Diamonds at Dinner Read online

  If that seems archaic to you, we were one of the lucky families: many – perhaps most – people of my class at that time lit their homes with paraffin lamps. And the reason only an adult could turn on the lamps in our house was because you had to be careful with gas. It was piped to the light in copper tubes, which stretched up the walls and across the ceiling: a little brass tap regulated the supply. The lamps themselves had a small net bag – known as a mantle – made of cotton impregnated with metal: the gas was forced through this and had to be lit with a burning taper. It would make a popping sound when the flame met the gas and gave off a slightly sickly yellow glow. Often as not the mere act of lighting it or (more often) turning the gas off at the tap would cause a small explosion, which blew the mantle into tiny bits. Replacing it meant a trip to the ironmonger’s shop and then fiddling about for an age to fit the new one in place. Sometimes today, when a light bulb blows in my nicely lit flat and a fresh one has to be popped in, I remember just how awkward and time consuming it was just to get the lamps working in those long-ago days and nights.

  From the front room, come with me to the kitchen. With no electricity there was, of course, no fridge (let alone a freezer): no one – neither rich nor poor – had anything that would be recognised as a fridge until after the Great War. The earliest models were nothing but wooden cabinets with ice slowly melting in the top. Then, in the 1920s, came the first true fridges, which generated cold by compressing gases, just as ours do today. The catch was that the original refrigerants were toxic – and, of course, they were so expensive that only the very few could afford them. Since electricity was also a rarity in houses, some companies tried out gas-powered fridges, marketing them as ‘modern marvels of the age’. But they, too, cost a small fortune; the vast majority of the population wouldn’t own a refrigerator until the early 1960s.

  Instead, we had a larder. This was a narrow room off the kitchen with a big stone shelf. Because the larder was on an outside wall, with a rectangular hole covered with a perforated iron plate, the stone shelf stayed cold and perishable food was placed on it to keep fresh. Of course, it wouldn’t last long, so Mum would go shopping almost every day – and in the days before supermarkets or convenience stores that meant a lengthy trek, with me, Joan and Jim in tow, around the butchers, the bakers and (for all I can remember) the candlestick makers.

  There was, of course, another reason why this rather basic system worked: the house was, invariably, cold. Today I don’t think there’s a home in the country that doesn’t have some kind of central heating but back then it was completely unthinkable. Why? Because we didn’t have any hot water.

  The kitchen sink did have a tap – and in that, unlike many, we were fortunate. But the only way of heating water was in big pans on the copper boiler in the corner of the kitchen, which was heated by a coal fire. This, of course, had another implication: getting washed. All of us grew up with a morning and night-time wash in a bowl of cold water – even in the bitterest of winters. The only time we’d see hot water for washing was on a Friday night when Mum would unhook the big copper bath from the toilet wall, put it in front of the coal fire in the living room and fill it up with panful after panful, ladled one by one from the boiler. As the eldest, I’d get to go first, followed by Joan and then Jim – poor Jim; he always got the coldest and dirtiest bath! And that would be that for another week: Mum would hang the bath back in the toilet and we’d be back to a quick lick and a promise in cold water, morning and night.

  Now, the toilet. It possibly won’t surprise you to know that this wasn’t in the house. At the end of the yard there was a little brick shed and inside was a very basic loo. Whatever the weather, whatever the time of day, if we needed to go, we’d have to nip out the back door and scuttle into the outside privy. And in winter we’d definitely scuttle quickly: there was no heating in the toilet – I’m not even sure there was a light: why would there be when there was no heating in the house itself, other than the coal fire? So we didn’t linger longer than was absolutely necessary.

  In case you think we were unusual or deprived in this – don’t! Most of the population of Britain in those days had an outside toilet and this persisted well into the 1950s. Certainly nobody we knew had a nice warm loo in their house. That was just the way life was back then. But we did have something special in the house –

  something not many other people of our class had. In the front room we had a piano. It was one of those old upright ones that you used to see in pubs in those days. And Mum and Dad were keen that I learned to play: from a very young age I was sent to have lessons – in itself, this was a luxury and I don’t know how Mum found the money from her limited weekly housekeeping. Luckily, I took to the piano very well: I was happy to study and practise and take all the exams so that I ended up as a pretty competent player. That’s when Mum and Dad got their reward for all those costly lessons. If anyone came to visit us, I was called on to play. I didn’t sing; I was too shy for that and, anyway, Dad had a lovely big voice. I would accompany him as he sang the songs he’d learned in the army during the war – good songs, they were, filled with the passion that fighting brings and the yearning for home that comes when you’re far away and stuck in some terrible trench in the mud and blood of a Flanders field. ‘Kiss Me Goodnight, Sergeant Major’, ‘When This Lousy War Is Over’ and not forgetting ‘It’s A Long Way To Tipperary’: they were good songs, those, with words and tunes that everybody knew. And if Dad didn’t sing, I’d perform light classical instrumentals like ‘The Blue Danube’ waltz.

