Everything I Have Always Forgotten (13 page)

Fortunately, this early evacuation wave was relatively short-lived. Once the Civil Defence Department determined that there was no immediate danger of invasion and that German bombers would not yet reach so far north, the children could go home again. It was established that the early Luftwaffe was busy enough bombing London, Birmingham, Bristol and literally flattening Coventry. Only later did their range increase and they come further North to Liverpool and Birkenhead. A few of the older evacuees even stayed on in the valley and may still be there, or buried nearby.

Certainly, caring for refugee children was a far cry from Mother's youth. When she was teaching me to ride horses, she told me that as a teenager, her mother insisted she ride side-saddle when she ‘rode to hounds' or went fox-hunting. Side-saddle, as required for society ladies, was suicide if you ‘rode hard', jumping hedges, banks and ditches along the way, as did she. There is no way to hold on with your knees, save the small pommel of the side-saddle. You stayed on the horse by balance alone. So she used to make arrangements with one of the young stable boys (certainly not the Head Coachman, he was far too faithful to her mother) to bring a normal saddle to a
rendezvous
beyond the end of the driveway. She would ride out side-saddle to show her mother, then slip to the ground and change saddles as soon as she was out of sight, get a leg-up from the stable boy, tuck in her voluminous skirts so as to sit astride and be off to the Meet. Once the hounds were on a scent, she would be up there with the Master of the Hounds (or rather just behind him, it didn't do to overtake the Master), riding and jumping hell-for-leather. It was a tribute to the landed gentry who rode along behind, that no one mentioned Mother's tricks to her mother! They must have had considerable respect for her daredevil horsemanship, riding as she did like a dashing young fellow.

Now, transplant that rich, spoiled, wilful young lady to the gaunt cold of a stone house in the mountains of Wales, without nursemaid, housemaid, chambermaid or anyone else to do her bidding, save perhaps, briefly and ineffectually, the older Evacuee Children. Totally unaccustomed and unprepared, she rolled up her sleeves, tucked her skirts in her knickers and scrubbed the floors, cooked for a small army and washed and suckled her babies.

Of course, all this was before I was so much as a twinkle in my Parents' eyes, but hearsay and family legend was an integral part of the lore of our existence, just as much as the dog in front of the fire during our story-telling sessions. We collected tales and retold them to such an extent, that Father claimed he could be the origin of a story, but by the time it had made the rounds of his substantial family, it was so totally unrecognizable that he might try telling it himself, only to be scolded by one of his children for misrepresenting the ‘facts'… small wonder I had so much trouble with single-word tests at school. ‘Facts'? What are these things called ‘Facts'?

Father himself gave lectures at the Gresham College in London, in one of which he argued (with considerable logic) that ‘fiction' was much nearer the ‘truth' than ‘non-fiction'. Indeed Gore Vidal also subscribed to the same idea, when justifying his own historical novels. I myself have subscribed to the idea ever since. Anyone who accuses me of skirting the facts, neglects that I am just trying to get nearer The Truth.

XII

HAVEN WITH A SPY

A
fter the untenable fiasco in the bleak mountains of Wales with the poor refugee children, Mother moved back to Gloucestershire, to a house called Barrow Elm, on her brother's estate. There she lived with three, then four and five children as she shared the house with Peter Ustinov's parents, Nadia Benois (the painter) and, with his own tales, Klop Ustinov. Klop was engaged as a spy to befriend suspicious foreigners in London, take them home for the weekend, ply them with good food and drink and see what he could get out of them, frequently speaking their own language (he was fluent in Russian, German, French and of course, English. This resulted in many hilarious stories that he surely embellished, as did his son.

Nowadays, more is known of Klop (his chosen nickname: ‘bedbug' in Russian). Born in Palestine in 1891, his grandmother was an Ethiopian Jew. He served in the Luftwaffe during the First World War, but once Nazism took over, his days in Germany were numbered. He held out as a journalist in Germany as long as possible, because he was already working for MI5 as a spy. Finally, he and his wife escaped to England where he secretly introduced important Germans to British politicians in the hope of galvanizing Chamberlain into an aggressive stance on Hitler. To no avail.

