The Day Gone By Read online

  Only part of the garden was cultivated. The lawn was big enough for a tennis court, a clock golf green and a small croquet-ground. Beyond it lay the long herbaceous border, and beyond that, the meadow we called the Paddock. To the west, behind the hundred-yard-long hornbeam hedge, was the kitchen garden, with its pear, plum and apple trees.

  But this was only half the substance of that garden. To the east lay a little copse, known as the Wild Wood; and beyond that the drying-ground with its clothes-lines and rough grass, among which lay the netted raspberry bed and a broken-down, disused pig-sty.

  Just to the north of these lay Bull Banks. (Beatrix Potter: ‘The Tale of Mr Tod’.) Bull Banks was an actual bank of considerable size, perhaps twenty-five yards long, five feet high and ten broad, planted with laurel, forsythia, cydonia, lilac and other shrubs and crowned along the top with three silver birches. In front of it, outside the dining-room windows, lay the rose garden and behind it the potting-shed, a vegetable patch and the sizeable stables (part of which had become the garage). Here was a place and a half! In Bull Banks you could go to ground and no one could tell where you might be. (‘If you’re called you’re to answer, Richard!’ ‘Shan’t!’) It could represent anything - a fortress, the council-rooms of a kingdom, a series of caves or dwellings, a dangerous jungle. But reality was often more delightful than pretending. Thrushes, blackbirds and chaffinches nested in Bull Banks. A small child, lying still among the bushes, was better placed to watch them than an adult. In due course the fledglings, all brown feathers and glum beaks turned down at the corners, would come out to fly. I would catch caterpillars off the leaves, put them down in the open and see how close a blackbird was ready to come to take them. (They never came to the hand, though.) Once, I fabricated a nest and brought my sister to see it, claiming to have found it. It didn’t deceive her and I’m glad she didn’t pretend it did. I hated being condescended to, and in fact I can’t remember that anyone in the family ever did condescend to me, though sometimes they grew evasive. (‘When you’re older . . .’)

  Bull Banks extended almost to the kitchen windows on the east side of the house, ending in a great bush of bay, the kitchen fence, a bed of wallflowers and on the house wall a wistaria. On the other side - the sunset side — of the house stood the conservatory and beyond that, in another wide patch of rough ground, the hazelnut trees, the swing and the rhododendrons. There were two great clumps of rhododendrons, one red and one mauve. When I was small, these affected me more deeply than any other flowers in the garden - more even than the roses or the dwarf begonias. I can remember once, after a shower of rain, standing on tiptoe and thrusting my head and shoulders up through the dripping branches and foliage to come face-to-face with a great cluster of blooms, covered with drops, glowing fresh, their brilliantly coloured trumpet mouths all maculate within, the whole bigger than my own face. In early childhood, I believe, awareness works on two levels at once: there is a paradox. Wonderful things are often apprehended composedly (after all, they’re tangibly there), while ordinary things can seem miraculous in a way in which they never do again. I remember feeling soaking wet - including my feet, which I hated - and at the same time recognizing a kind of abasement before the rhododendrons: that is, there was nothing I could do, adequately to respond to something so beautiful. They were beautiful beyond comprehension, beyond assimilation. You would never be able to say ‘Well, now I’ve seen them.’ You felt you ought to look at them for ever. They were beyond anything one could have expected or imagined. Saying even this much is really cheating - bringing in hindsight and words to try to express a child’s incoherent, inarticulate sense of being utterly bowled over.

  Nothing else in the garden affected me like the rhododendrons - which also, of course, provided caves, hiding-places and the dwellings of my imaginary friends. (I had plenty of those, as well as real ones.) But the dwarf begonias ran them pretty close. There is still, sixty years later, no garden flower with richer colours. I used to be allowed to gather up the fallen ones and float them in shallow bowls of water, and this gave me enormous pleasure. They were mine - mine! If only they had lasted a bit longer. One day I had an idea. I picked one or two unfallen ones on the sly. No one noticed. I believe this was the start of a certain unscrupulous streak in small matters which has remained with me all my life. It never got as far as pinching shirts, like Dylan Thomas; but by and large I believe it’s done me more harm than good. I’m sorry I got away with those unfallen begonias.

