Read the book: «Bertie, May and Mrs Fish»

1 HOMEFIELD

After wartime my father sends home bales of midnight-blue and plum-red velvet for downstairs curtains, a cinecamera and roll-down screen, two black bearskin coats, a touring Bentley and a dinner service for twelve of creamy rippling Copenhagen china hand-painted with wildflowers.

He writes to my mother … Now we’ll have some damned good fun.

And that’s what he says when he is home on leave and a thousand daffodil and narcissus bulbs arrive from Holland in plywood boxes. He spills whitewash from a blue speckled tin bucket in a half-moon arc from the coal shed oak to the damson tree by the bridge on the Rushy Brook stream and marks off half an acre of Homefield and shouts … Mind out of the way you bloody child … as I run over his white line. I am four years old and not afraid.

A post and rails goes up along the marker line. Joe Rummings slams the iron crowbar in the ground. Griff drops spiked ash stakes in the holes and swings an oak mallet. The Ayrshire milking herd chew cud in Homefield and watch nails hammered into split ash rails.

My father walks about with a box. He swings up one arm and throws a handful of bulbs that spray the pale blue autumn sky. Then he is gone.

My mother kneels for days in the grass and jabs a trowel where each bulb fell. Turf splits and she drops one in and smacks the trowel down once twice three times and shuts each grass lid.

Daffodils grow and flower and lean and break in the winds that blow across our farm in the Cotswold hills. In springtime I snap off stalks and my father arrives home and shouts … Pick the broken buggers first old girl … must experiment using your brain one of these fine days … bloody east wind.

Fifty years later I am by Juno beach on the French Normandy coast where his Inns of Court invasion troops landed in the Second World War. Dune grass blows east and my father’s wartime padre, code name Sunray, strides past in white cassock flapping in the breeze and a Hans Holbein black hat. Soldiers hold up embroidered flags on polished wooden poles tipped by fluted steel knives. The Union Jack and the French flag lie over a carved memorial stone beside a country road. War veterans wear medals and hold flags embroidered combatants. Four hundred of us stand with French families in the sun and the Inns of Court regimental band plays tunes from Cavalleria Rusticana.

An Inns of Court officer steps up to the dais and speaks. ‘For the sake of freedom – a suicidal mission – our men never gave up – covered a wider area than any other military unit – with this act of dedication we bridge the gap between this world and the next.’

Down go the flowers. Wreath after wreath. Poppies, marigolds, daisies, phlox, poppies, daisies.

A soldier at attention by the memorial stone falls forward on his face on the grass. Two others drag his body behind the loudspeaker van. From the ranks another steps forward to take his place. The regimental band play my father’s favourite hymn: ‘Praise My Soul the King of Heaven’ … and the padre reads, ‘We meet in the presence of Almighty God to commemorate this day.’

Nearly all of us weep. I remember my father, with his white hair round his bald head and wearing green corduroys and a navy-blue jersey, coming past the corner of top barn, arms held open wide saying … Fancy our meeting … when times are so fleeting … to what do I owe the great honour of your presence on this perfect summer morning … what say a small celebration is in order … a cup of Mr Bournville’s famous chocolate lightly stirred into fresh milk … agree … and I can hear my mother’s voice call … Any shopping wanted from Cheltenham … I’m taking a broken bridle down … I’ll be home by lunchtime.

The dedication of the Normandy landing regimental memorial stone is over. Soldiers march to a farm courtyard in the village of Graye-sur-Mer. Champagne and chocolate biscuits are handed out. Chocolate melts in my fingers and a French lady says to me, ‘I remember the war very well, madame, we were very hungry, oui ça c’est certain, mais …’ She shrugs and smiles. We look into each other’s eyes and down at the melting chocolate she offers me and we laugh and she says, ‘Il faut rire, madame, we must laugh savez-vous.’

I say, ‘Oui, merci, it is true.’

The mayor of Graye-sur-Mer says to me, ‘When I was a child I must go with no shoes. Certain things are not remembered. My family are going in the fields at night for food. It is food for cows. I do not know the names.’

I say, ‘Turnips, swedes, mangolds.’

He says, ‘C’est ça. If they see us the enemy shoot.’

I say, ‘Is there nothing left in the shops for you to buy?’

And he says, ‘Pour les collaborateurs … bien sûr, madame, there is everything.’

A Frenchman in a black beret reaches up and embraces me and says, ‘Madame, I live at Jerusalem Crossroads, a hamlet. The British soldiers come. We give them wine and flowers and tell them “Thank you.” We hear aeroplanes. A soldier calls, ‘It is Yanks, OK, OK, yellow – yellow.’ The soldier quickly spreads yellow silk squares on the two vehicles. A yellow smoke goes up into the sky. The driver says, ‘It is for the Yanks to see we are les amis.’ The American planes fly over firing. I run away with another boy. When I return, all Jerusalem Crossroads and all the soldiers are dead. I think I am lucky to be here with you today. It is a great honour and I say thank you, for your father. You are proud of him? I think so.’

