Dearest Jane... (15 page)

[Mid 1980s]

Your brother is here and seems in good form. He is putting on weight, drives a Land Rover and discusses property in terms of millions. Long may it last!

The Miller’s House

[1987]

Twitch came down for lunch: he has taken to dressing like an underprivileged tramp again, on the grounds that by having only one set of clothes he saves time as he does not have to think of what he is going to wear, there being no alternative. He looks like becoming embroiled with the Hobbs family. I don’t know if that is a good thing.

Lupin was to become a director of John Hobbs Antiques Ltd. The dramas of the notorious Hobbs family absorbed my brother for decades to come
.

The Miller’s House

25 October 1987

Charlie came to lunch in a new car, a sports Audi; I hope he will drive it with suitable restraint. He talks big stuff about money and is quite the budding tycoon.

Lupin fully understood what it was to be a dearly loved son. As to what it might mean to be a deeply loving parent . . . Who was the long-suffering mother responsible for these children? ‘Look what I’ve produced!’ was one of her proud observations, often countered by ‘Oh come off it, child!’

Now you can meet this indomitable lady
.

The Old Damp Ruin

Much Shivering

Berks

9 December 1980

Dearest Jane,

I hope Nidnod arrived safely. Look after her carefully and watch her diet. Not too much liquid, please. Tomorrow is our 33rd Wedding Anniversary – a long haul with the traditional ball and chain but not entirely without its compensations!

Best love,
xx D

Cynthia and Roger. Nidnod and Twig (my mother’s name for her husband). My mother and father. I put my mother first, because this is her chapter.

By the time my parents met in 1947 – introduced by a mutual friend in a London nightclub – Roger (thirty-seven) and Cynthia (twenty-six) had already lived through the most formative phase of their lives, the Second World War. But on that evening in peacetime London, Cupid prepared his bow.

Captivated by Cynthia’s prettiness, warmth and vivacity, it took my father just six weeks to propose. Roger’s charm, worldliness, wit and handsome looks put him streets ahead of any former suitors. Cynthia was entranced. They walked up the aisle of St Paul’s, Knightsbridge, in December that year and following a brief honeymoon settled into their first home, 25 Launceston Place, Kensington.

After nearly twenty nearly years as an impecunious bachelor Army officer, accommodated in a multitude of ‘billets’, including prison camps, Roger had acquired domestic management skills. It was he who drew up lists of household essentials for their London house, from a coal scuttle to a wardrobe, and sent these inventories in loving letters to his fiancée Cynthia at her Dorset home.

Roger was an immediate hit with Cynthia’s parents, her mother in particular. It was a joy for my grandmother to have a son-in-law in prospect who, in common with herself, was intelligent and cultured. Roger also gained heroic status when, by ingenious means, he removed a bat which had flown in and attached itself to my grandmother’s bed. This he did by sandwiching the bat between two squash rackets before releasing it through the window. My grandparents were privileged with their own squash court.

Cynthia had to be presented to her future in-laws in London. My father would have prepared his fiancée for the glacial gaze of her future mother-in-law and the likelihood of discomforting comment. His father, mild, genial and kindly, softened this and subsequent meetings, and welcomed my mother into his family. Did sweet young Cynthia meet my paternal grandmother’s criteria as a daughter-in-law? Not on your life.

Cynthia’s family home was a rambling, stone farmhouse by the River Stour in Marnhull, the village where Thomas Hardy set
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
– a romantic detail not lost on my mother. Always enchanted by fantasy and poetry, she had a flowing facility for both and throughout her life was prone to break into long recitals at unexpected moments, veering between the divine and the disastrous, applauded more often by audiences other than her family. ‘A prophet is never honoured in his own country’, a biblical quote she sometimes cast before us. My mother’s powerful emotions found their ideal outlet in writing her own poetry; it was not a passing phase of her youth. The intensity of her poems did not find favour with my father but my mother had sufficient imagination and talent to write affecting verse that was, on occasion, delightfully coloured by her own humour. Like her mother, she was a dab hand at watercolours and pastels.

