“THE OLD MEUSE,” as the house was called, was at No. 1 West Grove, situated right on the border between Walton and Hersham. The street had a row of run-down, Dickensian-looking almshouses on one side—but about halfway up the other was a long driveway to our house. Next door to us was the Belgrave Recovery Home, a convalescent residence that was once a fine manor. The Old Meuse had been the servants’ quarters to that manor, and the great joy for my mother was that her mother, Granny Julia, had worked as a below-stairs maid there.
It was obvious that this was the house of Mum’s dreams. It was certainly bigger than anything we had occupied before, and was considered very upmarket at the time. I believe it cost all of £11,000 (about $22,000 at today’s exchange rate, although property values have so escalated since then that the value would now be in the millions). For my mother and stepfather, the price was absolutely prohibitive. They had a huge mortgage, and I soon became aware that they were overreaching in getting the place.
The house sat in the middle of the property, which comprised about 2.2 acres. Because it had been the servants’ quarters, the back garden consisted of a vegetable garden, an orchard, a run-down tennis court, a little plot of woodland, and several outbuildings.
On the left of the house was a porte cochere, which led to an inner courtyard at the back with three fairly substantial garages: one single, one triple with a small loft area in it for storage, and next to that, another single. The courtyard also had a potting shed set in a stone wall and a side gate leading to the back garden.
Fir trees and large rhododendrons lined the drive; lilacs divided the front garden from the back. A pretty silver birch tree stood by the house, and indeed the owl did come most nights to sit in it. At first, I would lie in bed with the covers drawn tight, feeling a little spooked by its call, but I eventually came to love it and felt comforted knowing it was there—a guardian of the night.
The house had four bedrooms: one for Mum and Pop, one which the two boys shared, one for guests, and one for me. We had no furniture to speak of, so my stepfather turned his hand to carpentry: he built a trestle dining table with coffee table to match, some window seats with storage below, bookcases, and coat racks. My mother purchased a monk’s bench, which remains in our family to this day. We didn’t have closets or wardrobes, so Mum ran up some curtains on her old Singer sewing machine and hung them on string across the corners of the bedrooms. My stepfather added poles behind them, so that we could hang our clothes.
All the bedrooms had sinks with the exception of mine, which was right opposite the bathroom. There was a separate toilet upstairs and one downstairs with a wash-basin, plus one outside by the garage area. Almost every room had a small fireplace, which was the only source of heating.
The main living room was big, with a bay window—a long room, which we used mostly for parties and for housing Mum’s piano. The room we occupied most was a second, slightly smaller lounge, on the other side of the entrance hall. My stepfather built a bar there, complete with foot rail. The kitchen was large and square, with an old gas cooker, an ancient sink, and a small breakfast room next to it. Most of the windows were leaded in traditional, latticework style, and there were wood floors throughout.
Mum and Pop freshened up the whole house with emulsion paint. They stuccoed the long, rather dark living room in white, then stippled onto it a rose maroon color, and applied a high gloss over the lot. It was probably the fashionable thing to do, but the walls looked waxy, and with the warmth of a crowd or if the fire was lit, they would run with condensation.
My mother found a terrific bed for me—essentially a mattress on a strong wooden box with two big doors that opened for storage underneath. My little bedroom had a window seat and a fireplace, with a mantelpiece above for all my knickknacks. Pop created a dressing table by putting up a mirror and a shelf against the wall, and Mum covered the lower half with chintz fabric and added a stool.
They purchased a prefab bungalow for the garden, inviting Uncle Hadge and his wife, Kit, to come and live there and be our gardener/caretakers.
Hadge said that if he was really going to develop the garden, he would need a greenhouse, so a glass lean-to was added to the wall by the back door in the courtyard. A heater was installed, and to watch Hadge’s cuttings and plants flourish in their bedding boxes and to smell that delicious, earthy smell before entering the kitchen was to be hit with sudden, sensual delight. To this day I know of no more heady perfume than the smell of warm, damp earth.