  That was how people entertained themselves back then. There was – of course – no television and no radio: even when the BBC started regular broadcasts, very few people could afford the price of a wireless. So we made our own entertainment and it was, to my mind, a good thing: it was something that the whole family did together. That’s something I think we’ve lost in our modern age with all its instant gratification and technological advances – and I think families are the poorer for it. I’m a big believer in the importance of family life and it makes me sad to see how much we’ve lost of the warmth and togetherness that was once the norm for children and their parents.

  I don’t remember having many books in the house as a child – but then families like us wouldn’t have been able to afford them. There weren’t paperbacks in those days – they didn’t come along till much later – and, though I did enjoy reading, if I ever wanted a book, it had to come from Stamford’s library.

  This, then, was life for the Mulley family in our little home in Vine Street in the 1920s. We lived simply, as people of our class did, and there was a pattern to the week, which never varied. Monday was washing day. Mum would scrub the clothes in the kitchen sink – the washing machine was a relatively new invention – the first motor-driven wringer-washers (as they were known) had only arrived in 1911 and they were far too expensive for ordinary folk. On top of which, they were powered by electricity – and who had that in their houses in the 1920s? No one that we knew! Friday was the day when everyone ate fish: it’s one of the oldest traditions in this country – in the world, in fact – dating back many hundreds of years to when Catholics were required to abstain from meat on that day. I don’t suppose that in our modern, multi-faith or even secular country many people even remember the tradition, much less stick to it. But when I was growing up, no matter what branch of Christianity you came from (and we weren’t Catholic), people all over England followed the practice almost without thinking. In any event, if we’d ever paused to think about it, there would have been nothing odd about abstaining from meat on a Friday: for a working-class family like ours, meat was pretty much reserved for Sunday. The Sunday roast was the great family tradition up and down the land and for very many people it would be the one and only day when meat was eaten. If you were lucky, there might enough left over to serve up in a variety of inventive ways for the man of the house on a Monday. But for me, the real treat wasn’t any leftover scraps from the roast its
elf; it was the dripping.

  Do you – does anyone – still eat bread and dripping, I wonder? It was a staple of the British diet for all my childhood but I haven’t seen or heard of it for more years than I care to remember. Yet when I think about it, my mouth begins to water and I’m transported back to the tasty pleasures of a big slice of rich – and very fatty – dripping, smeared on a doorstep of good fresh bread. Delicious.

  I hope you’re getting the sense from all this of what life was like in those long-ago days when the last century was still new. It’s a bit of a cliché, I know, but life then was much slower and still revolved around the old rhythms of the country. Spring for planting, the summer for ripening, harvest in the autumn and then the long, cold months of winter. England had, of course, been transformed by the industrial revolution but my generation was, I think, one of the last to grow up within the framework of the old rural calendar and, as a child, one of my favourites was Lent, for that was when the fair came to town.

  Fairs are a very visual and telling example of how things have changed. Today, I know, fairs still travel the land and people still flock to them. But they are brash, noisome affairs today. In my childhood there were no fancy fairground rides, alive with flashing lights and pounding pop music: for us, the fair brought the exoticism of coconut shies, throwing mops at Aunt Sally – a figure of an old woman with a ruddy face and a clay pipe in her mouth, set upon a spike, that you had to knock down with rough wooden balls. But my favourite of all was the carousel – a huge, steam-driven merry-go-round with gaily coloured horses: it was the nearest I ever got to riding a real horse and I loved it.

  There was another reason that we lived much more by the restrictions of the seasons then. Very few places had much in the way of street lighting and, when darkness fell, most people knew that it made sense to be indoors. Today we take well-lit streets for granted but in 1920s Stamford what few lamp posts existed were topped with gas lamps. These gave out a slightly eerie, flickering yellow-green glow, which created pools of sickly light along the pavement. They worked on the same principle as the lamps that lit our home but with one exception: the lamplighter.

  Every evening just before it got dark a man on a bicycle pedalled through the streets, in one hand clutching a long wooden pole, which stretched back over his shoulder, while steering his bike with the other hand. It was his job to turn on all the street lamps and he would stop at each one in turn and reach up with his pole to turn on the gas. He would insert the pole into a hole at the bottom of the glass case and push a lever to the ‘on’ position. A small pilot light inside the enclosure then lit the gas, making the mantle glow. Gas street lamps like this were the norm in every sizeable town and, if they didn’t give off the brightest light, at least they provided regular employment for someone. And employment, as we shall see, was becoming in short supply.

  When I come to think about it, my only real experience of electricity as a child, or even a teenager (not that anyone had even heard that word back then), was at the picture house. Going to the ‘flicks’ – and Stamford had three ‘Kinemas’, all doing good business – was the closest we came to the big world outside our quiet little existence: a tantalising glimpse into how people very different to us lived their lives. I suppose the film industry must have been very young then and the pictures we saw would seem laughably primitive to a modern audience. There weren’t even talkies until I was 11 years old when Warner Bros released The Jazz Singer in 1927 – the first movie with a soundtrack (and even this was only in parts of the film!). The standard fare was relatively short black-and-white melodramas with on-screen captions instead of dialogue. It’s all light years away from today’s Hollywood output but, to me, it was a window to a glittering, exciting new world. Little did I dream that in a few short years I would find myself in the very heart of somewhere much, much more glamorous.

