Fair Girls and Grey Horses Read online

  But I, when I am stronger and can choose what I’m to do,

  O Leerie, I’ll go round at night and light the lamps with you.

  Poor Nana, trying so hard to turn us into little ladies, skilful with needle and thread, was unable to compete with poetry read by a much-loved mother, who was, without knowing it, nurturing the germ of a vocation. I now believe my love of the English language began with A Treasury of Verse for Little Children, my first, to use a contemporary phrase, tingle factor. Before we left Wimbledon, there was one unpleasant experience, which lurks at the back of my memory. Christine and I, with our identical genetic inheritance, both suffered from rotten baby teeth, perhaps because Mamma, who had suffered from rickets as a child, was unable to provide us with enough calcium in the womb. Extraction under chloroform was recommended to our parents but nothing was said to us, although Nana’s ardent scrubbing of the nursery deal table with Sunlight soap – she could trust no one else to do it properly – filled me with unease. ‘Must be clean for the dentist,’ she said. I suppose we met the dentist, and Christine says the doctor was there too, but I only remember coming round after the chloroform and spitting blood. We were not expected to be upset and we didn’t cry; we were, after all, in our own minds the sort of people who sail fearlessly away in shoes. Unknown to us, Denis’s tonsils were earlier snipped under chloroform on the same table. Astonished to be wakened from a night’s sleep by a uniformed nurse, he had been given a lump of sugar and led to meet his surgeon, so avoiding pre-operation nerves.

  We learnt at Wimbledon never to leave strangers alone anywhere in one’s property, after our parents put Number Eight on the market and a middle-aged viewer became faint in their bedroom. ‘Please, water,’ she gasped and Mamma, ever-helpful at such times, rushed to the kitchen to fill a glass. Soon revived, the woman left and in the evening Mamma noticed all the jewellery on her dressing table had gone. ‘Oh that’s mad Annie,’ the police said, on hearing the thief described. The jewellery was soon recovered, and our trust in human nature sensibly diminished.

  Although I grew to love my mother more than anyone else in the world, my first memories are of Nana in the night nursery at first light, a short, stout figure, pulling strong lisle stockings up thick thighs criss-crossed with mulberry red veins, dropping vest and petticoat over her head, buttoning blouse and cardigan, fixing a skirt and, lastly, winding her long greying hair into a bun, which she pinned firmly on top of her head. She was then in her fifties dressing a body that was slipping towards old age.

  Obstinate, loyal, deeply prejudiced and very hard-working, Nana made us her life; she cuddled us and crooned over us. She knitted, washed and crocheted for us. Although an agnostic since the First World War, she tried to teach us the Lord’s Prayer. She adored Mamma, who had been her favourite of the three Cannan girls, and disliked our father. ‘There was none of that shouting at Magdalen Gate House,’ she would say. ‘Your grandfather was such a quiet man.’ She pronounced Magdalen like Mary Magdalen, claiming that to speak as the gentry did would be ‘putting on airs’. In theory Nana was a servant, in fact she ruled her roost.

  But the afternoons we remember best were those when Mamma left her writing and took us and her Sealyhams across Wimbledon Common to Caesar’s Camp, or sometimes to The Windmill, and back. Usually Poppy, who had a weak heart, rode home in the pram with Christine, me and the firewood Mamma had collected, while Josephine stumped along in her beloved red riding hood mackintosh. And when years later I walked in the woods of Washington DC with my own children and a dog, I surprised my neighbours by filling the pram with twigs, too.

  Spared many boring domestic problems by Nana, Mamma felt like a thirteen-year-old when she was with us. She loved expeditions and sometimes took Denis on long walks in the Surrey countryside. Once Denis, running away with a knapsack on his back at the age of seven (perhaps traumatised by the arrival of three sisters), was asked, by the policeman who took him home, where he had been going. He was put out by Mamma’s giggles at his carefully considered reply, ‘The Portsmouth Road’.

  Sometimes she sang to us, out of tune but with an infectious merriment, and increasingly, twin-bound and Nana-bonded though I was, I responded to that merriment and started belatedly to move very slowly out of the fog of my early childhood into a sense of my own identity and that of other people.

