapa Kaye, who was always pleading poverty, insisted on living as though he was the local squire and a young Queen Victoria had only recently ascended the throne.

He kept a large staff, consisting of a cook, a housemaid, a skivvy,
^*
an odd-job man, an ancient gardener and, I rather think, a gardener's boy as well. There was neither electricity nor gas in the house. Oil lamps and candles, and that was it. There
must
have been running water, because I couldn't possibly have forgotten having to take a
bath in a hip-bath, or using an ‘earth closet'. But the mere fact that I can't remember where the bathroom was, or the loo, or even if they were there at all, says a lot about Upton House.

Each day there began with the arrival of a maid with a copper can of hot water, which she would dump in the china basin on the washstand and drape with a towel, to keep it warm while she pulled the curtains. The next thing was family breakfast in a dining-room where the sideboard almost literally groaned with covered silver dishes, each one on its own stand above a tiny flame from a little methylated-spirit lamp that kept the dishes hot. You had a choice of kippers or kedgeree, eggs (scrambled, fried or boiled), grilled kidneys, bacon and sausages, a large cold ham, and always, heading this ridiculously lavish line-up, a huge tureen of porridge; because whatever one chose for ‘afters' one was expected to start with porridge. The grown-ups always ate it standing up, out of wooden bowls and with salt, not sugar — a Scottish ritual which, considering that the Kayes originally came from Yorkshire, I regarded as a piece of swank.

The mornings were all right, because one could play in the gardens. And I discovered that I could cope with bees without getting stung; which pleased Grandpapa, who used to take me down with him to the row of beehives in the upper orchard to help him remove old frames or fumigate the hives, and would watch approvingly when (carefully veiled, I may say) I let swarms of the little insects crawl all over my hands. I can only suppose I must have had the sort of smell that bees like.

Lunch, however, was to be dreaded, because Grandpapa liked to drink beer that was drawn fresh from the cask, and it was always one of his grandchildren who had to fetch it for him. ‘Let a child do it!' was his invariable command, and we never knew which of us his beady eye would light upon. We all hated fetching the stuff, because the casks were kept in the wine cellar; a damp, pitch-black dungeon of a place with a vaulted roof and pillars draped with cobwebs like something out of a horror film. But it was neither the dark nor the spiders that scared us. It was frogs. Or rather toads, of which there were any number, squatting fecklessly on the wet stone flags and brooding on infinity, regardless of the fact that they were almost impossible to see by the light of a single wavering candle. Have you ever trodden on a frog? Or, worse still, on a toad? I do not recommend it. They explode
with a horrid pop, followed by a squish as one slips wildly on the remains of the deceased.

Armed with the beer-jug and a candle I would grope my way down the slimy steps into musty, beer-smelling blackness, praying that I would not tread on a frog or be dropped on by a spider; and having balanced the candlestick on the top of a cask, cautiously turn the spigot and attempt to fill the jug without getting too much froth on top or spilling too much beer. There would always be a certain amount of spillage, of course, and I can only presume that the reason why those wretched toads didn't hop out of the way was because they were permanently sozzled.

I was always terrified that the candle would go out and leave me in that toad-filled darkness, or that I would drop Grandpapa's favourite jug and get skinned by his razor-edged tongue for doing so. The whole business was a terrifying ordeal and probably the reason why I am afraid of the dark to this day. And just to add to everything else, the house was haunted. It had a resident ghost…

Given the choice between the ghost and the toads, I would have preferred the ghost every time; in spite of that hair-raising experience at The Bower. For one thing, this ghost was the only truly kind-hearted one I have ever heard of. She had no known history, and even the Oldest Inhabitant in the village could not say when she had started haunting the house; only that it was ‘before me time'. One really should not be scared of benevolent ghosts; and if there
had
to be a ghost in the house it was obviously better to have a friendly one. Speaking for myself I would have preferred to have no ghost at all, and the fact that the house harboured one was not conducive to peaceful sleep at night.

The Upton House ghost was that of a young woman; a girl in her late teens or early twenties according to those who had seen her, and judging from her dress she must once have been a housemaid, for even in my day, in the depths of the country young village girls ‘in service' still wore print dresses, aprons and mob caps; as they had done for several hundred years. One can only suppose that this one, when she was alive and in service in that house, was treated with great kindness by someone who lived in it, and was so grateful that even after her
death her ghost would return to the house whenever those who lived in it were in need of help.

It was not easy, in those post-war years, to find household help even for a modern, labour-saving house, while for one such as Upton House — old and stone-built, with long ice-cold passages leading to large stone-flagged kitchen quarters, not a hint of All Mod. Cons. anywhere, no electricity, no gas, miles from the nearest town where there was a cinema, good shops or, for that matter, a barracks — it was getting almost impossible to obtain staff. The women who once worked in such houses, and had left to work in munitions factories, hospitals and a dozen other spheres during the war years, would never come back; while the young had no desire to take work in out-of-the-way places where there were few if any young men to take them out on their days off.

With no boy-friends, no bright lights, no
fun
! — and that human battle-axe, Aunt Molly, chasing them around to see that they ‘kept up to the mark' — it was not surprising that the staff at Upton House were always downing tools and departing at short notice, leaving Aunt Molly and Cousin Maggie, and any other available grandchild who happened to be present, to cope with the housework and cooking while Cousin Grace trundled off in the family car to do the shopping and to plead with the nearest employment agency to find yet another set of replacements willing to take on the drudgery and boredom of Upton House and put up with Aunt Molly's ideas of discipline. On at least two such occasions (there may have been more when she wasn't spotted) the ghostly housemaid rushed to the rescue and did her stuff. That girl really
must
have had a heart of gold.