  Chapter Two

  Scandal and Renaissance

  The projector whirs and clicks. The screen flickers into life. A caption – curly black-and-white script against a backdrop of pillars and statues – appears: ‘60 Years of Happiness. Earl and Countess of Coventry celebrate their Diamond Wedding, felicitated by tenantry and relatives.’

  A very old man, a shiny top hat above a round, smiling face covered in huge white whiskers, emerges from a great mansion house, his wife in the full skirts and corsetry of the Edwardian age and a clergyman in a long white cassock. Carefully and with much huffing and puffing, he is seated on a wooden chair in front of the imposing front entrance. Cut to a small army of men and women, clad in domestic uniforms and plainly the servants of the house. The clergyman presents the old man with a scroll or paper of some kind.

  The kindly looking old gentleman is the ninth Earl of Coventry. The great house is Croome Court, in the rolling heartlands of Worcestershire: the place that will – though I don’t yet know it – become my home.

  The film itself was a Pathé Newsreel from 1925. In those days before television news bulletins, picture houses up and down the country would screen a silent ten-minute newsreel before the showing of the main picture: this was the only way ordinary people got to see images of people and places far away from their own hometowns. Pathé was the main creator and provider of these early news films, and the Earl and Countess of Coventry were often its subjects. In 1930, five years after Pathé joined in the celebrations for the Coventry’s Diamond Wedding, its cameras returned to Croome Court to mark with reverence the ninth Earl’s death.

  ‘A Grand Old English Gentleman!’ the opening caption announced. ‘The Earl of Coventry, one of the greatest figures of [the] English Turf, typical old English Squire & Sportsman, passes away in his 92nd year.’ The film then shows the same ruddy face, still supporting enormous whiskers, grinning with happiness a few weeks earlier as he greets and shakes hands with his tenant farmers. It then cuts to the front of Croome Court and images of a pack of hunting hounds swarming and barking in front of the front entrance, before switching back to a valedictory shot of the Earl.

  Today the death of a country aristocrat would never be deemed newsworthy: it might possibly make a small paragraph buried deep in the later pages of the Daily Telegraph but I can’t imagine it being even noticed by a television news bulletin. Yet there it was in 1930 – important enough for a camera crew to be dispatched to Worcestershire from London, and to be showcased to mass audiences in cinemas up and down the land. How times change.

  The Coventry family came to Croome – a shallow if large area of marshland in the valley between the rivers Severn and Avon in Worcestershire – in the later years of the 16th century. Queen Elizabeth I was still on the throne when Thomas Coventry, a successful and wealthy provincial lawyer, set about looking for a suitable piece of land to purchase as an investment. At first glance, Croome must have seemed an unlikely prospect: it was boggy, unpromising and its soil largely unworked. But a sizeable area of land to the north of Croome was already owned and farmed by his wife, and Thomas spotted the area’s position – within a day’s horse ride to the then prosperous city of Worcester and its satellite market towns of Pershore and Upton – and its proximity to the vital trade artery of the Severn made it much more appealing than first impressions would suggest.

  There is little else of interest to record about this first Coventry of Croome but, from the next generation onwards, the family would become very important indeed. Thomas Coventry (junior) followed in his father’s legal footsteps and rose through the ranks of provincial solicitor gentlemen to become the Recorder of London and then Solicitor-General to the first of the new Stuart monarchs, King James I. In 1621 he became the MP for nearby Droitwich and, four years later, he ascended to hold the greatest of royal offices – Lord Keeper of the Great Seal of England, the priceless artefact, inscribed with the King’s name, and which is used to stamp a wax imprint on all the monarch’s official documents.

  After James died, his son Charles I continued to favour Thomas and in 1629 he made him the first Baron of Coven
try. A baronry is the lowest rank of the peerage and by 1697, when the Stuart dynasty had been replaced by the House of Hannover (and Thomas’s descendant had become the 5th Baron of Coventry), the new King William rewarded the family’s prominence and service to the Crown by upgrading the title to that of an earldom – the third highest rank in the nobility.

  Croome Court, too, had undergone at least two rebuilds by the time the 6th Earl, George William Coventry, took up residence in the middle of the 17th century. But, to the new owner’s eyes, Croome appeared dowdy, old-fashioned and unfittingly provincial in style. Apparently, he took one look and declared it ‘as hopeless a spot as any on this island’. Determined to create something to rival the finest in the land, he commissioned the most fashionable architect of the day – and one of the most celebrated in English history – Lancelot Capability Brown, to create an entirely new estate with the express purpose of exciting the amazement and admiration of his peers.

  Brown decided that the new Croome estate should appear to be a completely natural swathe of parkland. But to achieve this would require extraordinary feats of engineering. Acre upon acre of the land had to be drained; miles of culverts had to be constructed to carry away the unwanted water and an enormous lake with an artificial river (designed to appear as if it had always existed) had to be created.