  Josephine

  From left to right: Denis, Diana, Christine and Josephine

  We all had our own birth stories. Denis was born in Oxford in the house of our maternal grandparents in 1919. Cappy, as our father became known, who had survived four years in the trenches, was still a regular soldier and could not be there.

  Denis was a large baby and a breech presentation. Our mother, her twenty-third birthday only two weeks away, was small. After forty-eight hours of pain and anguish he was hauled out in a forceps delivery. During those two long summer days a cuckoo in the Botanical Gardens cuckooed unceasingly. For the rest of her life, Nana could not bear the sound, it reminded her too vividly of those hours when she watched, helplessly, the pain of her favourite child.

  The five-year gap between Denis and me was odd, for both parents wanted another child, preferably a daughter, and the powerful sexual attraction, which had brought them together, was as strong as ever; but possibly the trauma of Denis’s birth had something to do with it.

  Mamma had married for love and rather against her better judgement. She had been educated by governesses and at Wychwood School, Oxford, and then between sixteen and seventeen, refusing to follow her two older sisters to Downe House School, she had been ‘finished’ at a modest establishment in Paris.

  She had attended art classes there and, falling in love with Paris, had become a lifelong Francophile; mimosa, she always insisted, was her favourite flower. At eighteen, she had mapped out her future: she would enrol at the Slade School of Art, then paint in a Parisian garret, and free love, rather than the dreary domesticity of an English marriage, was to be her lot. But it was 1914 and, on the outbreak of the First World War, she became a VAD and later worked at the Oxford University Press.

  Mamma always admitted that she was bowled over by Cappy’s looks, by his assured manner and his ability to hail taxis and summon head waiters. At thirty-four he was so different from the undergraduates who had previously courted her; and though she refused his first proposal of marriage, when later, on leave from France, he asked her again, she accepted him.

  A quiet marriage in 1918 put an end to her ambitions as a painter, but, vowing that she would never sink to being a housewife, she began to breed Sealyham terriers and to write. The dog breeding was successful; Hero, son of Spic and Span, was a reserve champion at Crufts. But the writing proved more enduring. The Misty Valley was published in 1923, and a review in the Daily Express began ‘… one of the cleverest and most delightfully written first novels I have read for a long time’ and ended ‘her clarity for a beginner is staggering’.

  She was finishing her second novel Wildberry Wine as I arrived. Tradition has it that the monthly nurse said ‘Put away that scribbling dear, Baby’s coming.’ Conveniently small and the correct way round, I emerged without drama. It was April 3rd and snowing, but the men who had come to sow the new tennis court worked on.

  Diana and Christine, who were not planned, arrived eighteen months later. The realization that it could be twins, sent Cappy scurrying for insurance, but, as there had been twins in the last two generations of Mamma’s family, it was not forthcoming.

  On October 1st, a breakfast quarrel over the fishcakes – I suspect they were either pallid or tepid, Cappy’s two hatreds – precipitated the arrival. It was a Saturday, Dr Newton was fetched from the golf course, but arrived too late; our identical twins had been delivered by the monthly nurse.

  It seems that Diana and Christine did look exactly alike, for on a traumatic day when their identifying ribbons fell off, everyone was consulted as to which was which. It is said that Smith, the jobbing gardener and a great dahlia man
, made the final decision. But if a fortune had been involved, if the twenty minutes between them had mattered, I think Christine could well have disputed such a doubtful identification.

  Denis has always complained that my arrival completely disrupted his life and it was true that up until then he had had the attention of two devoted women. But I was a quiet and unobtrusive baby and, as he was becoming bored with nursery life, he had started school early – the compulsory age at the time was seven. The Study, a private school across the road from our house, was mainly for girls, but took boys up to the age of eight.

  My short life was far more upset by the arrival of the twins, for Nana announced, with justifiable firmness, that she could not be expected to care for three children under two – in Granny’s day, though almost thirty years younger, she had always had a nursery maid – and I must leave the nursery. She adored babies but I don’t think she had ever bonded with me. She liked the large, plump, rosy-cheeked variety; I was pale and thin. On arrival I had instantly expressed my intolerance of cows’ milk, sometimes reducing Nana to tears with the look of rejection I gave her proffered bottles. And then, according to Mamma, I sat up and ate everything from cheese to lobster; highly inappropriate behaviour for a baby of those days.