For a few brief shining months, Hadge revealed the magic that was in his fingertips. He pared back the roses on the arbor. He weeded the overgrown tennis court, mowed it, rolled it, marked out the tennis lines, and put up a net. He pruned the trees and the orchard began to bloom. There were canes of raspberries, black currants, cherry trees, apple trees—Cox’s Orange Pippins—and a plum tree. He grew beautiful sweet peas, lines and lines of them, and runner beans. Everything about the garden began to fall into shape, and it became my joy, my realm, my fantasyland. Life suddenly seemed a lot better and we finally had a place we could truly call home.
I found a secret hiding place, down by the small copse beyond the tennis court—a little freak of nature where the forsythia had grown into a complete natural arch. I would lie on the ground looking up into the yellow sprigs and dream the day away. I began to wonder what I would do when I got older. I didn’t really feel that I was good at anything, and I certainly didn’t recognize the value of my voice at that time. I made a resolve to myself that whatever I did, I would do it to the best of my ability and make myself useful. If I was to be someone’s secretary, I’d be the best secretary in the world; if I was a florist, I’d be the best florist in the world. I would apply myself, and work hard to become valuable and needed.
HADGE AND KIT, sadly, did not stay with us very long. When he was good, he was very, very good—but when he was bad, he’d disappear for days and get horribly drunk. Mum and Pop had to let them go. This was difficult for my mother, since she had spent a great deal of her young life in Hadge’s company.
Not long after they moved out, the idea arose of my aunt taking over the garages at the back of the house for her dancing school. She and Uncle Bill moved into the bungalow—or “the bung,” as we fondly called it. Auntie christened it “Twigs,” and Uncle fashioned the name from branches found in the garden and put it up over the door. The little place didn’t even have a foundation, being just a two-room pre-fab with a Calor gas stove for cooking. A mirror and ballet barre were installed in the big three-car garage. One single garage was converted into a waiting room, and the outside toilet serviced Auntie’s students. Auntie began her classes.
She also made the little bungalow come to life, and planted flowerbeds along the outside walls. There were prettily arranged flowers inside, too, and she filled vases for our house as well. When Mum and Pop were away, Auntie and Uncle Bill kept an eye on me and Donald and Chris. Best of all, there was music and dance around The Meuse all day long.
For a while, my mother played the piano for the dance school, and the music would echo across the garden, accompanied by the sounds of Auntie teaching, her hands clapping, keeping time. From our upstairs bathroom window, I would look down into the courtyard and see heads bobbing in the studio and listen to Auntie’s trilling laugh, or hear her chattering with the mothers as she sorted change for their payments. Though a good deal of merriment floated up from outside, often the main house inside would be quiet, empty, and dark.
Auntie offered everything from children’s classes to character and ballroom dancing, and she was a good teacher, evidenced by the endless parade of cars, bicycles, and people walking up and down the driveway.
I especially loved watching the toddlers, skipping around pretending to be fairies, running and flying. Aunt was so gentle with them, helping to strengthen and shape their little bodies and feet. If I wasn’t studying or working, I would go across to the studio and either join in the older children’s classes, or watch. Aunt would give me private ballet lessons whenever she could. She had some terrific ballroom students who were eight to ten years older than I, and they eventually became what we called “the gang.” Special friends included Keith Oldham, a handsome fellow who had a glass eye. He had a sweet girlfriend, Margaret, whom he eventually married. There was Ted Owen—a skinny fellow nicknamed “Tappets,” because he was always having trouble with the tappets on his motorbike.
When the evening classes were over, they often headed for Auntie’s bungalow. The little potbellied fire would be stoked. There’d be some ale or cups of tea and biscuits, and everybody would smoke and play canasta. It was a pleasure to cross from our big empty house to the toasty little bungalow and to just sit and enjoy the company. Eventually I learned the card games, too, and got to be pretty good at them.
Uncle Bill came into his own at these times. By day, he was a civil servant, working at the Milk Marketing Board, but in the evenings he loved to socialize. He also loved to gamble, and was especially fond of the horse races. From time to time he would take me with him to local Sandown Park, and this I simply adored. Uncle Bill taught me how to spot a good-looking horse and which one might just win. He’d go to the tote booth and lay down bets for us both. We always sat in the cheapest seats or stood at the rails, and it was thrilling to see the horses come thundering round the bend, heading for the finish line. I became familiar with all the jockeys’ names and eventually became rather good at picking a winner.
