To Run Across the Sea (3 page)

‘Doesn’t Dick mind?’

‘Mind, why should he? He doesn’t dance and he realises I have to have some sort of break. Well, I mean it’s only normal isn’t it?’

Later I heard the gossip: that she was the target of village adulterers, who were encouraged by Dick, her complaisant husband.

I questioned Dorothea as to why she felt she had to ride, mentioning that, according to village opinion, the horse was a bad one, with the habit of tripping over its legs.

‘It’s an old jumper,’ she said. ‘It’s not so much its legs as its back. It’s hit the deck a few times.’

‘They were telling me you were a member of one of the Cloate families, whatever they mean by that.’

‘It’s a sort of clan,’ she said. ‘The thing they have in Scotland. Dick and I belong to it. About half the village used to be Cloates, but there’s only five families left now. They say only the Cloates were allowed to ride in the old days, but they say anything.’

‘What else do you do beside ride horses?’

‘Well, nothing really. We’re supposed to help each other, but that’s a laugh. Really it’s more a question of keeping in touch. You sometimes get Cloate people who’ve gone overseas writing home. I suppose they feel lonely out there. Maybe you write two or three letters and then it drops.’

‘Nothing else?’

‘We have a sort of get-together in August. There used to be about fifty of us, but now it’s down to half that. A lot of these things are dying out. I mean, times change.’

The information Dorothea provided was vague, but one interesting aspect of the Cloate personality emerged—the clan’s attitude to education. Where their menfolk were concerned they saw schooling only as a means to an end. This end was usefulness and self-sufficiency. Boys took what the primary school had to offer, moving on as soon as possible to the education provided by life. In the old days, Dorothea had heard, a Cloate would build his own house. The function of a girl, however, was to please. If a girl was plain and dull, there was nothing to be done, but if she showed promise—beauty, even wit—no sacrifice was too great to develop her potential and place her on the road to success. Then she would be packed off to a boarding school—of an unassuming, yet rather special kind—in Woodford, London E11, where a village girl would be subjected to a process of transformation, so that at its end she would be hardly recognisable, even to her own family.

First impressions often mislead. My original view of Long Crendon was of a poverty-stricken, backward Essex village, of the kind often described as ‘unspoilt’ because there was no money for necessary improvements. Every roof, whether thatched or otherwise, carried a television aerial, but that meant nothing. Only a quarter of the houses had bathrooms, or even inside lavatories, and less than half were connected to the main water supply or the sewer. Two houses, including the Rancho Grande, and the Pied Bull—most successful of the pubs—had central heating; otherwise, when the frost set in, coal fires burned, as ever, in small grates. The locals pretended contempt for luxuries city-dwellers everywhere took for granted. Some actually boasted of leaving their windows open through the interminable Essex winter. The fact that Long Crendon remained on the surface as it was, was a matter of stubborn conservatism and resistance to change, rather than economics. Yet a hidden transformation was in progress. In 1943 the American Allies had built an important base at Effingham, some five miles away; since then, despite all local claims to a preference for the hard but worthy life, self-indulgence and luxury were making their stealthy appearance.

The Americans offered to employ every civilian in the area capable of holding down a job. They paid well and they were considerate, almost over-tolerant employers. Dorothea’s Dick was one of the many who benefited from their generosity. He had been considered unemployable after his accident, but as soon as he was able to get about he was taken on at the base as a timekeeper, an occupation for which nimbleness was not required. For some time Dorothea had kept him out of sight, but one day she brought him to see me, prematurely wizened and sitting askew on a pony he controlled with one arm. The story was that while working 12 years before in an agricultural smithy, the prototype of a new combine harvester had run amok, snatched him up, neutered him, torn off a forearm, an ear and most of one foot. He and Dorothea had been married a matter of weeks when the accident occurred, and their daughter, Jane, had been conceived just in time.

I got to like Dick. Working for the Americans, according to most of the villagers, was like being on paid holiday for the rest of your life, the main problem with all the noise of the planes coming and going being where to find a place to sleep undisturbed. Dick put his endless leisure to good use. He liked people, and limped about the place getting to know everybody and picking up useful gossip. He was a treasure-house of village information, a holder of strong opinions and interested in religion.

‘But you don’t go to church, Dick?’

