Читать книгу Accident by Design - Edith Caroline Rivett - Страница 9

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Templedean Place stood on the western escarpment of the Cotswold Hills, six hundred feet above sea level. From the western terrace of the house the ground dropped steeply; far below, the rich plain of the Isbourne stretched away to the Severn Valley, mile upon mile of level fertile farm land. A little to the north Bredon Hill raised its characteristic contour, and in the far distance the Malvern Hills showed blue on the sky line. Templedean was an Elizabethan manor house, but Jacobean builders had enlivened its original austerity with Italianate enrichment of fanciful stonework and elaborate chimney stacks.

Sir Charles Vanstead, father of Gerald and Judith, was the third in line of wealthy industrialists who had amassed fortunes in the nineteenth century. Jabez Vanstead, grandfather to Sir Charles, had been born in Birmingham in the year 1800. His parents had been poor working folk, but Jabez had the brains and tireless energy which could earn money in the nineteenth century. When he died in 1870, he bequeathed a fortune to his son James, in addition to the Manor of Templedean. Jabez had claimed kinship with Vansteads of an earlier century who had owned Templedean, a matter which few disputed, for great wealth had arguing power, even in the mid-Victorian era. James was educated as a gentleman’s son, but his brains were none the worse for an education totally irrelevant to industrialism and the techniques of the steel trade. James, like his father before him, was a hard worker, and when he died of an apoplexy in 1900, he left a fortune to his son Charles, which put the latter among the biggest industrial magnates of his day. Charles, born in 1869, had been to Eton and to Oxford: he had married the daughter of an adjacent landowner, and his wealth and her taste and knowledge made Templedean Place and its gardens famous, even in an area where architecture and gardening had flourished as sister arts for generations.

The war of 1914-18 did not diminish the Vanstead fortune: as taxation increased in the interwar years, Sir Charles spoke of imminent ruin, but his great industrial undertakings continued to make money. Even under the “crippling” taxation following the declaration of war in 1939, Sir Charles Vanstead was still an exceedingly wealthy man. His three sons, Charles, James, and Gerald, born in 1899, 1902, and 1905 respectively, had had a public school and university education, followed by such travelling as they fancied. Charles and James, cut to the parental pattern, were able, hard-working fellows who pulled their weight in the complex pattern of industrialism when they joined the firm their great-grandfather had founded. Judith, born in 1908, was also an exceedingly intelligent, clearheaded woman, who had developed the manner and charm of a great lady to offset an unusually acute and critical mind. Gerald was the exception in this family of acute intelligences. Frail in infancy, nervy and unhealthy in boyhood and adolescence, Gerald was the duffer of the family: useless at lessons, inept at games, devoid of social grace he was the despair of his family. It certainly never occurred to a dominating father or to brothers endowed with a high degree of intelligence and vigour that more than half Gerald’s trouble was due to fear of his own family. Knowing himself for a duffer, he had spent an unhappy boyhood as the family butt. It was not until 1930, when Sir Charles had agreed to let his youngest son go out to Malaya, that Gerald ever really made any attempt to use such intelligence and initiative as he did possess. Once away from his family, he became a reasonably competent and reliable fellow. He learnt the business of a rubber planter, and bought his own plantation in 1935. In 1937 he married the daughter of a Queensland stationer. Gerald met Meriel in Singapore, where she had come for a holiday. Over the business of courtship and marriage Gerald showed no hesitation or shilly shallying; perhaps Meriel, who certainly had a mind of her own, provided some of the necessary impetus. Be that as it may, Gerald loved his wife, and Meriel was the right wife for him. She was a shrewd, practical, hard-working girl, and she not only loved Gerald Vanstead, she admired him. For the first time in his life, Gerald lived with somebody who admired him, studied him, petted him, and gave him sound practical advice in words which he could understand. Released by his marriage from the frustrations and lack of self-confidence which had made him a nonentity, Gerald Vanstead had a few years of ideal happiness. His son was born in 1939, and life seemed perfect. In 1943 he and his wife and child were involved in the nightmare of the Japanese occupation of Malaya: they were just units in the sum total of human misery which overwhelmed the Far East like a flood.