My wife, Margreet, who has been checking my rather extensive autobiography, says that she would like to know more about the people in it. That failing is because I am more at home and comfortable with inanimate things rather than people. With things, situations, and places, I know more or less what to do or not to do, or make note of. With people I am not so sure and do not like to offend. Moreover, they are extremely complex.
So I got to thinking about some of the people who have influenced my life in major or minor ways.
Arthur Keep was gardener to my grandfather and later worked on our Silchester chicken farm.
When grandfather bought a car, he asked "Keep" if he would abandon gardening to become the chauffeur. Arthur Keep drove the car to the end of the rather long drive, didn't like it, dismounted, and remained gardener.
He and I, though he was much older, got on well. So from him, and my father in a different way, I learned the ways of the country and countryfolk.
Arthur Keep recalled later that as a small boy I would go to his dwelling and ask for "half a nana", and I presume was given it. And when he retired to a small cottage near Aldermaston, and where I would sometimes stay when painting landscape in the district, he taught me how to eat a tomato in the hands by making a hole in the skin, sucking out some pulp, replacing it with vinegar salt and plenty of pepper and consuming it with bread and butter. And outside in the sunshine, with the tomato warm and straight from the vine, it was quite delicious.
In his old age he would take a great delight in watching black and white children's television.
It was probably that having taken me rather under his wing that I was happy catching newts with the village boys (bad form) and drinking nettle tea with our lengthman - a man in charge of the surface and drainage of road (also bad form). But on his advice I avoided the Tadley gypsies (good form). I did once visit Tadley to meet our maid's family. When the door opened, there, hanging from the wall, was a large black pig, dead and cold, ready for butchery (one remembers these things).
Sights like that were normal, as was the baking of bread in most villages. This bread was baked in such ways that other peoples bread was always different and seemed to taste better than our own. It was something to relish, as was the bread and butter consumed at Arthur Keep's cottage with ripe tomatoes.
With WW 2 well under way (I'm sure it should be "weigh"), I disembarked from a liner in Montreal, in Canada, as a pubescent 15 year old refugee. I was being possibly the only member of my family to survive the imminent Nazi invasion of the UK.
My kind hosts, the Killorins, collected me and we drove down to Watertown, Connecticut where my host worked with a brass factory and my hostess in the very smart Taft School. I soon came to realise that I had landed in a very foreign country and that I was a misfit in it.
Because of my adopted family's connections with the school I was enrolled there, where I excelled only in sport. So I was sent by bus each day to a Trade School in Torrington, Connecticut. There I learned to draw cog wheels and had difficulty with the over-befriending headmaster who thought I might be a good match for his plain daughter.
With no money, except for the magazine subscriptions that I sold locally, life was a bit bleak.
That was, until I met a person called Souther Buttrick, a fellow, but American misfit.
Souther did not fit in with the almost ritualistic American way of life. Older than me by several years, he lived alone above his parents' garage as a wood sculptor, clarinet player, furniture mender, Bull Durham smoker and whisky drinker. His chaotic eyrie smelled of smoke, freshly-cut wood and Bourbon. There was a most pleasant haze about it.
Souther didn't speak a lot and got on with his creative processes.
In the room where I lived I designed and made a musical instrument, helped in the garden, and dug us out of the enormous snow-drifts that piled up outside each winter.
In Souther's place I was happy and felt at home. And what I learned there about wood and wood sculpture has stood me in good stead ever since.
Unbeknown to Souther, he did me a most useful service by giving me too much Bourbon one evening. I lived a short distance away from his hideaway, and to cover the distance on this occasion I recall resorting to all fours. Regaining my room, the bed tried to tip me on to the floor as the walls around moved in all directions. I have been in many a tipsy state since but never one like that. The lesson learned had been a memorable one.
When once I returned to America it was important to me that I locate Souther to say how much I had appreciated his company during early wartime before returning to fly in the RAF, and to tell him how he had influenced my future.
I did find him, living alone in the countryside, mending antique wooden furniture.
He had forgotten me.
