Fair Girls and Grey Horses Read online

  FAIR GIRLS

  AND

  GREY HORSES

  Memories of a country childhood

  Josephine, Diana and Christine

  Pullein-Thompson

  Fair Girls and Gray Horses! A toast to you

  Who never went wide of a fence or a kiss.

  Will H. Ogilvie

  Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Epilogue

  About the Authors

  Copyright

  Prologue

  What made all four of us become writers? Was it in our genes or caused by an unorthodox childhood with little formal education?

  Our elder brother Denis, a playwright, was conventionally educated and, being older, spent far less time at The Grove -which suggests it was genetic. But though our clutch of first cousins yielded a composer, an actor and a publisher, there were no writers among them. And, so far, the next generation has written text and academic books, but little fiction.

  We, Josephine, Diana and Christine, all knew that one day we would write about our childhood. And when a film production company approached one of us and asked, ‘Are the Pullein-Thompsons still alive?’ and the BBC made radio and television programmes about us, we knew that it was time to start.

  Our first book, It Began with Picotee, published fifty years ago, was a joint effort, which emerged slowly as we argued over every word. But now we are veteran authors with our own styles, such close co-operation has become impossible.

  We decided to tell our story in three different voices and, at first, we avoided too much discussion as we wanted to see what would surface and to keep the independence and freshness of our individual recollections. We found that many memories were shared, and to avoid boring repetition it was necessary to divide up some of the material. We agreed, where possible, to start the chapters in turn, and that the last writer, who was sometimes left with a dearth of material, should be first in the following chapter.

  There have been disagreements. When it was possible we checked the facts; where this was impossible we voted and, as in childhood, ‘two against one’ settled the matter, but where anyone has wished to rebut or add to a sister’s contribution, this has been allowed.

  Journeys back into childhood are not made without poignancy and we have all suffered a little as we re-lived the sharpness of its sorrows and joys and struggled to recall the parents - Mamma and Cappy - as we saw them then.

  As well as our own story, we have told of the animals and people around us, the South Oxfordshire of the ’thirties and a way of life that ended with the Second World War.

  Chapter One

  Diana

  It all began in 1917 at Magdalen Gate House, Oxford, whose front door opens at the side on the High, opposite Magdalen College, but whose façade looks with Georgian grace across the front of the Botanical Gardens.

  Harold James Pullein-Thompson, an infantry captain, who had been through the retreat from Mons and much else on the Western Front, was invited to dinner by the Cannans, while he was stationed in Oxford training officer cadets. All three Cannan girls were at home, but Joanna, the youngest, made a late entrance. Five feet three inches tall, pretty, with honey-gold hair and an aquiline nose, she took her place at the table, pulled out her lorgnette and examined the guest with her grey-green eyes. And Pullein-Thompson, six feet two inches tall, with raven-black hair, hooded dark blue eyes and a neat moustache, fell in love. We four – Denis, Josephine, Diana and Christine – were the result of that love.

  It is easy to speculate about where our various interests came from. The Cannans were great scribblers; long letters and poems passed between our Cannan forebears. Books were essential to their lives. Our mother’s father, Charles Cannan, a classicist, was Dean of Trinity College, Oxford, before becoming in 1898 Secretary to the Delegates (Chief Executive) of the Oxford University Press. His wife Mary, née Wedderburn – the only grandparent we knew – was a fine letter writer. Charles’s brother Edwin Cannan (Uncle Teddy), the economist, wrote extensively on his subject. Aunt May became a poet. Our mother wrote forty-eight books.

  Love of the theatre was in our genes, too. Great-great-uncle James Cannan was a Manchester drama critic and his grandson Gilbert Cannan became an avant-garde novelist, poet and playwright. On the other side of the family towered Stanley Houghton, the dramatist, my father’s first cousin. As if this were not enough, our paternal grandfather James Pullein Thompson, a vicar, exercised his passion for the theatre by staging amateur productions of Gilbert and Sullivan’s works, with the Bishop of London; two of our father’s plays were performed at fringe theatres and one of his scripts was turned into a silent film.