  We had all been born into a changing and deeply depressing world. The aftermath of the First World War weighed heavily and Britain’s economic position was appalling. Unemployment, which had earlier been swelled by the returned soldiers and the almost two million surplus women (for whom there was no prospect of marriage), was still rife. The widows and orphans of the three quarters of a million men who had died were struggling to survive, and, while the worst cases among the million incapacitated wounded were hidden away, the number of amputees in society were a constant reminder of the carnage.

  Both our parents had fairly expensive tastes. Though the Cannans had prided themselves on plain living and high thinking, Mamma had been brought up to accept many of the good things of life – beautiful houses, Swiss holidays, books and regular meals – without considering the cost; while Cappy’s longing for the high life was probably a reaction to his penny-pinching rectory childhood.

  As well as a mortgage, they had acquired a car and four children. They had staff to pay: Nana, the little live-in maid, the cleaning woman and the part-time gardener and Cappy felt that membership of a London club and the occasional golfing weekend were essential to his happiness. Mamma had refused to marry him unless he gave up bridge, but they both enjoyed parties, the theatre, the ‘flicks’, eating out and dancing; when too broke for night clubs, they ‘slummed’ at the Palais de Danse in Hammersmith. They lost most of their investments in the slump, bills and the overdraft were a constant worry, but while she gradually learnt frugality, he remained a spender.

  Cappy never told us much about his immediate family. He boasted of being born within the sound of Bow bells and we knew from a drawer full of tasselled caps that he had been successful at Merchant Taylors’ School – excelling at rugby and running. He never mentioned his afflicted brothers Eric and Basil, but he admitted that he had never forgiven his parents for sending Uncle Edgar to a grander public school and he acknowledged the injustice of their treatment of Aunt Muriel, the eldest and only daughter – now a war widow – who was taught that she was ‘only a girl’ and must sacrifice her interests to those of her father and brothers. Their mother had been injured in a carriage accident just before Cappy’s twenty-first birthday and never wholly recovered.

  At Oxford his life blossomed. The escape from home to Wadham seems to have resulted in a violent reaction to his whole upbringing. He became an agnostic, abandoned theology in favour of geography and teetotalism for the presidency of the college wine society. He also, from his own accounts, became a rugger hearty who smashed up poets’ rooms, knocked off policemen’s helmets and climbed spires in order to decorate them with chamber pots.

  After university he taught at King’s College School, Wimbledon, from 1909 until 1914. He was probably a heroic figure to the boys as he had played rugger for Oxford and the Harlequins and, becoming a lieutenant in the Special Reserve, he ran the OTC. He also had a circle of friends with whom he played tennis and bridge. The school magazine of December 1914 states that he was one of the first to sail with the British Expeditionary Force and tells of him visiting the school as a captain, wounded, and ‘suffering from the temporary loss of the use of both arms’.

  After the war he had agonized for a long time about staying in the army. Mamma was in favour, she longed to see India, but he said later that it was the likelihood of a posting to Ireland, and the possibility of having to kill his fellow countrymen, that finally made him resign his commission. Of course, at that time he was not aware that his wounds were gradually to disable him. The doctors had patched up his shoulders and arms, broken by bullets at the battle of Aisne in 1914, but the second wound left him with shrapnel in his hip and its removal was beyond the medical expertise of the time. At first it caused no trouble, but with the onset of osteoarthritis various cures seemed to have been tried, including an electrical treatment, which by heating up the shrapnel must have caused unbearable pain; by the time I was old enough to be aware of the problem he had a limp and was dependent on painkillers.

  Leaving the army, his first job was with a film company and he wrote scripts for silent films, but when the company failed, as so many did at that time, he took various jobs to support the family and wrote plays in the evenings and at weekends.