British officer veterans drink French champagne and laugh and tell me, ‘We shouldn’t laugh, we oughtn’t to.’

I say, ‘Why not?’

They say, ‘We’re remembering hunting a Hun along Juno beach. Bloody hell he ran. We got him with the flail tank chains.’

I ask, ‘What are flail tank chains for?’

One says, ‘For mine-sweeping. Tank bars on the front swing the chains and find mines hidden under sand.’

Outside the farm courtyard I stand in wildflowers and lean on a sunny stone wall and look at a field of pale-cream Charolet cattle and hum ‘Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring’, and hear my father’s high tenor voice descant. I see him walk across our farmyard past a downstairs window and look in. I am piling up pennies and half-pennies on his desk and Gigi is playing on the radiogram. He shouts at the window … Turn that bloody man off … turn that man off … do you hear me … at once. Maurice Chevalier is singing … Thank ’eaven for leetle girls … for leetle girls grow bigger every day … thank ’eaven for leet-le girls … I open the window and he stammers … I w-will n-not … r-repeat n-not … h-have d-damned c-collaborateurs in m-my h-home.

I turn off the radiogram and he calls from the hall … That’s m-more like it … the so-and-so should be locked up by rights … one first-class slippery customer … or after the invasion we’d have caught him fair and square. Hey-ho … you keep an eagle eye out for cowardly types when your turn comes old girl … that’s my advice.

He closes the window and says … I hear the bastard’s filthy rich these days … three cheers for the ignorant hoi polloi … now who’s next on parade? What say we bring in the beloved horses and give them their tea … jump to it … enough fraternising with the enemy for you today. Did I tell you in confidence I risked the Lion of Judah over Dewpond sliprails … went at them like an Eleventh Hussar trooper … took off from his hocks … only had him in a rubber snaffle … mouth soft as a baby’s bottom.

His brilliant blue eyes look my way and his finger taps his lips … Mum’s the word … shh-hh … if I am called upon to make a confession I shall simply say to your mother … not a hope in hell of stopping a young horse who’s made up his mind to jump a fence … you’ll know that as well as I do. He and I walk up the yard and he sings … Chirri-birri-bin … chirri-birri-bin … I love you so-o …

At Five Acre gate he calls the horses … Come on … come on, girls and boys … teatime … teatime …

I climb the elmwood bars and say … What is a collaborateur …

He says … Not now … not now … keep your mind on one thing at a time … look out … here they come … a fine sight if ever I saw one … open the damned gate … get a move on … don’t stand there coffee-housing like the bloody French … off the bars … I am in no mood to pay for new hinges … that’s more like it … have a leg up onto Glory Boy … then lead on. The rest will follow … if we’re lucky.

I ride bareback up Rickyard Lane astride my father’s tall chestnut and look over the Cotswold grey-stone wall built on Calfpen bank to our hills and woods. He pulls fistfuls of linseed barrel nuts out of his green corduroy trouser pockets. Loose horses follow and push and shove to nuzzle his pockets. We pass the twin stone barns tall as churches and turn down into the farmyard.

My mother’s Irish money buys our Elizabethan farm in 1941, the second summer of World War Two. My father’s Inns of Court regiment is fighting a mock battle on the Cotswold hills and from a high point he looks down and sees what he thinks is a small village or a hamlet in a hollow. He tells his armoured car driver … Head downhill … we’ll make a quick recce … His car roars down Homefield and he finds the deserted farm.

A doll’s house face under triple gables looks at a farmyard circle of stone barns and stables spreading to cattle sheds and lanes. A front door path is between two green squares of lawn edged by sprawling pink roses on a drystone wall. The garden swerves away past a cherry tree and south around two apple trees to the wicket gate at the damson tree by the Rushy Brook stream. The house faces north because Elizabethans believe flies spread the plague and sun shining on windows attracts flies. They are wrong. Xenopsylla cheopsis, the rat flea carries the plague and fleas are brought to England by black rat hosts from China.

He telephones my mother at her Corps headquarters at Camberley south-west of London and says … God willing I’ve found the Bears a home.

My mother has joined the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry – FANYs – created in 1907 to train English girls to gallop on horseback onto battlefields and give first aid to wounded soldiers and carry the injured to field hospitals in horse-drawn ambulances. In the 1930s FANYs become a mechanised Women’s Transport Service. Upper class girls drive and service transport lorries and motorbikes and chauffeur army personnel and chant:

I wish my mother could see me now,With a grease gun under my car,Filling the differentialEre I start for the sea afar,A-top a sheet of frozen iron, in cold that would make you cry.

I used to be in Society once,Danced and hunted and flirted once,Had white hands and complexions once,Now I am a FANY.