  Both our parents liked riding, but the love of horses probably came mainly from the Wedderburns. Granny, a keen horsewoman in her youth, hunted the carriage horses when her father Andrew came home from India on inheriting Glenlair, the Ayrshire estate of his cousin, the physicist James Clerk Maxwell. She kept a pony and governess cart in Oxford and her aunt, the painter Jemima Blackburn, and her brother’s son, John Wedderburn, loved riding all their lives. Some of our aptitude for handling difficult horses surely came also from the Reverend Pullein Thompson’s father, hard-drinking John Thompson, an illiterate farrier and blacksmith – in the days when farriers were also horse doctors. John Thompson married Mary Owthwaite (or Outhwaite), a descendent of the Pulleyns of Scotton Hall near Harrogate, where Guy Fawkes, who was taught by a John Pulleyn at the Grammar School in York, lived for a time shortly before trying to blow up the Houses of Parliament.

  In 1852 James, the Thompsons’ seventh and last child, was born, like the others, in the small village of Crayke near Easingwold. He alone was given the second name of Pullein, probably in honour of his maternal grandmother Mary Pullein. Records of James’s youth and education have not survived, but we know he became teetotal, probably in response to a drunken father. In his twenties he studied to become a Methodist minister, before switching to the Church of England when the Manchester girl he loved, comely high-browed Emily Darbyshire, declared she could not marry a man who was ‘chapel’. As family legend has it, he was helped to make the change by his mother’s kinsman, John James Pulleine, who later became Suffragan Bishop of Richmond, Yorkshire. James passed the Preliminary Cambridge University Theological Examination, probably as an external student, and in 1876 he married Emily Darbyshire and was appointed a literate deacon at Salford, Manchester. Four years later, after ordination, he became curate at St Mary’s, Manningham, Bradford. In 1883 he moved to London to become Associate Secretary of the Colonial and Continental Church Society, and in 1886 he was appointed vicar of St Stephen’s, Bow. His five children, Muriel, Harold, Edgar, Basil and Eric, were all born in London. Muriel was conscientious and musically talented. Basil died in infancy and Eric was of limited intelligence, but Harold and Edgar were tall and healthy with strong features. Meanwhile Emily’s sister Lucy had married a man in the cloth business and produced Stanley Houghton, whose play Hindle Wakes would ensure him lasting fame. While he was at Bow, Pullein Thompson’s friendship with the Bishop of London blossomed and contributed, I suspect, to his move to Chelsea, where his popularity has long been commemorated by a plaque in the church. The women liked him. ‘His voice was so beautiful,’ an old lady told me years later, ‘and when he pronounced the blessing – it was unforgettable.’

  Pullein Thompson’s work for the blind and the alcoholic led to a friendship with wealthy, sightle
ss Mrs Graham of Kingston, whose son and daughter he cured of a drink problem. Fortuitously the daughter, fat, cleft-palated Isabella, fell in love with her mentor and moved with her maid into the Chelsea vicarage. Here she took three rooms at an exorbitant rent which financed Edgar’s education at Marlborough College, while our bitterly envious father remained a day boy at the less prestigious Merchant Taylors’.

  An opportunist, James Pullein Thompson had informally used his second name in conjunction with the first after abandoning the Methodists, but the linkage was not cemented for the next generation until our father and Edgar formally joined the two names together with a hyphen, a necessary change if a double-barrelled name is to be used in the army.

  In February 1913 Emily Pullein Thompson died in a Wimbledon nursing home, not far from King’s College School where our father taught. In later years their marriage had been soured by sexual strife, after Emily, for reasons best known to herself, had rejected James’s advances. Then, Muriel told her son, Emily would flee to spend the night with her, pursued by James who would hammer on his daughter’s door vainly demanding that his wife should return to the conjugal bed.