  My earliest memories are, first, of making my way through the paddock, among the long grass of June, with the sorrel and moon-daisies taller than my own head. I was perhaps three. The moon-daisies, if you gripped four or five stalks, would actually support your weight as you leaned backwards. Secondly, I remember lying in bed in the morning - my mother already up and gone - listening to a bird singing in the dew-glittering silver birch on the edge of the lawn. The bird sang ‘Bringing it! Bringing it! Bringing it! Marguerite! Marguerite! Knee–deep! Knee-deep! Wait! Wait! Wait! Wait!’ It was, of course, a song-thrush, but I didn’t know that then. I just felt it was beautiful - so vigorous and clear – and nothing to interrupt or stop it. But those are words, too. Cheating.

  Another special flower - a wild flower, this time - was the orange hawkweed (‘Grim the Collier’ or ‘Fox and Cubs’). It’s not very common, but, like many wild flowers, where you do come across it, it’s usually fairly profuse. It flowered here and there in the long grass by the rhododendrons, between the Spanish chestnut and the swing. It’s a dandelion type of flower (composita). The clustered blooms, deep orange, are at the top of a stalk about as tall as a milk bottle, and are not large - perhaps each as broad as an adult’s little finger nail. This was my own, secret flower. I knew that even my father didn’t know it was there; or if he did, he’d never spoken of it. I loved its colour and vaguely knew it to be a shade uncommon, for you never seemed to find it anywhere else. In my imagination I attributed magical properties to it, though these I never put to the test. To this day I love to come upon one.

  The insects continually fascinated me. There were huge slugs – yes, I know they’re not insects – bigger than my thumb, some of them. They didn’t disgust me, though naturally I preferred the snails. If you put them on a sheet of glass you could watch the pulsation along the base of their bodies, a regular alternation of colours as they slid along. I liked the earwigs, too, that fell out of the dahlias; and the woodlice which curled up defensively when you came upon them under bark or in old boxes in the potting-shed. But best of all were the centipedes and millipedes. For these you had to dig with a trowel - usually in the Wild Wood. The centipedes, bright chestnut, dashed away at speed, articulated and wriggling all ways. The millipedes - barely an inch long – shammed death, curling up like woodlice. But if you put them in a jam-jar and waited, after a while they would uncurl and start going round and round, with their wonderful, undulant motion on innumerable, fluent, flexible legs. The motion of these legs was weirdly smooth, as they followed one another down the length of the body. In the jam-jar the millipedes had a peculiar smell, not very pleasant. It occurs to me now that this may be a natural deterrent reaction against enemies.

  The only insects we killed were - apart from greenfly - ants and wasps. The tile-floored verandah harboured colonies of black ants. When they flew, it was a sight to see. The air was filled with them. They could bite sharply, but as a rule they didn’t hurt you if you didn’t provoke them. Sometimes, however, they became so numerous that my mother would decide that they must be reduced. (I don’t think total extermination would have been practicable — not in those days.) The job was done with relays of kettles of boiling water, which percolated through the long, thin cracks in the tiles. This never seemed to create any panic among the ants. Those who died, died at once, of course. Those who didn’t simply carried on. I don’t think these onslaughts really had much effect. They certainly had no long-term effect. Anyway, my father rather condoned the ants, because they kept down t
he greenfly on the climbing roses growing up the fluted wooden pillars of the verandah. Lovely roses they were: I can smell them now, and remember their names, too: Lady Hillingdon (yellow): Clos Vougeot (dark red); Madame Butterfly (pink); and the little, thornless yellow Banksia rose, which grew right up to the bedroom windows and flowered so profusely that you were allowed to pick a bloom or two if you wanted. At one end of the verandah was a white, scented jasmine and at the other end a ceanothus, whose blunt, smoky-blue cones of bloom I then thought rather dull. In those days I wanted all flowers to be fragrant (that was the only thing wrong with the rhododendrons and begonias) and hadn’t much time for Canterbury Bells, gladioli (they were all pink in those days) or forget-me-nots. It was wallflowers for me, night-scented stock, lilac, viburnum, chrysanthemums, blue lupins on a hot afternoon: and above all, the scent of the Siberian crab-apple in bloom. It is the literal truth that I am half-afraid to smell one now, for it turns my heart over and makes me want to weep for Bull Banks. Bull Banks is gone, for ever. After the war, and long after we had sold the house, the house was pulled down. The whole place was built over. The former garden - even the great oak trees were felled - is now the site of twenty-two small dwellings.