Blessed with the kind of country upbringing found in the classic children’s books, Cynthia grew up on a farm, with the freedom to run wild, roaming the countryside with ponies and dogs – watched over by loving and accessible parents. It was an idyll that no later phase of her existence would ever quite match up to. Yet, as in most stories, there were shadows, and challenges to be met. Her unstable and erratic middle sister, Barbara, or Boo – ‘a real character’ by the time I knew her, but in Dorset days, a whole cartload of trouble – was often a draining and disturbing presence in her family.

Cynthia was the youngest, prettiest and most spirited of three daughters. A decorated officer in the Royal Scots Greys, landowner, farmer, Master of the Portman Hunt and a dedicated member of local councils and committees, Harry Denison-Pender was her loyal and doting father. He was also possessed of a famously fiery temper, and some of its sparks were inherited by my mother. Her humour, sensitivity and imagination were her bequest from her gentle but spirited mother, Doris.

As a girl, with nine indoor staff at one point, at her home, Strangways, Cynthia was not compelled to roll up her sleeves – except to groom her pony. The war altered all that. Her wartime jobs included being a FANY (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry), working as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross and being employed as draughtswoman at an Aircraft factory – a sixteen-mile bike ride there and back every day. A young man she was in love with had been killed in the war. By 1945, she had seen and experienced much, yet retained a kind of youthful naïvety that she never quite lost. It was a part of her charm. By the time my father swept her up, she was ready to be a wife and to do all she could to make a happy life and home for him.

Newly married, in their own little house in Kensington, the continuation of rationing meant food and very many essentials were still scarce, but love, laughter and friends were in plentiful supply. In those days, there was no question of Cynthia working, other than as wife, and soon, as mother to me, born in 1949. There was a nanny and some domestic help. Labour was absurdly cheap and readily available.

One day, before I was born, my mother walked through Kensington Palace Gardens with tears pouring down her face. She had understood from my father that he might have a brain tumour and have only six months to live. Roger was suffering from a period of bad headaches – they were entirely genuine. The brain tumour, mercifully, was not. It was Cynthia’s initiation into a troubled zone – Roger’s lifelong concern with the symptoms of his physical health, but probably, quite often, expressions of psychological difficulties. These anxieties always received my mother’s sympathy and she unfailingly took them seriously even when they aroused exasperation.

Fevered brows, aches and pains were never dismissed in our family. Bed was always encouraged as a remedy. Looking back, I cannot think of a family whose combined numbers have spent more daylight hours in bed than my own. My mother was a caring nurse and forty years on, when my father’s health was truly failing, he referred to her as ‘Nurse Dillwater’ or ‘The Minder’.

My parents hankered after the countryside. It would be much more convenient for my father’s work to live outside London within easier reach of racecourses. Everyone started to flourish when Roger, Cynthia and baby Jane moved from smoggy London to Hampshire – Barclay House, Yateley.

In 1952 my mother acquired her first car, a silver Hillman Minx NJJ 166 – and also a son, the golden apple of her eye, Charles. Five years later, little sister Louise arrived on the scene. An utterly dependable and competent housewife, my mother was busy with all of us and the task of organizing our domestic staff who became like extended family members. My mother was proud of her DIY talents for fixing machines – ‘It’s a special knack.’ She was the one to mend the hoover, not my cerebral father.

Fun-loving though she was, my mother carried the aura of one who is constantly engaged in pressing activities. With appreciative affection, it was at that stage that my father christened her ‘The Buzzer’. Yet her frantic energy exhausted her. Her frequent exclamation (unacceptable today) was ‘I’ve been working like a black all morning. I’m out on my feet!’ The antidote to her nervous energy was riding in the open countryside. There was nothing to compare with the ‘rapport’, as my mother called it, between rider and horse – or, as she also loved to say, being ‘
d’accord
’ with any animal. When my mother was in a position to take up hunting again, the reviving effects of riding took on a different aspect. Her adrenalin levels soared. There was palpable sigh of relief from my father when each hunting season ended, which can be felt in his letters.

Horses were at the centre of the lives of both my parents but in entirely separate spheres: my father wrote of racing and my mother rode to hounds.