  Mamma’s sister, May Wedderburn Cannan, had been the first of the younger generation to be published – slim volumes of her war poems had appeared in 1917 and 1919. Carola Oman, the historian and Mamma’s best friend throughout their school days, has told of an occasion in 1919 when she, Joanna, and Georgette Heyer met in Wimbledon to talk about their writing. The Heyer family were Cappy’s friends. George Heyer, the father, had also taught at King’s College School and he belonged to the Wimbledon tennis and bridge-playing set.

  Georgette was the youngest of the three novelists, but the first to be published. Her Black Moth appeared in 1921, Mamma’s Misty Valley in late 1922, Carola Oman’s The Road Royal in 1924.

  We had two family stories about Georgette. One was that as a teenager she had been in love with Cappy, and the other that when her father lost a large sum of money in the collapsing stock market of 1920 she had written Black Moth – an historical romance – to save the family fortunes, and handed him her hundred pound advance. Her first modern novel, Instead of the Thorn, published in 1923, contains a very fulsome dedication to Joanna Cannan.

  At the same time as realising her own ambitions, Mamma had become an important contributor to the family finances. Her third novel The Lady of the Heights appeared the year the twins were born and was followed by a romantic serial in the Daily Courier, she also wrote articles for magazines and newspapers.

  She worked hard and I must have learnt to be undemanding and adaptable. While she wrote I played quietly. When Denis tobogganed, Mamma pulled me along in a home-made sledge; when Cappy wanted her company on a business trip to the north of England and Scotland, Denis and I went too. We stayed in York, where I fell in love with the Minster and throughout the rest of the journey constantly suggested ‘Let’s go back to the Orchestra (sic).’ I was bathed in a wash basin because Scottish hotels charged extra for baths. At Cowdenknowes, where we stayed with Mamma’s Hope cousins, Denis rode a grey pony and I was sick at breakfast, but the butler dealt with it calmly, bringing a large sponge.

  This trip was described to me so often that I doubt whether I really remember it. I suspect that my first memory was being alone in the garden with Denis – perhaps there was a crisis with the twins and he had been told to amuse me. Anyway, he took the wooden cover off a drain and there was the most enormous spider with stick-like legs. We weren’t frightened, we stood together marvelling at it.

  I was an obstinate child. Told on no account to touch the deck chairs, I experimented the momen
t the adult backs were turned and almost removed the top joint of one finger. The doctor did his best with it, but it has never matched its pair on the other hand.

  I was smacked once, but I can’t remember the crime or the punishment, only my terrible tears afterwards. Both parents were there and it seemed that they were as frightened by my terrible choking tears as I was. ‘Stop crying,’ they demanded, ‘stop crying.’

  Mamma was not a cosy mother and was often preoccupied – she had once come home from a shopping errand without Denis. When Nana demanded, ‘Where’s the baby?’ she had to rush back and fortunately he was still there, parked in his pram outside the shop. In some ways this lack of conventional motherliness was an advantage, for she saw you as a person, almost an equal. When you were sobbing, aged three, at the indignity of wetting your pants, she consoled you, ‘Don’t worry, it could happen to anyone.’ She was also understanding about my square of silk, my equivalent of the sucky blankets beloved of some children, but not permitted by Nana. I took my square to bed with me, rotating it between my first finger and thumb, and Mamma swore that I could not be fobbed off with the new artificial silk, but insisted on the real thing.

  I think we had a good relationship. I liked her wit and she enjoyed my earthier sense of humour. She told a story of finding me performing weird antics and, when asked what I was doing, answering ‘Only trying to make God laugh!’

  I am not sure that this is as original as it sounds, for the poet and playwright John Drinkwater was a visitor – I can remember sitting on his knee while he drew pictures for me – and one of his poems begins with the immortal line ‘God laughed when He made Grafton’.

  Mamma’s family were Scottish with dashes of French blood. Her father, Charles Cannan – small and undistinguished-looking – was possessed of an excellent brain. A double first, he had become classical tutor, Fellow and Dean of Trinity, Oxford. His mother, Jane Dorothea Claude of a French Huguenot family, died in Madeira when he was eighteen months old, and three weeks after the birth of his brother, Edwin Cannan. Their father, an intelligent but weak man, brought them back to England and, after various vicissitudes, they were reared by an aunt in Clifton.