School were always trying to kiss, and a small nose, and freckles. Her hair was smooth and long, the colour of hay. It looked quite startling sometimes, shining in the sunlight. I used to feel proud of Betty and Dick when they came to collect me every afternoon at Mrs Pritchard’s school. Dick was to leave the Grammar School in July, and on the afternoons of that warm May, as Betty and I cycled home with him, we felt sorry that he wouldn’t be there next term. But Dick said he was glad. He was big, as tall as my father, and very shy. He’d begun to smoke, a habit not approved of by my father. On the way home from school we had to stop and go into a ruined cottage so that he could have a Woodbine. He was going to work on the farm; one day the farm would be his.
‘It would be lovely to play tennis,’ Betty said.
‘Then you must, my dear. But if you want to play this summer you’ll have to get the court into trim.’ Mrs Ashburton smiled at Betty in a way that made her thin, elderly face seem beautiful. Then she smiled at Dick. ‘I was passing the tennis court the other day, Dick, and I suddenly thought of it. Now why shouldn’t those children get it into trim? I thought. Why shouldn’t they come and play, and bring their friends?’
‘Yes,’ Dick said.
‘Why ever don’t you come over to Challacombe on Saturday? Matilda, too, of course. Come for tea, all three of you.’
Mrs Ashburton smiled at each of us in turn. She nodded at us and climbed into the governess cart. ‘saturday,’ she repeated.
‘Honestly, Betty!’ Dick glared crossly at my sister, as though she were responsible for the invitation. ‘I’m not going, you know.’
He cycled off, along the narrow, dusty lane, big and red-faced and muttering. We followed him more slowly, talking about Mrs Ashburton. ‘Poor old thing!’ Betty said, which was what people round about often said when Mrs Ashburton was mentioned, or when she was seen in her governess cart.
The first thing I remember in all my life was my father breaking a fountain-pen. It was a large black-and-white pen, like tortoiseshell or marble. That was the fashion for fountain-pens then: two or three colours marbled together, green and black, blue and white, red and black-and-white. Conway Stewart, Waterman’s, Blackbird. Propelling pencils were called Eversharp.
The day my father broke his pen I didn’t know all that: I learnt it afterwards, when I went to school. I was three the day he broke the pen. ‘It’s just a waste of blooming money!’ he shouted. He smashed the pen across his knee while my mother anxiously watched. Waste of money or not, she said, it wouldn’t help matters to break the thing. She fetched him the ink and a dip-pen from a drawer of the dresser. He was still angry, but after a minute or two he began to laugh. He kissed my mother, pulling her down on to the knee he’d broken the pen over. Dick, who must have been nine then, didn’t even look up from his homework. Betty was there too, but I can’t remember what she was doing.
The kitchen hasn’t changed much. The old range has gone, but the big light-oak dresser is still there, with the same brass handles on its doors and drawers and the same Wedgwood-blue dinner-set on its shelves, and cups and jugs hanging on hooks. The ceiling is low, the kitchen itself large and rectangular, with the back stairs rising from the far end of it, and a door at the bottom of them. There are doors to the pantry and the scullery, and to the passage that leads to the rest of the house, and to the yard. There’s a long narrow light-oak table, with brass handles on its drawers, like the dresser ones, and oak chairs that aren’t as light as all the other oak because chairs darken with use. But the table isn’t scrubbed once a week any more, and the brass doesn’t gleam. I know, because now and again I visit the farmhouse.
I remember the kitchen with oil-lamps, and the time, the day after my fifth birthday, when the men came to wire the house for electricity. My mother used to talk about an Aga, and often when she took us shopping with her she’d bring us to Archers’, the builders’ merchants, to look at big cream-coloured Agas. After a time, Mr Gray of the Aga department didn’t even bother to bustle up to her when he saw her coming. She’d stand there, plump and pink-cheeked, her reddish hair neat beneath the brim of her hat, touching the display models, opening the oven doors and lifting up the two big hot-plate covers. When we returned to the farmhouse my father would tease her, knowing she’d been to Archers’ again. She’d blush, cutting ham at teatime or offering round salad. My father would then forget about it. ‘Well, I’m damned,’ he’d say, and he’d read out an item from the weekly paper, about some neighbouring farmer or new County Council plans. My mother would listen and then both of them would nod. They were very good friends, even though my father teased her. She blushed like a rose, he said: he teased her to see it.
Once, before the electricity came, I had a nightmare. It was probably only a few months before, because when I came crying down to the kitchen my father kept comforting me with the reminder that it would soon be my fifth birthday. ‘You’ll never cry then, Matilda,’ he whispered to me, cuddling me to him. ‘Big girls of five don’t cry.’ I fell asleep, but it’s not that that I remember now, not the fear from the nightmare going away, or the tears stopping, or my father’s caressing: it’s the image of my parents in the kitchen as I stumbled down the back stairs. There were two oil-lamps lit and the fire in the range was glowing red-hot behind its curved bars, and the heavy black kettle wasn’t quite singing. My father was asleep with last Saturday’s weekly paper on his knees, my mother was reading one of the books from the bookcase in the dining-room we never used, probably
Looking back on it now, there was a lot of happiness, although perhaps not more than many families experience. Everything seems either dismal or happy in retrospect, and the happiness in the farmhouse is what I think of first whenever I think now of that particular past. I remember my mother baking in the kitchen, flour all over her plump arms, and tiny beads of moisture on her forehead, because the kitchen was always hot. I remember my father’s leathery skin and his smile, and the way he used to shout at the sheepdogs, and the men, Joe and Arthur, sitting on yellow stubble, drinking tea out of a bottle, on a day hay had been cut.
Our farm had once been the home-farm of Challacombe Manor, even though our farmhouse was two miles away from the manor house. There’d been servants and gardeners at Challacombe Manor then, and horses in the stables, and carriages coming and going. But the estate had fallen into rack and ruin after the First World War because Mr Ashburton hadn’t been able to keep it going and in the end, in 1924, he’d taken out various mortgages. When he died, in 1929, the extent of his debts was so great that Mrs Ashburton had been obliged to let Lloyd’s Bank foreclose on the mortgages, which is how it came about that my father bought Challacombe Farm. It was a tragedy, people round about used to say, and the real tragedy was that Mr Ashburton had come back from the war in such a strange state that he hadn’t minded about everywhere falling into rack and ruin. According to my father, Lloyd’s Bank owned Challacombe Manor itself and had granted Mrs Ashburton permission to live there in her lifetime. It wouldn’t surprise him, my father said, if it turned out that Lloyd’s Bank owned Mrs Ashburton as well. ‘He drank himself to death,’ people used to say about Mr Ashburton. ‘She watched him and didn’t have the heart to stop him.’ Yet before the First World War Mr Ashburton had been a different kind of man, energetic and sharp. The Challacombe estate had been a showpiece.
