Authors: Malcolm Macdonald
Strange Music
Table of Contents
The Dower House Trilogy by Malcolm Macdonald
Friday, 15 December 1949 â January 1950
THE DOWER HOUSE *
STRANGE MUSIC *
PROMISES TO KEEP *
Malcolm Macdonald
for Richard
all of whose dials go up to 1011
On truth and memory:
But my dear Bosie, it is so vulgar to remember events exactly as they happened, especially as most of them happen by accident. In recounting them we must often (I would say always and quite literally)
re
-count. You say we were eight on that evening? Yet you can name only six! So of what possible value were Tomniddy and Tomnoddy? Re-
counting
, however, is but the beginning of our enterprise. Your remarks on the sublimity of the brushstrokes in the handkerchief of that Velázquez portrait, delivered that same evening when you were still sober, are not worthy of record when set against your exquisite analysis of the man's countenance â which, alas, you confided to me a full month later (and more than full of that excellent ChaËteau d'Yquem). So I shall demote the handkerchief to some other occasion and instead show in my little memoir how you soared like Icarus before he fell. (The presentiment will not be lost upon our readers.)
And thus it shall be with every facet of that memorable evening on the lake in particular and our exquisite lives in general: the dullness of what-actually-happened shall be buffed away to reveal the sublimely glistening jewel of our lives as they
are
(when the pestilential detail that dulls them is no more).
Eric Brandon â private communication dated 30 August 1968 (in a parody of Oscar Wilde)
A: Head Lad's Cottage: Felix Breit, 37 (German-born leading European sculptor; survivor of Mauthausen concentration camp), Angela, 29 (German-born electronic recording expert with the BBC, survivor of Ravensbrück camp) and newborn daughter Pippin; also Faith Bullen-ffitch, 34 (publishing executive at Manutius Press and Felix's ex-lover). They later buy and convert the Tithe Barn â the ecclesiastical-looking building in the foreground.
B: Tudor-style Victorian annexe: Adam and Sally Wilson (34, 35 â architects and co-founders of the Dower House community; partners of Tony Palmer â below), Theo, 2, and Rachel,
C: Upper floor of genuine Tudor remnant of original manor house: Todd Ferguson (British Rail transport manager) and Gracie (his wife, both in their thirties), Betty, 8, Charley, 5, and Samantha, 1.
D: Main House ground floor front and ground floor of Tudor remnant: Eric Brandon, 25 (children's author), Isabella, 27 (Vogue editor), and Calley, 1.
E: Main House first floor front: Arthur Prentice (BBC TV cameraman), May (his wife, both in their thirties), Sam, 6, Hannah, 4, and Frederick, 1.
F: Entire attic floor: Willard A Johnson, 39 (American-born, high-flying London architect), Marianne, 25 (Swedish-born architect of aristocratic lineage), Siri, 2, and Virgil <1.
G: Ground and first floor back: Tony Palmer, 32 (architect, co-founder of the community and partner of Adam and Sally â above), Nicole, 29, his French-born wife, and Andrew, 2.
H: (In the gate-lodge at the end of the drive â not shown): Terence Lanyon, 34 (economist at LSE), Hilary, 30, his wife, and Maynard, 1.
Monday, 25 April 1949
âSam! Charley! Get down off that wall!' Angela pegged out the last of the nappies in what had been the wall-fruit garden of the Dower House. âNot that way!' she added. âCan't you see all those rusty nails? Go along to the old air-raid shelter and slide down there. If your mothers come out and catch you, I wouldn't like to be in your shoes â which are disgusting, by the way!'
The wall-fruit garden, long since denuded of the cordons and espaliers for which it was named, had been the Dower House community's nappy-drying area since 1948, when Isabella Brandon had complained about nappies being hung on shrubbery and trees all over the garden. The mothers replied that nappies
had
to dry and air in the sun and so eight lines were duly stretched wall-to-wall in the old fruit garden. Isabella conceded with ill grace until, later that year, she gave birth to Calley and then accepted the arrangement gladly. On the first occasion she used her line, Eric hung up a washable condom beside their nappies, with a note:
Useless item going cheap â one penny
.
By April 1949, when Pippin was born to Angela and Felix (the community's first baby to be born under the brand-new National Health Service), they were already calling the collective of children The Tribe, which now numbered fourteen if you included Tommy Marshall, the son of Lena, a local girl who had been left pregnant by a
GI
who never made it up Omaha Beach; she lived in with the Palmers and helped with the housekeeping. Tommy was going on six.
The Tribe had powers that even Betty Ferguson, the eldest, did not possess on her own. When one of the tyres on the old Armstrong-Siddeley chassis went flat, they stood around in engrossed silence, watching three of the fathers try and fail to dismount the wheel so that it could be brought to the Dormer Green Garage for Jim Churchill to repair. It took The Tribe three days to succeed where the men had failed.
The Tribe was a tidal swarm of children who, on a typical day, invaded the Johnsons' top-floor apartment for drawing sessions (otherwise called scribbling) on the floor, the coffee table, and Willard's drawing board if he was away at the Curzon Street office . . . then swept onward to the Breits to make sculptures in modelling clay of beasts unidentifiable to adults . . . then descended on the Brandons for dressing-ups and impromptu dramas that involved cowboys, Injuns, South American slave plantations, Flash Gordon, and Tarzan and Jane â all with a fair helping of well-simulated violence . . . and then, with the smallest break for lunch, on to dens in the coppice for stalking polar bears and tigers . . . or â well, you imagine it and they did it.
The Tribe was a self-disciplining boot camp, as their far more liberal parents were amazed to discover. Anyone who got âout of line,' as Willard put it, would be thrust outside the group, ignored, allowed to share nothing, until the crime was expiated. Children who would howl at the lightest ticking-off from their parents took their punishment from their peers in stoic silence. They knew very well what worked â and what didn't.
âIsn't it the sort of thing we talked about that night we spun off the Autobahn on the way to Bielefeld?' Adam said to Willard one evening in May â the first warm evening of what had been a rather dreary spring.
They had brought out an assortment of war-surplus camp chairs and folding tables and spread them under the weeping ash in the backyard. One by one, as the daytime cowboys and squaws were bathed, powdered, pyjama-ed, read to, sung to, and generally lulled to sleep, half-exhausted parents sauntered out to join the grown-up Tribe â or tribal elders â to rebuild something of their shattered adulthood.
âThis isn't that different from America,' Willard replied. âWe were always in and out of everybody's home in a housing lot of â maybe â twenty . . . twenty-five units. Except, I guess . . .'
âYes?'
âExcept people were a whole lot more mobile. By the time I was ten almost all those homes were owned by people who hadn't been there when I was just two. So this is probably better.'
âWe won't be able to
afford
to move away from here,' May said, quickly adding, âeven if we wanted to. The rent!'
âThe low rent we pay here should help you save the deposit on a house,' Eric pointed out.
âIs that what
you're
doing?' Nicole asked.
âNope.'
Sally turned to Willard. âSo you couldn't really have formed a Tribe in America â not like our children. I mean, it wouldn't have had the sort of permanence our kids have.'
â
Beh-eh-eh-eh
. . .' Eric bleated.
Sally rounded on him. âI say
kids
, OK? My father said
kiddiwinks
and I say
kids
.'