‘Well, no. Most people round these parts don’t.’

‘And yet you’re a believer?’

He gave a sly grin. ‘When it suits me, I am. In the resurrection of the body, for instance. Now that’s something I believe in. And I’ve every right to. It gives anybody like me a second chance, doesn’t it? If the Bible says God can put back my missing bits who am I to argue about it?’ This, I supposed, was meant to be a joke.

In my second year at Long Crendon the new farmer moved in. The black-and-white cows had long gone, and the farmer ploughed up the field and planted horse-beans, the most hideous of all crops. For thirty years the Essex farmers had been adding a few feet here and there to their usable land by tearing out hedges, but they had done it in a haphazard and disorganised fashion, whereas my neighbour was thorough. The trees across the moat were on his land, and they all came down, dead or alive, and were cut up. Those were the days when psychedelic painting was in vogue, and he rode round on a tractor painted in astonishing colours, like Sennacherib in his chariot, dealing death and destruction to nature. One of the big chemical firms was encouraging farmers to experiment with its sprays. He sprayed the banks of the moat on his side and in doing so killed off a vast colony of frogs. The resident mallards, feeding on these, also died. I watched them seized by a kind of paralysis, trying to take off. After splashing about in desperate fashion for a while they subsided and swam in slow, tightening circles. In the end they could no longer hold their heads up, and drowned. In a single year this man quite changed everything included in my view of the Essex landscape. What had looked in summer like the southern, treeless edge of the Argentine Pampas, became Siberia in the winter. This was perhaps the hardest, due to the efforts of my neighbour and his friends, of the century. Nothing held the east wind back as it blew in from the North Sea. Six inches of snow lay in the ploughed fields and the wind plucked it up like feathers from a moulting goose and dropped it into the hollows of the land. When spring came that year there were still yard-deep pockets of frozen snow lying between the bare banks at the bottom of the lanes.

Every penny Dorothea and Dick could scrape together was saved to send Jane to Woodford, but Jane was already thirteen and they were becoming desperate. Dorothea now worked three days a week at the Rancho Grande, owned by a man who had made a fortune from laundromats. Her beloved horse was for sale but there were no takers. She got permission to build on her garden and sold it off to a speculator. This was a sacrifice indeed for, endlessly enriched with the night soil from their cesspit, it produced vegetables of spectacular size and quality. Henceforth, she said, they would live on Cornish pasties with the occasional addition of sugar beet leaves. These, which the farmers threw away, looked and tasted like spinach of an inferior kind. ‘Are you really sure,’ I asked her, ‘that what you’re doing is for the best?’

‘We have to do everything we can to give her a proper start,’ Dorothea said. ‘After that it’s up to her.’ She mentioned her cousins, the Broadbents, accepted as the leading Cloate family. They had done well in the post-war period out of buying up and stripping the assets of several derelict estates in the neighbourhood, clearing the few remaining woods and turning the land over to agriculture. Bill and Emily Broadbent’s daughter Patricia had just finished four years at Woodford, and had gone straight from it to one of the leading schools for models and faced the prospect of a dazzling future. Pictures of her were already beginning to appear in the Essex newspapers, and there was talk of contracts. I made no attempt to dampen her enthusiasm. It was hard to believe that Jane—slouching about the village with rounded shoulders, pretty in a way but with a vapid expression, and burdened with a nasal and moaning Essex accent—could ever hope to imitate her cousin.

A few days after this conversation Dorothea cut several inches from Jane’s lifeless hair, tidied up her fingernails and took her to Woodford for an interview with Mrs Amos, headmistress of Gladben’s Hall. She had found Mrs Amos formidable, a woman in her sixties she would have said, smooth-skinned, immaculate and precise. She was unnerved by the combination of Mrs Amos’s penetrating stare, and her almost excessively sympathetic manner. All in all, there was something spiderish about her. ‘But there you are,’ Dorothea said. ‘She gets the results.’

Dorothea had an excellent memory and in describing the interview seemed to be repeating the conversation word by word. Jane, she said, was at her worst; fidgeting, embarrassed and tongue-tied. ‘She couldn’t have been more stupid,’ Dorothea said.

‘I want to know all about you,’ Mrs Amos had said. ‘Are you a sporty girl? Does music appeal to you, or do you like to curl up with a book?’