  On St Valentine’s Day in the year after Emily’s death, James Pullein Thompson married Ruby Eastwood, a chorister and parishioner in her twenties – instead of Isabella Graham, as expected. Their daughter Daphne, our indomitable step-aunt, was born in 1916, although we did not meet her until middle age. The same year Pullein Thompson became rector of Luddenham, Kent. He and his wife were soon joined by Isabella, who again rented rooms from them and paid Daphne’s school fees, a generous act continued after Pullein Thompson’s death in 1924.

  Our father disapproved of the second marriage and, although his inheritance (pictures of Scotton Hall and Samuel Pulleyn, and much Pullein silver) came into our teenage lives, we knew little or nothing of the Thompsons. Three years or so after Daphne’s birth, our parents settled in Wimbledon, first in 12 Crescent Road and later at 8 (now 4) Marryat Road, which runs between the Common and the tennis courts. Here we three girls were born. Number 8 was (and still is) a grey roughcast-stuccoed house, with a matching addition built on by Granny Cannan, rather French-looking with tile-hung mansards and a large garden by today’s standards. It had a tennis court and a huge cedar tree overlooking the night nursery which Christine and I shared with Nana, a coachman’s daughter, who had come to work for the Cannans when our Aunt Dorothea was born in 1892. The cedar, jagged and dark against the evening sky, was the first tree I loved, not only for its beauty but also because it was the cause of night-time parties in thunderstorms. Then Mamma, afraid that lightning would strike the tree and send it crashing on the night nursery, wrapped us in eiderdowns and carried us to her bedroom. Our father and Josephine were there, too; and Denis, if he were home, tried to take photographs by lightning. Nana made tea and brought milk and biscuits for us; there was a sense of warmth and excitement, which returns to me even now when thunder wakens me at night.

  Our first mount was a rocking horse who lived on the balcony. He had once been dappled but was by then a dirty grey. There was a hole where his saddle had been, into which we later stuffed lumps of sugar which encouraged mice to nest in his belly and led to his destruction. We called him Dobbin, or sometimes Starlight, and rode him constantly. Christine and I also had pretty wheeled horses, with stiff manes and tails, which we pushed around the garden. One night we dreamt at the same moment that we had fallen off Dobbin and woke together with a leap in bed. And then there was Jack, whom Christine will describe.

  Identical twins do not bond as closely with their mothers at an early age as single children do, because of their preoccupation with and allegiance to each other. We talked twin language and with our short hair, wide faces and somewhat hooded eyes (mine became more hooded than Christine’s), we were oddities.

  ‘Are your twins normal?’ asked a Wimbledon neighbour. And our mother, who knew that talent often lies deeply hidden behind eccentricity, replied ‘Good God, I hope not.’ Later she had her own answer to the difference between the twins, who stumbled and fumbled through life, and her elder daughter, who was so much more at home in the world. Josephine, she said, was an old soul, the twins new.

  At three, still only able to converse with each other, habitually carsick, sometimes trainsick, hyper-active and clumsy, Christine and I were not children of whom intellectual parents could be proud. Mamma was staunch in our defence; our father, trying to be fair, could not love us as much as Josephine. Unplanned, we added to financial problems during a difficult time. In photographs we often look farouche, whereas Josephine, pretty and blonde, smiles confidently into the lens as she poses delightfully on garden steps, garden seats and beside cars. She travelled sometimes with the parents – a recipe for jealousy, I suspect, for one day we beat her over the head with a beaded bag given to Christine by an ancient godmother. Then our father, a man of action, laid us over his knee and smacked our bare bottoms. And afterwards we couldn’t stop crying. My sobs took over my whole body and Mamma kept saying ‘Do stop, do stop!’ while our father said, ‘Never, never fight two against one,’ and thereafter we never did. It was, I believe, the only time he smacked us. I admired him for a time, but never loved him. He had, like his father (by whom he was frequently caned), a quick temper and he was not a man to snuggle up against. Although he played with us I do not remember ever sitting on his knee or being led by his hand and later I envied girls who had enjoyed a warm relationship with their fathers.