  The other insects that got killed were wasps; and this was serious stuff. By August they had nearly always become a nasty nuisance. The lesser part of the campaign consisted of the cook - no, I must say ‘Cook’, for she was never called anything else and to this day I don’t know her name - resorting to the traditional wasp-trap of jam and diluted beer in glass jars hung up outside the back door. Into these the wasps fell, struggled and drowned. I thought it cruel then and I think so now; the wasps swam a long time. Anyway, I believe the traps attracted more wasps than would otherwise have come to the kitchen. ‘But what else you goin’ to do, Mas’ Richard?’

  There was a lot. My father was a nailer at tracking down wasps’ nests. In the evening he would wander round the garden, or stand quietly about until he had detected the general flight-line of passing, homeward-bound wasps. This he would patiently follow up. Or he would stroll in the lane beyond the paddock, observing the verges and banks, with occasional forays into the great harvest-field opposite. I have known him find six nests in an evening.

  The crunch came later, after sunset and at a time when I was always in bed. My father, accompanied by the gardener, Thorn, would set out again for his quarry. Being a doctor, he had access to poisons, and the poison he used was the deadly potassium cyanide. One sniff kills you in a second, or so I’ve always understood. The jar was kept locked up. I never even saw it: the idea alone frightened me. Arrived at the nest, Thorn would clear away round the entrance, and then my father would put in the cyanide with a teaspoon lashed to a longish stick. On these raids they quite often got stung, and for this the palliative was bicarbonate of soda. (Milton hadn’t yet been invented. It’s enormously effective: on the aforementioned trip to Martock in 1962, four-year-old Juliet was stung by a bee in the churchyard. Elizabeth, my wife, applied Milton at once and Juliet didn’t even cry.) I recall being taken to see a poisoned nest the morning after. Each wasp, as it flew over the cyanide, dropped dead instantly.

  We always had plenty of apples, and stored them through the winter in a special room in the stable, equipped with what I can only describe as big chests of drawers, made of plain, unvarnished wood, each drawer slatted and open to the air. Every few days you inspected them and took out any gone-rotten ones. Stewed apple and custard was pudding every day throughout the winter. It must have saved a lot of money. I never got tired of it: it was delicious with cream.

  My father must have spent more than he could afford on the conservatory, which was quite big and opened off the drawing-room by glass double-doors. It was heated by a coke stove and hot-water pipes, and all winter was as warm as in summer. Always, there was a melange of fragrances in the air. In those days, cyclamen had a characteristic, singular scent which went all up your nose. Its pungency made you jerk back your head. They’ve lost it now, for some reason. There were brilliant purple cinerarias, pink primulas and mop-headed chrysanthemums taller than I was, crisply viscid and smelling like pine and cedar-oil.

  During the winter these splendid pot-plants used to be brought in relays into the drawing-room: all but the arum lilies. Nurses, throughout the profession, are superstitious, and none of their superstitions is stronger than the tabu on lilies in a ward or a house. However, I can’t remember my mother observing any other superstitions. I’m sure my father wouldn’t have liked it. He might even have uttered his characteristic dismissal, ‘Pooh! Silly, I call that!’ He was by no means an assertive man — rather the reverse — yet somehow what he said carried authority.

  The water-butt in the conservatory was a fine plaything. It was not quite as high as my shoulders - or that’s how I remember it - a convenient height for leaning over. You could, of course, sail toy boats on it, but once again reality was more absorbing. In summer it was full of little larvae, which hung suspended, head downward, their tails held by the surface tension. If you startled them by a bang on the tank they went jerking and wriggling away, but soon returned to their motionless suspension. They had tiny hairs on their bodies and a broad thoracic region, a slightly bulbous section (for they were segmented) behind the head. These, of course, were the larvae of the culicine mosquito. I didn’t know that then, but I knew well enough that they were bound to turn into something or other, as tadpoles turned into frogs. I hated mosquitoes. They really go for children – I suppose the blood’s sweeter than adults’ – and I could never let the bites alone, but scratched and scratched them till they bled. However, the larvae in the tank I didn’t regard as enemies.