She says to me when she is an old lady … I was never lost or behind schedule driving my brigadier-general … even in the blackout on the very long journeys with no car lights, when we went from the north of England all the way down south to Devon.

My father telephones her FANY HQ in summer 1941 and tells her … Steal a tank of petrol and concoct some excuse to drive down here p.d.q. This is a land of milk and honey. I give you my word. Take the London – Oxford A40 road past Burford and Northleach. On the ridge look left-handed across open country. A single clump of trees on the far horizon is the farm boundary. Stay on the A40. Look for a red iron gate in a line of beeches. If you fetch up at Seven Springs crossroads you’ve gone too far. The drive is half a mile of bloody awful potholes. If I’m right – and I’m damned sure I am – this is a home for us for ever. Those old boys knew how to build to last. No flies on the Elizabethans … and no flies on us. We’ll be sheltered on all sides. The Almighty had his eye carefully on our future when the War Office boffins planned today’s regimental exercise.

In their khaki uniforms in his armoured car they dash across the farm. My mother says … It all looks so terribly neglected … could there be something wrong with the land … I wish I knew more about these things … the Valley is nicely sheltered for horses … and the house does have lovely proportions.

White stones scatter the hilly land. Fences are broken walls or cut and laid hedges grown wild into tall bullfinch thorns. Gaps in walls are wide enough to drive a tank through. Gates and stable doors hang off hinges. Water is pumped by a windmill reservoir two miles away at Needlehole at the far end of the farm. Purple thistles and yellow poisonous charlock flower on grassland. Nettles spread inside barn doorways. Wild cats stare from stable drains. Rats run along house walls. In the drawing room a soldiers’ campfire has burnt a hole in the ceiling.

My father says … We will rise above any minor problems … we’re not about to start playing windy buggers. Not now we’ve found this heavenly place … quite right we’re not … no siree. We’ll invite your bank manager to a slap-up lunch at the Cavalry Club. A bank manager lunching with a bloody colonel in Piccadilly … he will think he is going up in the world. We’ll never look back … you mark my words.

In September 1940 the Blitz begins and a year later my mother’s Irish Georgian furniture arrives at the farm in a horsebox with her motorbike-sidecar. My father has gone north to Yorkshire to train his Inns of Court lawyer soldiers – the Devil’s Own – to fight like hell when their time comes.

Her lights are paraffin oil lamps and she cooks on a knee-high coal range with a hot iron square over one oven. Her heating is paraffin stoves until she hammers a nail into a wall to hang a picture in the drawing room. My father comes home and says … Who’d have thought a nail going through a wall like butter would produce a magnificent Elizabethan open fireplace … and he sings … Praise my soul the King of heaven …

She sells her blue Rover and her motorbike and buys a Ford van painted British racing green and has her initials stencilled in gold on both doors and her Pytchley Hunt Point-to-Point Ladies Race silver fox leaping through a horseshoe is screwed on the bonnet.

My father is frustrated soldiering in England between 1940 and 1944. His Eleventh Hussar cavalry brother officers are fighting on the North African front. He is a colonel training lawyers to be soldiers. He writes home from Yorkshire barracks:

I can’t tell you how much I miss you and our lovely home and wish I was there to help … and then I can’t help wishing I was out there in the hunt for the Boche … so I don’t know what I want. I worry all the time you have too much to do and work too hard. Find some woman to help in the kitchen … or else it’s no fun when I come home on leave.

Never thought you would get the rye and the beans planted. A week with fair weather and the land warm with no frost and our seeds and wheat will all germinate and we shall be established for the winter. The new saw bench means you will be warm. Get lots of wood cut up. Did I remind you no one must touch the machine until covered under the Workman’s Compensation Act in our insurance policy. If someone cuts their hand off it is liable to be expensive!

I miss you and everything so very much and long to be home doing something useful. Have been on a damned badly run armoured battle. Sent up by the General on to the enemy’s position to view the attack and give an opinion. Such a bad show that I am at a loss what to say or do. Came back before the end in disgust cold and disheartened. All my love from your own lonely Big Bear.

She props a prayer written in Gothic script and illuminated gold and blue capitals on the kitchen dresser – May He support us all the Day long … Until the Shadows lengthen and Evening comes – and reads his next letter:

… As it was my birthday I was allowed by the Priest to choose hymns for our Regimental Armistice Day Service. We sang ‘New Every Morning Is the Love’, ‘Lead Us Heavenly Father Lead Us’, ‘Now Thank We All Our God’. I had the ‘Nunc Dimittis’ put in … the best of all those things and never heard unless one goes in the evening. I wished my Bear was with me at this time.

She learns to farm. Two thousand acres. A mile of valley. Horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, poultry. Snow in winter above the lintels of the downstairs windows. Her fingers swell. Chilblains. Long white kid gloves are wrapped round a leaky pipe in her bedroom knotted at the fingers. She has a lot to learn that no one has taught her. Accidents happen.