This piece is really a glimpse into my early life, a child's life in the English countryside during the late 1920s to the early 1930s.
It all started as Margreet and I were enjoying a glass in our garden "shed" when she asked me more about when I was recovered crawling toward a neighbour's house in my nappies to see the local parson's daughter, a friend. "You must write about it", she suggested. But how could I write a whole piece on such a small incident? So I might as well include it with other small recollections of that time. That is what I have done. I apologise for any repetition as I have written in the past on many of the episodes that I will mention.
I was born in our house at Silchester in 1925. At that time the village could not be reached unless a stream had been forded. My father (badly wounded by the Turks during the '1914 - 1918' war in Mesopotamia) had started a chicken farm in a large field next to our house.
Around our pear-shaped back drive were two ex-army sheds, joined together to form a banana shape. In one end the food for the chickens was kept (mostly dried sweetcorn and ground-up oyster shell) and in the other, the Baverstocks who worked on the farm and did odd jobs. Their daughter remembers me going to see them to ask for "half a naaner" (banana).
One of our jobs was to scrape eggs. Being free range (as all chickens were then) sometimes droppings would adhere to some. These had to be scraped off before the eggs could be loaded on or trailer to be driven to Woking market. One of those scraping knives is still in use in our garden shed. It must be around 100 years old. When there was an order for a chicken from the farm, our spaniel Ben, would under my father's direction, hold down the bird with his paw until my father could pick it up.
We were "gentry" but poor. This came to light I remember when the local brass band came to our drive to play carols at Christmas and we had no money at all to give them. Perhaps we offered eggs or chickens. But I recall that it reduced my mother (a Londoner brought up in court circles) to tears. I don't think she was ever very happy as a farmer's wife. Yet being gentry our financial circumstances were understood. And I am sure that friends and relations helped out with school fees and other expenses.
This lack of money and the generous attitude to our small income with my father's war disability pension, manifested itself when my parents played bridge with friends. Always someone at the table would cover their losses. It was not a disgrace to be poor.
The Firths lived across a field from us. It was one of the venues for playing bridge. I was often taken along, and boring it was for a small boy. To keep me happy I was given marons glacées to eat, but I would have much preferred a "pennerth" (pennyworth of chocolate drops, a bag of lemonade crystals or a sherbet fountain.
When the Firths wanted two chickens from our farm for a dinner party, my sister June delivered them - to the front door. Sherrard, the butler, opened the door and asked her, very politely, to deliver them to the servants' entrance at the back of the house. My sister never forgot her embarrassment, especially as no one locked their houses and we were used to simply walk in to see whoever we wanted.
A social faux-pas that I remember my mother telling we about was when the Duchess of Wellington came to call. When she arrived, my mother was eating bread and dripping. And dripping was one of the perquisites of the staff.
Harry Firth seldom entered his well-stocked cellar. One day he decided to look at it and found the butler, Sherrard, drinking his favourite port out of a teacup. Sherrard was sacked on the spot, not for drinking the port but for drinking it out of a teacup.
We had other connections with the Firths. Our wireless (a PYE) needed power from a large dry battery and a wet, car battery. As there was no electricity in the village it was my job to take our wet battery across the field to have it charged at the Firth's electricity-generated plant. This extension to the back of their house contained a large flywheel as part of its power generator. On the floor were masses of car batteries linked up to supply the house with light. Our battery was added to the others. My father, being a cricketer (he played for Berkshire) among other sporting skills, wanted to hear the Test Match score from Australia. This needed an aerial strung from the wireless set to the top of a tree.
The Firths must have moved, I think to Calcott. We stayed there and I recall their men's lavatory being just like stalls in a public lavatory. And after our stay I tipped the butler six pence.
Mary Firth's sister, Hetty Heber Percy, who came to stay at the Firths, became a great friend of my mother's. She lived in London near to the Albert Hall. Much later, when her chauffeur had gone to war, she let us use his flat in the basement, which became a fairly safe refuge for friends and family on leave or needing rest and recuperation. A bomb actually fell nearby and blew off the right breast of one of the sculptures connected to the Albert Memorial. (It was cleverly repaired after the war, but was not quite the same as the original.)
Other rich friends lived at The Vyne, a Tudor house owned by Charlie Chute (he was probably a sir or a lord). There was a chapel in the house, and a resident priest who gave me fishing hooks when I went fishing in their lake. Outside the front door were (and probably still are) two large stone eagles on plinths. They were covered in lichen. I called them "the mossy eagles", and that was then their name.
My grandmother, a formidable lady with a title and rather unknown origins, would come to stay with us. We obviously had to be nice to her as she probably contributed to our finances. She was grand enough that when walking in London's Soho district with my mother, they were confronted by some louts blocking the pavement. She pushed through them, saying "aside, scrum". And they obediently did stand aside.
One day at Silchester, when I had shot or snared a rabbit and not yet dealt with it, she rolled up her old-fashioned sleeves, paunched, skinned and cut it up for the pot. We were astounded. It might have confirmed that she had been an Irish farmer's daughter before she met my later to be knighted grandfather.
