Читать книгу Secret Sister: From Nazi-occupied Jersey to wartime London, one woman’s search for the truth - Cherry Durbin - Страница 9

At first Billie’s influence was just felt in terms of strictness about the way she ran the household. She was constantly chiding me to speak ‘properly’ and adopt a posh accent like hers instead of the Wiltshire one of my schoolmates; I wasn’t allowed to mix with anyone she didn’t consider to be of ‘our class’; and at seven shillings a week she decided that my riding lessons were far too expensive and had to be stopped. I was distraught about this and begged her to reconsider, but she said things like ‘needs must’ and ‘don’t be a spoiled little girl’, which meant there was no room for discussion.

Before long I was constantly on edge, waiting to be told what I had done wrong, and Pop never intervened to support me; he was a gentle, go-with-the-flow person who was soon totally under Billie’s thumb. We hardly had any time alone together anymore because he was out at work during the day, and when he came home Billie was there. I remember once he took me to the airfield at Boscombe Down, and I was allowed to climb into the cockpit of Fairey Delta 2, a new plane that had just broken the world speed record. It had a long pointy nose and was very narrow. Inside, I sat in the pilot’s seat, holding onto the steering column and looking at the figures on all the dials; one of these dials had recorded the speed of 1,132 miles per hour that it had achieved to break the record. I tried to imagine what it must have felt like to be in the pilot’s seat then as the world whizzed past. That was a pretty special treat.

After I showed an interest in Fairey Delta 2, Dad told me about the rickety little planes he used to work on in the First World War. ‘Like string bags made out of balsa wood and cloth treated with dope,’ he said, which made them terrible fire hazards. He’d been a Flight Sergeant with 56 Squadron and had fitted out planes in France, then when the war ended he’d gone on a goodwill flight to South Africa with dozens of stops along the way – he showed me them on the map. After that he went out to work on planes in India for a couple of years. I was in awe of this. It seemed terribly glamorous to be an aeroplane fitter back in the days when aviation was in its infancy.

Sometimes Pop would sneak into my bedroom and wake me in the middle of the night if there was a nightingale singing outside, or if there was a particularly dramatic thunderstorm he thought I’d like to watch. We were both fans of thunder and lightning. But otherwise Billie was always around and always criticising both of us.

With Pop, her main complaint was that he didn’t earn enough money to keep her in the style to which she had become accustomed in India. Our Salisbury home was a perfectly nice semi-detached house with a beautiful garden, but Billie wanted something grander where she could be a lady of the manor. She persuaded Pop to buy Glebe House in West Lavington, a gorgeous old property which was actually three cottages knocked into one. It stood in three-quarters of an acre of garden with a trout stream running through it. I think this was a stretch for them to afford because Billie insisted that I paid for my own bedroom with the £200 Mum had left me in her will, which was in a building society account in my name.

I liked the West Lavington house, especially after Billie got a goat, which we kept in a shed in the garden. I became very close to that goat, who was named Grizelda. I never talked about my emotions to any human beings – I saw it as a sign of weakness now, something that could be used against me – but I always found solace in animals, and Grizelda was an exceptionally good listener. Every day, when I got home from school, I’d take out the vegetable peelings for her and sit telling her about my day: I’d talk about any girls who’d been mean to me, or teachers who were cross, or complain about the amount of homework we had. Grizelda would munch on her carrot tops, regarding me with a wise expression, then bend her head for me to scratch it. She genuinely was my best friend and confidante through those early teenage years.

I did try to make other friends. Someone told me about a youth club in West Lavington, something to do with the Methodist church, where you could play games and hang out with other kids the same age. Surely Billie would let me join that? It was local so I could walk there myself.

‘We will both go along together,’ she ruled when I told her about it. ‘I will judge whether or not it is suitable.’

I imagined her charging in, wearing her fur coat and full make-up, turning up her nose at the club, announcing that they were the ‘wrong sort of people’, while I tried to hide behind her in my embarrassment. Cringing, I said, ‘No, I’ve changed my mind. I don’t think I’ll bother after all.’

I hadn’t forgotten my love of horses, and I found that if I turned up at the local stables every weekend to muck out, they let me have a ride every now and then. There was a field of horses very near our house and sometimes I would sneak out with a halter I’d made out of string and ride around on one of them. I was never happier than when I was out on horseback with the wind in my hair. When you’re out there on a horse, you have to be able to deal with whatever happens, and I was learning a lot about being self-sufficient. I was getting good at it.