But Jane just sat there and looked blank, Dorothea explained. ‘She wouldn’t utter. She wouldn’t even look Mrs Amos in the face. There was a picture on the wall of a German battleship going down after some battle—was it the Battle of the Plate?—and she was hypnotised by it. “I’m sorry,” I said to Mrs Amos. “It’s just her nerves. It’ll pass in a minute.” I have to say Mrs Amos was very understanding. Full marks to her for that. She asked Jane what she wanted to do with her life and Jane told her she didn’t know, and Mrs Amos said that was quite normal at her age, most young people didn’t. She seemed to be trying to draw Jane out,’ Dorothea said, ‘but Jane was terribly negative. When Mrs Amos asked her what she did in the evening she said she looked at the telly. She didn’t have any favourite programme, she told her. She just watched anything that happened to be on. It was all the same to her. Otherwise she went down to the bus shelter. That’s what the kids do when there’s nothing on the box. They just sit there and talk. Don’t ask me what about.’

‘So what was the outcome of it all?’ I asked her.

‘You won’t believe this,’ Dorothea said. ‘She was accepted.’

‘That’s really tremendous news,’ I said. ‘You’re over the worst hurdle. You must be very happy, and relieved.’

She was, and was worried now only about how she was going to come up with the money. But I was curious to know what was taught at this school beside charm.

‘Well,’ Dorothea said, ‘that comes into it, but there’s much more to it than that. I’ll tell you exactly what Mrs Amos said to me. She said, “Here we introduce them to pride. Often when a girl first comes to us she has no ego, and therefore no personality and we set out to change that. When she leaves us we expect her to be full of herself, and that in a woman is the open sesame to success.”’

With the coming of spring there were great changes in the neighbourhood. The Americans decided to expand their Effingham base, doubling their military personnel and building accommodation for families brought in on long-term postings. Once again, as it had been back in the forties, there were Americans everywhere. These by all accounts were smartly uniformed, outstandingly polite young soldiers, and local men who had sucked in humility with their mothers’ milk were often amazed to be addressed as ‘sir’.

The village began to smarten up. Essex had been discovered by the frontiersmen from London who paid dearly for arriving late on the scene. Charmers End, which nobody would pay £5,000 for when I moved in, was expected to fetch at least five times that sum by the time my lease ran out. A half-dozen rather sombre-looking lath-and-plaster Jacobean buildings were snapped up in and around the village. The newcomers stripped away plaster to expose ancient beams, knocked out partition walls to join up poky little rooms, put in cocktail bars and usually found a place somewhere for a wrought-iron Spanish ornamental gate. There was nothing to be done about a cesspit except lift the iron cover, peer in and drop it hastily back in place. The settlers from London cut down old diseased fruit trees to turn gardens into paddocks—sometimes making the mistake of buying local horses on the cheap—and rose early to exercise fashionable dogs. For the first time the Pied Bull had vodka on sale, and the village shop now stocked yoghourt in various flavours.

A paternalistic US government assured military personnel volunteering for overseas service that the comforts awaiting them abroad were no less complete than those they had come to expect at home. In fulfilment of this promise, a stream of air transports began to fly in to Effingham, laden with deep-freezers, washing-machines, pressure- and microwave cookers, hi-fi equipment, Hoovers, electric organs and even Persian carpets. Many of those for whom this flood of goods were destined had become accustomed to an annual trade-in of their possessions, replacing old models with new, and one of the major disadvantages to life overseas was that no regular outlets existed for discarded equipment. Thus the system was threatened and a surplus built up, for the houses on base were small and soon glutted with gear.

Dick was everybody’s friend. When consulted by the Americans about their quandary he immediately discussed it with local shops and affluent villagers like the Broadbents. A number of these offered to help the Americans out, and slowly the flow of consumer durables was renewed. It was the commitment to Jane’s future that turned Dick into a salesman. First he accepted small gifts, then a trifling commission, then finally obliged American friends by giving them a price for some article for which there was no immediate sale. This Dick would have to hold until a customer could be found. And so the process of trade developed. Dick was a reluctant and therefore good salesman, a little troubled in his conscience about the legality of what was going on, and there was a melancholic religiosity about him that was reassuring both to seller and buyer.