Anyway, at Barrow Elm they had running water and drains, with perhaps even a little help from a village girl, when she could spare the time. Everyone pitched in and worked long hours for little or no pay during those intense years of wartime. In an effort to make food less boring, they exchanged recipes that used the few available ingredients. I imagine that Klop Ustinov's wartime job carried a few perks, since he had to entertain his suspects at home… but who knows? Free whiskey was no good for feeding babies!

One of these tales, recounted by Mother (and since she was living with them at the time, she was getting the stories ‘hot off the press'), told of Klop escorting one of his Russian ‘customers' to the train station in London on a Friday evening to come and stay for a weekend in the country. Klop was an inspired cook and during the week he had scrounged the makings of a lobster thermidor soup. No doubt with food war, it was already remarkable that he managed to obtain any lobster at all, but there would not have been enough to serve half a lobster each, so he had invented a thermidor soup, complete with cognac, cream and cheese. He had placed the soup in a leaky jar and then put it in a hatbox for transport. In the heat of the moment, as he escorted his suspect guest to their first class compartment, he forgot which way up the hatbox was supposed to go. He placed it on the overhead luggage rack, the guest sat below it and Klop sat facing him to engage him in amusing conversation – but he was horrified to see soup dripping out of the hatbox onto his guest's Homburg hat! History does not relate what they had for dinner instead.

Meanwhile, Father had sought mobilization in the army, because he felt guilty at not having served in the First World War, from which whole school classes from the years ahead of him never came back. Robert Graves was one exception who luckily survived. Though five years his senior, he too had been to Charterhouse School (five years ahead of Father) and was first reported ‘missing in action' then, ‘killed in action'. Finally, he was brought back to Britain on a stretcher with only half a lung left, to find accolades in his newspaper obituaries, speaking of the waste of losing such a young talent. Father said that Graves became impossibly arrogant and conceited at that time… but that had worn off by the time I met him. The last time I saw him, he was in his seventies and he out-walked me across Oxford, having developed his half lung to the size of two by sheer willpower and strenuous exercise. He died at ninety.

At 39, Father was deemed too old for action, so he was found a desk job at the Admiralty in London and worked as a fire warden by night. Like many of his contemporaries, after the war, he found it difficult to readjust to peacetime. Once installed in our house on the estuary in North Wales, not only did he wire it for electricity (the 12 volt windmill), but gardened hard, raising vegetables and fruit besides setting two varieties of fish net and night lines to catch fish on the rising tides. He was often down on the sand flats at low tide, cleaning and mending his nets, baiting the nightlines. Sometimes he would catch a nice bass, but most of the time it was plaice (that poor cousin of the Dover sole – I always thought they tasted of the mud in which they lived and fed.)

Grass could grow in the shallow earth that covered the shale, here and there a stunted tree or two, but for a vegetable garden you needed compost and manure. He worked on the quality of the earth for years using horse manure with its bedding straw and seaweed from the beach. He managed to produce many of the things that were unobtainable in the shops, either because of rationing, or because no one produced them and no one asked for them: sweet corn, asparagus, Cos (Romaine) lettuce, beans, peas, artichokes, rhubarb and strawberries.

When he tried to grow berries, the birds immediately devoured them – after all, this was the only fruit garden within many miles. He built a huge wire-mesh cage to keep the birds out and inside produced raspberries, black and red currants and gooseberries. From these fruits, Mother canned and jarred quantities of jams, but since sugar was so severely rationed, it never set and quickly went mouldy. We found them delicious and even claimed to feel a little kick from the fermented fruit.

All of this providing of food cut into his writing day and for the rest of his life he had great trouble finishing anything. He shot rabbits and wild duck. Cartridges for the 12-bore shotguns or the .22 Winchester were expensive and only to be used for bringing home food. Target practice was not allowed, you cannot eat a tin can if you shoot it, but you just might bag that wild duck.