I had seen the film My Friend Flicka, the story of a boy and a beautiful horse, at our local cinema, and had fallen madly in love with the film’s star, Roddy McDowall. The character he played in the story, Ken McLaughlin, lived on the huge Goose Bar Ranch. I was so obsessed with the film that I fantasized I was married to Ken and that we owned many properties, many horses. After a day at the races with Uncle Bill, I would keep the race card and laboriously copy into a ledger all the horses’ names, their dams, sires, and pedigree details. My “Goose Bar Ranch” was very real to me, and I thought of little else for a while. I made property deeds, sealed them with wax, and tied them with red string. They would state “This is to certify that Mr. and Mrs. Ken McLaughlin own the [name of ranch] and other parts of the United States and Canada.” I even kept a “stable” of Hadge’s old beanpoles in the garden. I’d attach a string at one end for reins and gallop the length of the property. In my imagination, these were the shiniest, healthiest horses in the world.
My mother seemed to be experiencing a new feeling of well-being: she’d settled into her dream house, she’d had the two sons that Pop wanted, their vaudeville act was doing reasonably well. Pop had become a member of one of the local golf clubs, where he did a lot of networking and socializing. He was a left-handed scratch player, and very good—my mother often said that she was a golfing widow. I think my stepfather’s greatest dream was to win the British Amateur Golfing Championship. Sadly, he never did.
For the first time in my memory, Mum began to practice the piano again, the way she used to when she was a young classical pianist.
I remember being awed by the lovely music that emanated from our big living room. I would creep in to sit in a dark corner and watch my mother at the other end of the room, bent over the piano keys, completely absorbed in her scales or beautiful pieces of Chopin or Rachmaninoff or de Falla. She would lean into the instrument, or rock back with her face toward the ceiling, her eyes closed. This was clearly a source of great joy for her, and I rejoiced, too.
That first year at The Meuse felt like we’d really stepped up in the world. So many sweet things come to mind. Little Chris, cycling around on his tricycle, trying so hard to learn to whistle. He couldn’t say the words “Uncle Bill,” and referred to him as “Dingle Bell”—a name we all adopted, eventually shortening it to “Dingle” and then “Ding.”
Great-Aunt Mina came to work for Mummy, helping to clean the house and keep us all tidy. She was a wonderful character, large and ruddy-faced. She would climb the stepladder to wipe an overhead lamp and declare “Bar-bur-a! The dust on this lamp is ow-dacious!” Or, answering the phone for my mother, she would clutch it in one hand and yell up the stairs, “Bar-bur-a! Missus So-and-So’s on the phone for you…You’re not in? Right, I’ll tell her!”
Dad would come over to The Meuse some weekends, bicycling all the way from Chessington. I would accompany him back, riding my own bike. Pedaling my way up Esher Hill, my legs would ache horribly. Dad would give me a great shove, his hand in the small of my back, and I would shoot ahead of him, only to stall a few rotations later as the ascent got the better of me. We would always stop at a pub along the way for lemonade and crisps. I do not know how Dad managed his travels without a car.
Our local cinema showed Astaire-Rogers movies from time to time. Whenever one was playing, Aunt would arrange for us to see it together. I think she lived vicariously through the famous couple. We would have such fun—Aunt rhapsodizing aloud throughout the movie at Ginger’s loveliness and her gowns, and Fred’s brilliant work. I was equally impressed, though more silent, munching on my Mars bars. Aunt would note down every dance step she could, trying them out by cavorting on the sidewalk all the way home, and incorporating them into her own choreographic works as quickly as possible.
Through sheer hard work and all of us pulling together, it seemed that life was finally going to be okay. The divorce had been painful, Mum’s guilt had been tremendous, and the poverty had been oppressive, but, gradually, she and Pop were building a better name and a better life for themselves. In retrospect, it was actually the pinnacle of Mum’s and Pop’s success and happiness. Alas, everything went downhill from there.