The ignition key to most conversations at home was my mother. Her loquacity was considerable. She rose like a trout to the bait of the teasing of her sharp-witted husband. Her adventurous spirit was always leading her into minor scrapes. My father loved dining out on her escapades, with exaggerated invention. ‘But you’ve got it completely wrong, Roger!’ expostulated my mother, whose own anecdotal accounts might be much repeated. She too relished the fun of fabrication and should anyone question her veracity: ‘What does it matter? Don’t spoil a good story!’

In those halcyon days of early childhood, I remember my mother as affectionate, attractive and fun. How much I loved her company, particularly when I had her to myself.

A tomboy in sensible trousers, climbing trees and riding fearlessly, I was not. My mother found herself with a quaint little chatterbox of a child, who preferred indoors to outside, obsessed with dressing up and far too interested in what the grown-ups were doing for her own good. Enchanted by her mother’s femininity, that daughter would hide in her wardrobe rustling with fur coats, evening dresses and Ascot outfits – or creep between the pink damask curtains of the forbidden territory of her dressing table to sample deliciously scented potions and creams.

Meanwhile, little brother Lupin – then known as Charlie B – manoeuvred his toy cars around the nursery floor, smiling engagingly and providing no problems for anyone. Our later and younger sister added a new pleasure as the baby of the household. I was very fond of them but as their conversational skills were not to develop for another twenty years, their company was not noticeably stimulating.

‘Go and ask your mother if she’s up for a lark,’ my father would ask of a summer’s afternoon. Picnic packed in the car, family dog Turpin’s tail wagging, we would set off to Finchampstead woods. Hide-and-seek followed tea from the thermos and sausages sizzled on my mother’s paraffin camping stove, which once nearly ignited a forest fire. A fire engine hoved into view and our mother was given a good dressing down. ‘Perfectly ridiculous. I had things completely under control. Damn it all, I used to be a girl guide,’ she exclaimed as the firemen drove away.

My mother, irretrievably known as Nidnod, gathered a few extra bonus points in the nickname stakes for certain tendencies. They need no embellishment: ‘The Minister of Misinformation’ and ‘Mrs Malaprop’, which she graciously accepted. Finally, one day when we had been guided round a historic house by a female volunteer whose cut-glass tones were a match for the Queen, my mother pressed a tip into our guide’s hand, declaring in her own resonant tones: ‘So lovely to have been taken round by a person of our calibre.’ From that moment, my mother had yet another name – the P.O.C. or Person of Our Calibre.

The humour of our parents was poles apart. ‘Having a sense of the ridiculous’ was a shared standard to be met, the highest comic accolade that could be paid by either of them, but their definitions of ‘ridiculous’ did not always coincide. ‘Do laugh!’ my mother would cry, even though my father would sometimes admonish her for ‘taking things so terribly seriously’. ‘The world is a tragedy to those who feel, a comedy to those who think,’ quoted my father. ‘Your poor mother falls into the former category.’ I was at times in sympathy with my mother.

‘Remember I was head girl of my school, Jane. I’m not completely C3!’ my mother frequently reminded me, her testing teenage daughter, in the 1960s. If a squeak of fear escaped me in the car as she overtook as oncoming traffic roared towards us, it was, ‘For goodness sake, girl, I drove an ambulance in the blackout during the Blitz.’ The further the war receded into the far distance, the more my mother tended to romanticize it as the most exciting period of her life. The older she became, the greater the number of boyfriends and fiancées who had apparently attended her in her youth. The past became ever more golden as the shadows deepened.

How lucky I was to have experienced the very best of my mother as a little girl. She always endeavoured to be scrupulously fair with her children and it was not until I was eleven that some small incident revealed to me that Charlie B held the master key to my mother’s heart. Devastated at the time, I never held this preference against my amiable brother. He never abused his prime position then, even if he was to misuse himself in the years to come. My mother suffered much on this account, which became a regular aspect of divisions between our parents. My father was to write to me: ‘Your mother loves her son not wisely but too well.’ Now, the bottle was added to my mother’s recreational repertoire.