  Although brought down sometimes for visitors to see, Christine and I and were definitely nursery children dominated by our adoring Victorian Nana, who was proud of our plump bodies and rosy cheeks. Having grown up poor, she was also extremely frugal. So from our earliest days we saw that nothing should be wasted: brown paper was smoothed and parcel string unknotted for future use. Vegetable peelings and tea leaves were boiled and fed to the hens, whose surplus spring eggs were stored in water glass for winter days.

  Fishcakes were my favourite breakfast – is it significant that a row over fishcakes, which were served lukewarm once again to Cappy’s fury, precipitated my birth? But Nana favoured milky rice puddings for small children, soft-boiled eggs and in winter oranges with a lump of sugar in the middle. You did not usually ask for things. My longing for a hard-boiled egg was only expressed in a whispered prayer no one heard when I was taken downstairs to wish as I stirred the Christmas pudding. She knitted us beautiful sweaters; in winter we slept under six blankets, well tucked in, and an eiderdown, our feet cosy in the long white bedsocks she had made us. In the daytime we wore combinations (known as Cossiaggers in twin language) as well as woolly vests, and Granny’s old fur coat was cut down and turned into little waistcoats (woofies, we called them) for us to wear under our overcoats. Nana had a stockpile of remedies, among them: Homoceia, an ointment for bruises and aches and pains; and Hazeline Cream, which was antiseptic. Her poultices were legendary within the family. Her linseed variety had saved Aunt Dorothea’s baby, Charles, from dying of whooping cough to the astonishment of the doctor treating him.

  Our twinny, deep-rooted togetherness defied loneliness. We didn’t suck our thumbs or need corners of blankets to finger to help us adjust to our limited way of life. Rarely hungry and constantly warm, with space in which to enjoy ourselves and a nurse who did not often grant requests, we rarely tried to communicate with the grown-ups. But eventually Mamma, despite her insistence that we were normal, became worried about our poor speech and decided to part us. Christine remained in Wimbledon with Nana, whose favourite she was, and I went with Mamma to stay in Oxford with Aunt Dorothea where, traumatised by separation, I sank into lethargy and silence, while at home Christine uttered not a word. Alarmed, Mamma accepted that the experiment had not worked and took me back to my twin.

  Nana dug out the Crown Books from which Mamma and her sisters had learnt to read. ‘I am up on my ox,’ began the first lesson in volume one, and in the second volume: ‘Winter days are jolly. The days are
long, the nights are short, there is not time for all the things we have to do.’ I soon learnt the stories by heart and, pretending to read, recited them when asked, stumbling over the pronunciation. From now on broken English became my second language. But at first I loved books’ pictures best. Struwwelpeter’s were horribly fascinating, the art nouveau illustrations in A Treasury of Verse for Little Children a total delight, and the little history I learnt came entirely from two history picture books. Then the rhythm and imagery of poetry read aloud by Mamma captured us all. Robert Louis Stevenson’s:

  Up into the cherry tree

  Who should climb but little me?

  I held the trunk with both my hands

  And looked abroad on foreign lands.

  Also Eugene Field’s ‘Wynken, Blynken and Nod’ with its enchanting illustration of three blue-clad figures sailing in a green sabot called Daisy watched by a man-faced moon:

  Wynken, Blynken and Nod one night

  Sailed off in a wooden shoe –

  Sailed on a river of crystal light,

  Into a sea of dew.

  “Where are you going and what do you wish?”

  The old moon asked the three.

  “We have come to fish for the herring fish

  That live in the beautiful sea.

  Nets of silver and gold have we!”

  Said Wynken, Blynken and Nod.

  And, of course, we Pullein-Thompson girls felt we were the three.

  What pictures these words conjured up, along with Lear’s ‘The Owl and the Pussy Cat’ and, of course Carroll’s ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’. And on winter nights who could resist Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘The Lamplighter’?

  Now Tom would be a driver and Maria go to sea.

  And my Papa’s a banker and as rich as he can be.