After leaving Devizes Road Primary I attended Devizes Grammar School, a co-ed some distance away from home. Every morning I had to catch a bus then walk a mile and a half, which inevitably got me there late, doing the same on the way home. It was difficult to make friends since I lived so far from school and wasn’t allowed to invite anyone home, or to take part in after-school activities. Billie had other plans for me: unpaid housework. I did the washing, the ironing, the cleaning, fed the dogs, prepared the vegetables for dinner every evening and washed up afterwards. I guess she’d had servants to do all these things in India, and in West Lavington I became the substitute punkah-wallah.

Soon I began to rebel, and we clashed bitterly. I was distraught when I came home from school one day to find that Billie had retrieved my old doll’s house from the attic, driven a stake through it and turned it into a bird table in the garden.

‘What are you so upset about?’ she asked. ‘You didn’t play with it anymore.’

‘I wanted to keep it. It was my special thing that Pop made me. How could you destroy it?’

‘At least it’s doing some good now instead of just taking up space.’ She failed to understand its emotional significance, and when I told Pop that evening he just shrugged and sighed and opened his paper. He’d do anything to avoid a fight.

Billie didn’t ever beat me but she locked me in my bedroom as punishment for misdemeanours, not realising that I could slither through the bars at the window and jump down onto the roof of the goat shed below. I suppose in retrospect I was a bit of a rebel.

One flashpoint was clothes: whereas my mum had bought me a new coat and new shoes every year because I was a ‘growing girl’, Billie complained about the cost of things. She would never buy me the correct school uniform, instead sending me to school in a hotch-potch of garments, for which the teachers told me off. My out-of-school clothes were all frumpy hand-me-downs from Billie’s sister, which Billie insisted that I ‘make do with and mend’. When I complained, she retorted, ‘What do you want nice clothes for? You’ve got a face like a spade.’

One of our worst fights came after I got home from school one day to find that Grizelda was gone.

‘Where is she?’ I screamed. ‘What have you done with Grizelda?’

‘She got on my nerves, eating everything in the garden,’ Billie said, ‘so I gave her away to a farmer.’

‘Which farmer? Where is she?’ I wouldn’t stop my persistent questioning until Billie gave in and told me where Grizelda had been rehomed, then I charged out of the house and walked all the way there. When Grizelda saw me she got so excited she tried to leap over the fence. I hugged her and cried, but had no choice but to leave her there when it was time to go home again. I missed her terribly after that.

When I asked, in typical teenage fashion, ‘What about me? Don’t my feelings come into it?’ Billie replied, crushingly: ‘You? You’re less than a grain of sand in the universe.’

Only once did Pop stand up for me in a fight with Billie. We were in the car and I was begging her to buy me some summer stockings rather than the awful 60-denier nylon pair I was supposed to make last for an entire school year. ‘Who do you think you are? Lady Muck?’ Billie rebuked. ‘We’re not made of money, you know.’ Suddenly, Pop screeched the car to a halt and yelled, ‘You will not treat her like that. Get out of the car!’ There was a blazing row, but for once he stood his ground and made Billie walk the three miles home.

When I was around fourteen, Pop was made redundant from his job as representative of Fairey Aviation when they closed down that branch of the aircraft testing site at Boscombe Down. He could have retired at that stage, but Billie persuaded him that they wouldn’t have enough money to live on from his pension. She had very expensive tastes, particularly in home décor, constantly changing our carpets, curtains and upholstery for the latest shades and styles. She insisted that Pop went back to work in the aerodrome storeroom, which was a huge climb-down for someone who had been in charge, and I could tell he hated it. We downsized to a house in Amesbury, Wiltshire, and I moved to the South Wilts Grammar School for Girls for my third year onwards.

The overwhelming feeling in my teens was loneliness and isolation. My contemporaries in the late fifties and early sixties were listening to pop music, wearing the latest fashions and going to dances where live bands played, but I had no social life except accompanying Pop and Billie to evenings spent playing cards with their friends. Every day after school my classmates hung out in the Red Cockerel coffee shop, chatting to boys and having a laugh. I yearned to join them but my pocket money was all taken up paying for school lunches, and besides, I’d have been in big trouble if I missed the bus home. I sat in the window seat of the bus watching them all clustered round a table in the Red Cockerel and felt like an alien species. It was such a lonely feeling.

In the early years of their marriage they had talked, tantalisingly, about adopting a child because Billie couldn’t have any of her own, and she said she’d always wanted to have a son. They made enquiries but Billie found the adoption agency’s assessment procedures rude and intrusive.

‘These flipping people, they want to come and inspect our house and ask all sorts of personal questions about us, and they haven’t even let me see what kind of child they might have available. I’m not putting up with this!’ she exclaimed.

My chance of gaining an ally, someone I could be close to, were dashed. After that my only hope was escape, to start a life of my own somewhere I could make my own choices and determine my own fate.