On the first of those two occasions it was my cousin Tom Polwhele, elder son of Tacklow's beloved sister Nan, who saw her. Tom, a naval Lieutenant, was on leave and due to spend a few days with his grandfather. Since he had written to say that he would be arriving late at night and that no one need bother to stay up for him, a cold supper was left for him in the dining-room and a candlestick in the hall, where all our candlesticks were put out for us every evening; each of us lighting one and carrying it upstairs when we went to bed. We did not hear him arrive and no one had thought to tell him that the staff had walked out
en masse
on the previous day. He came down next morning to find us all at breakfast, and having apologized for being
late and dutifully greeted his grandfather, kissed his aunt, and grinned at his assembled cousins, he collected himself a plateful of food from the sideboard and remarked casually that if he hadn't been woken up he would probably not have surfaced until well into the afternoon: ‘Who's the new girl who woke me up this morning?' inquired Tom: ‘Haven't seen her before. Pretty little thing.'

Everyone stopped eating and there was dead silence in the dining-room as we all stared at him, open-mouthed. Then someone said: ‘What did you mean … she woke you? How?'

‘Oh, she just tapped on the door and came in and pulled the curtains, smiled at me and made a nice little bob and went out again. Why? — what else would she do?'

‘
The ghost!
' yelped his cousins in chorus: ‘
He's seen the ghost!
'

Tom, who was a stolid, ‘Silent Service' Navy type, not given to practical jokes or playing tricks on people (and besides being unaware that there were no servants in the house, he had never heard that there was a resident ghost), demanded to know what we were all yowling about, and on being told, leapt to the conclusion that one of us had persuaded a friend to dress the part in order to pull his leg. When he realized that this was not so, and that there really were no servants at Upton House, he first became extremely cross and stuffy and said the whole thing was rubbish because no ghost could possibly open and close doors and pull curtains, and then fell back again on insisting that we must have put someone up to doing it and that he didn't think it was in the
least
funny.

The girl was not seen again for the best part of a year. And next time it was Aunt Molly, of all people, who saw her. Once again there had been high words with the staff who, with admirable solidarity, had flounced out in a body. Shortly afterwards, my formidable aunt, feeling cross and distrait, came downstairs to prepare luncheon and, on her way down, passed a housemaid who was on her knees brushing the stair-carpet. The girl drew aside to let her pass, which Aunt Molly did automatically and without thinking, and it was only when she had taken the last step and reached the hall that it flashed into her mind that all the staff had already left. She whirled round and looked back up the staircase; and of course there was no one there.

I gather she tottered into the dining-room and helped herself to a stiff brandy, and spent the next half-hour lying on the sofa in the
drawing-room sniffing smelling-salts. She did
not
cook the lunch: I suppose Maggie did.

What with ghosts and toads and Grandpapa and a strong-minded aunt, it is hardly surprising that I disliked staying at Upton House. The room I slept in was known as the ‘Battle of the Blues' because its once fashionable William Morris-style wallpaper was a riot of hydrangeas, lilies and larkspur in various shades of blue on a prussian blue background, and there were curtains of navy blue rep on the four-poster bed and at the windows. The furniture was mahogany and massive, and the room so large that the single candle permitted to a child (the older grown-ups had oil lamps) made such a small pool of light in that waste of shadows that on one occasion I spent all my pocket-money on extra candles, because I had come across a book in the library called
Carnaki the Ghost Finder
which so scared me that I did not dare go to sleep in the dark.

The only other thing that I remember clearly about Upton House is that it was here, during a weekend when my parents were also present, that I first realized with an appalling sense of shock that my gay, pretty mother was a complete nit-wit. I can even pinpoint the moment. It happened during a sunny half-term holiday and I was sitting on the grass bank at one end of the tennis court with my cousin Maggie, who was umpiring. Mother was one of the players and I can see her still; the afternoon sun making her hair the colour of horse chestnuts. She is wearing a very becoming white dress and laughing. I haven't the faintest recollection of what it was that she said or did; I only know that whatever it was it made me suddenly aware, as though a blinding light had been switched on and blazed in my face, that she was silly. A charming, butterfly-minded bird-brain … what Victorians would have called a ‘goose-cap'.

It was a horrible moment. Nowadays I don't suppose that anyone under the age of fifty could have any conception what it was like, because with the arrival of the Bright Young Things in the Roaring Twenties, and the appalling prospect of a second world war, standards crumbled, many illusions perished, and it became fashionable to criticize one's parents and anyone of an older generation. But in my day the vast majority of children still regarded their parents as the fount of all wisdom, and the sudden revelation that one's
own
mother was, to put it crudely, plain stupid, was shocking beyond words. It couldn't
be true and I must be some kind of horrible freak for even
thinking
such a thing: for didn't the Bible say: ‘Honour thy Father and thy Mother that thy days may be long in the land that the Lord thy God giveth thee'? My days couldn't be long at this rate, and for the first time I wished I was a Catholic and could rush off to Confession and be given a penance, and be shriven. Because if I was right about Mother — and I knew very well that I was — then nothing was safe and the very earth under my feet was not solid any more.