It was my job to burn the waste paper and cardboard down at the high water mark, so I witnessed the vast quantities of his discarded typescripts. The flames would lick hungrily through the painstakingly-filled pages. He would retype each page up to forty times each time it became illegible from his tiny, densely hand-written changes. He once said that his best editor was his bank manager. Once his overdraft hit rock bottom and could go no further, he was forced to send off his current typescript.

The war over, Mother had gone back to painting. Earlier, she had painted landscapes and individual trees. She had an especially sensuous relationship with trees and loved to paint their limbs, as they grew out from their trunks. She told me how, as a little girl, she would climb huge old trees in the park of their home, sit astride great boughs in her long white pantaloons, her white skirts tumbling torn and dirty around her, and piss on the branch, for the sheer sexual pleasure it gave her. Now she turned to the hills and rugged mountains she could see from her studio, painting them in different lights and cloud cover, with and without snow caps. Modestly, she never signed a painting, nor did she ever sell one for her own profit. It was always for some charity or other, usually the Red Cross. Once, as she sat on the low wall of the terrace on the North side of the house sketching the mountains, I asked her why she only painted mountains, never people. I quickly saw why. She rapidly did a sketch of me that showed such utter impatience with human beings, I never asked again.

Later, when I was away at boarding school, she took to going on little trips by herself. By then she had bought a small second-hand 1948 four-seated Hillman convertible. She would set off with her painting materials, a sleeping bag, tent and billycans. Sometimes she would sit in the car to paint mountain ranges, holding her palette and brushes in her left hand and propping the small canvass or sketchbook on the steering wheel. The result, of course, was that the convertible top of one car after another was slashed with strokes of oil paint above the driver's seat.

She told me that, as a young woman, she had been a scout master and taught little village boys how to make a fire in the rain, how to scour pots and pans with the earth and gravel found under a tuft of grass (which served as handle for the scourer), and set up a drying rack made of sticks stuck in the ground for drying them. She taught my youngest sister and me these skills too and I must have been eight or nine when the two of us set off on ponies, with tents, and then rendezvoused with Mother sixty hours later, on the far side of the Snowdonia mountains.

When she went off alone, she would just ask a farmer if she might pitch her tent in the corner of a field (without cows – they become inquisitive and tend to want to join one in bed.) No farmer refused this middle-aged lady with windblown hair. Indeed, they would often come down later to see if she had everything she needed and were duly impressed by her camping skills. She continued in these excursions until she was seventy, by which time her arthritis refused to let her sleep on the ground any more. By then she was painting waterfalls, often clambering down the sides of gorges and sitting in the spray from a cascade. She seized the movement of water with a few quick strokes of her brush, giving the impression of a Japanese sketch.

She also used her little car to bring home bales of hay for the horses, piling them on the open trunk lid and up over the rear window. Inevitably hayseeds fell into the rubber seal around the glass window and with a little rain, they sprouted in a trim fringe of very green grass… I once saw Father carefully clipping this grass with his best beard-cutting scissors – saying he was just giving it a hair cut “so that Mother can safely see out of the back window”. A sense of the surreal was happily shared by both of them, though their blazing rows intimidated me and to this day I cannot stand altercations. Anyway, she never looked in her rear-view mirror – the unfolding developments ahead were always more than enough to take her full attention. Horses do not have rear-view mirrors, so why should these horseless carriages or motor cars?

XIII

RAIN, SEX, SCHOOL

E
ndless rainy days, before I could read, brought marathon introspection and self- exploration. Sex and sexuality were, of course, black magic mysteries to me. With no television to give me examples of ‘standard' behaviour, my imagination ran amok like a snipe that breaks cover with wild, rapid zigzags up into the sky to confuse its hunters. Of course I had no concept of what sex was for, but I was acutely aware that certain images and sensations aroused me in a pleasant way. I don't know when I learned to read, but I was a late starter. Certainly I could read and write by the time I was sent away to school at seven, so this period was probably when I was four or five.