  The upper end of the tank lay immediately below a glass pane at one end of the drawing-room, and in sunny weather the water-reflections would spangle and glitter elastically, flashing back and forth across the white ceiling above the piano. My brother played well, and to watch the dancing, glinting ceiling while he played Chopin was another of those unselfconscious delights of childhood whose worth is not realized until years afterwards. I was lucky to have that as a start to the pleasure of music.

  It was my father who taught me to recognize and love the birds. That half-wild, wooded and lawned garden was full of them. (Many birds love a lawn; even those, like nuthatches and swallows, who don’t alight are attracted by the insects flying over it.) Thrushes, blackbirds, starlings, sparrows, chaffinches, greenfinches and robins came and went continually and tussled over the food my mother put out for them. (‘The rats’ dinner’, my father sardonically called it, but in fact we didn’t seem to suffer from rats – or very little.) Bones and half-coconuts were hung up in the verandah, just outside the dining-room window. Anyone spotting a blue tit or a great tit would call out ‘Tit on bone!’ and others would come to have a look at close quarters. Coal tits we didn’t seem to get; I don’t know why. (They prefer conifers?) In spring black-and-white house martins built their mud nests under the eaves, and I loved to watch them coming and going. You could see the fledglings looking out of the nests, and hear them squeaking with excitement. The swallows and swifts swooped, hunting, over the lawn. You could set a fair idea of coming weather from observing how high or low they were – which was how high or low the flies were, of course. To this day the screaming of swifts in a clear sky recalls Oakdene – the pointed, back-swept wings of the fleet birds black against the blue. I love swifts.

  In wet weather particularly, pied wagtails would quarter the lawn, their long tails bobbing as they ran about in short sprints. I liked their vigour and energy and their dipping, flirting flight all mixed up with the running. Wash Common is high up, a hilly watershed between the Kennet and the Enborne, so during my infancy I never saw a grey wagtail, that riverside dweller. As for yellow wagtails, it wasn’t until, in my thirties, I visited Connemara that I saw one at all. They’re common enough there.

  In spring and summer my father often used to sit on the lawn in a deck-chair, the news
paper a mere pretence folded across his knee. He was not only watching the birds: he was listening to those he couldn’t necessarily see. His particular aversion was to the bullfinches which used to pick the buds off the prunus tree. This they commonly did round about March. ‘Look at the blighter!’ he would say, pointing at it angrily. Yet he never did anything about it. There wasn’t really much you could do, short of shooting it with a catapult, perhaps. But that wouldn’t have been what Harry Wharton & Co. used to call ‘the proper caper’.

  As he sat in the deck-chair in May or June, my father would locate the song-posts of the various summer visitors to the garden, particularly the warblers. As I grew older he taught me to recognize their songs - blackcap, chiff-chaff and willow warbler (which he always called a willow-wren: I don’t know why). Since then I have read in certain bird books that the songs of the blackcap and the garden warbler are virtually indistinguishable. I can’t agree. They are fairly plainly distinguishable. Both, certainly, are similar and arresting, but the garden warbler’s song is more contralto, sustained and unpausing, while the blackcap’s is higher and broken up into particular phrases that one can learn to recognize. With the dying fall of the willow warbler I soon became familiar; and I noticed, too, that when a robin is singing he is almost always asserting himself against another robin a little distance off. He will sing a few phrases, then stop and listen, and if you listen too you can generally hear the other robin answering. Robins are aggressive and fight for territory. In autumn, as the summer visitors depart, they lay claim to the wider, less insect-filled territory they are going to need for the winter.

  Spotted flycatchers used to build on projecting ledges of the verandah or the stable, and sit conspicuously on the netting round the tennis court, fluttering away and back in their hunting. The few conifers - there were only three or four - on the west side of the garden attracted both nuthatches and tree-creepers. The nuthatches would come for nuts to the bird-table, but I don’t recall that tree-creepers ever came. Occasionally a green woodpecker would visit the garden, but never seemed to stay. As a child, I never saw the greater spotted.