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3

The Manor House

If I ever get to be so old that I can no longer recognise my children; when I hear my name being called and it means nothing to me; when I cease to be able to name the birdsong I have known all my life and when the pageant of the season’s turning fails to move me; when each day merges into the last and the next as a continuous fog and I hear people whisper, ‘He’s lost it, poor old bugger’ – they will be wrong.

I shall be running free with the soft wind in my face, skipping through the shining grass of the damp Longbottom meadows, swiping with my stick at thistle heads to watch the downy seed caught and flown in eddies of sunlit breeze. I shall be straddling the old crack willow fallen into the pond where the moorhens built their soggy nest. I shall be under the ancient yew searching for tawny owl pellets, leaping the little box hedges of the ordered gardens and racing past the long glasshouses four in a row. I shall be heading out. The ancient flagstone floors will be cold beneath my bare feet once again and Nellie will be chasing me round the kitchen table with a tea towel. I shall be eight years old, laughter rippling through me till I ache, free as a cloud, embraced and held fast by the joy and the jubilation of careless youth. I shall be back at the Manor House.

As you headed out of the quiet Warwickshire village, past the little brick bridge over the weed-waving brook that burbles through the green, passing between Borsley’s grocery store, the tart aroma from the block of cheddar cheese on the marble slab greeting you at the door, and Mr Anderton across the lane in his straw boater and a blue-and-white-striped apron, smile as wide as a valley, waving his cleaver over his butcher’s block – ‘Pettitoes not such a bad price this week’ – you turned up Church Hill, past the long terrace of cottages on the right, slate roofs staggered like a rickety staircase.

Then past the Georgian vicarage, square, solemn and not a little smug behind high-boarded gates and an ivy-quilted wall. Opposite, on the south side of the lane, a low red-brick boundary wall to the graveyard led up to an oak-beamed and shingle-roofed lych-gate where the lugubrious Reverend Ferguson posted his notices every week. For years I thought his name was ‘Vicar’. ‘Morning Vicar,’ was all I had ever heard. In the background the grey church tower stood square-shouldered against the sky.

The sweeping branches of ancient oaks and beeches trembled their shadows over the lichened gravestones of many of my ancestors, barely legible now. Far below, their bones and oak coffins were sifting down into archaeology in sure and certain hope of everlasting oblivion, earth to earth. Those trees seemed to me to be the very essence of antiquity. Their roots writhed silently beneath the tombstones and the flagged paths, tilting them drunkenly. The massive trunks powered upwards in plaited thongs of great strength, branched into an algal tracery against the sky where they clutched at the clotted nests of a hundred and more thronging, clamouring rooks.

A bit further on, on the other side of the lane and right at the end of the village, matching ornamental ‘in-and-out’ wrought-iron gates, both invitingly and forbiddingly painted bright white, were set a hundred yards apart. A dense privet hedge six feet high ranged between them like a green rampart. Behind the hedge, a long gravel driveway crunched through neatly mown lawns to link the two gates in a sweeping arc. Those gates announced the presence of a house that didn’t need a name; it was and always had been the Manor House.

It was the home I longed for. Even now, sixty years later, it is engraved upon my soul. Not my parents’ home at that delicate moment in my young life – my father was leading a peripatetic existence as he worked tirelessly to build a business and we had migrated to wherever he needed to be: Yorkshire, Bath, Devon, south Somerset; no, the Manor House was my father’s family’s long home to which we always gravitated as surely as bees return to their hive, however far afield the capricious winds of fortune had wafted us.

Family lore had it that Henry VII had made an ancient branch of our family Lords of the Manor, vassals to their feudal superior, Edward Plantagenet, Duke of Clarence and 17th Earl of Warwick in his magnificent medieval castle, around which the county town has mushroomed. In deference to this historical patronage many sons of our family had been christened Warwick, right up to the present day.

The house was built in the seventeenth century when fire ripped through the original Tudor oak-timbered manor house and razed it to rubble. Since then it had been added to seemingly endlessly, wings and extensions bursting out at every point of the compass and several in between, as if for centuries each successive generation had felt the need to append their own whimsical additions. By my time in the late 1940s, the original Jacobean oak-beam and straw-brick beginnings had been hemmed in on all sides by sprawling Carolean, Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian wings, each apparently oblivious to any sense of architectural cohesion. The result was a jumble of gables and eaves on steeply pitched roofs with plunging valleys beneath a thicket of towering chimneys.

Getting around inside these ill-fitting extensions demanded long corridors leading to many external doors over countless steps, flights of stairs and varying floor levels more akin to a ship than a dwelling. And yet this random agglomeration of additions had awarded the house all the vernacular charm and mystique of a Cotswold village, in what seemed wilful denial of its much more formal intentions.

The house stood at the edge of a modest estate of farms and woods and was surrounded by broad acres of gardens and grounds. Close to the house they started off with the prescribed orthodoxy and the unmistakable Englishness of a country house, dignity upheld by manicured lawns, clipped box, privet and yew hedges and topiary, partitioned by walls and steps of ancient limestone intricately patterned with dark mosses and pale lichens. As you moved outward a network of flagged paths led you through a walled rose garden, the stonework dripping with bright aubretia, up stone steps and on beneath Japanese pergolas at the path intersections, smothered in tangles of rambling roses; then on past extravagant herbaceous borders and shrubberies bursting with scent and colour. Well away from the house, the walled gardens relaxed into much more casually arranged fruit beds of gooseberries, black and red currants, raspberries, loganberries, rhubarb and, finally, lurking discreetly in the distance, the ordered rows of vegetables.

Espaliered against the long south-facing wall, ten feet high, were pear, quince, plum, damson and apricot trees, where red admiral and peacock butterflies sipped the fruits’ oozing and fermenting sugars and basked drunkenly in the sun. That wall was an important boundary, a physical and aesthetic barrier between the disciplined world of horticulture and formal gardening and an altogether wilder world beyond.

Passing through any of its several archways another world opened up, tamed perhaps but certainly not domesticated, another country where long ago nature had claimed primacy, despite periodic, half-hearted summer mowings and prunings of its rampant, inexhaustible verdure. It was a country of ancient orchards, luxuriant paddocks and copses, weedy ponds, nettle banks and marshy hollows, lime kilns long abandoned, fox earths and badger setts, rabbit warrens and thorn thickets where roe deer lay up during the day. Yet further, on to the pocket-handkerchief meadows of the Manor Farm, where the rickety old farmhouse and ivy-smothered labourers’ cottages seemed not to have been built but to have grown organically out of the soil.

Behind the Manor House a discreet back drive led past the green-painted doors of the old coach house-turned-garages, to a veritable hamlet of outbuildings where the essential services of centuries of self-sufficiency had been performed: coach houses ivy-clad and a wide stable yard with a cast-iron hand pump and loose-boxes under a pan-tiled roof bursting with untidy sparrows’ nests, the laundry cottage, servants’ outdoor lavatories, wood and coal stores, pig stys, potting sheds, apple stores, saw mill, workshops, and four long, brick-based and white-painted glasshouses.

The Manor House was where, coming and going, we had been for centuries, and where my Victorian widower grandfather, born in 1873, now lived out his horticultural old age with my father’s younger bachelor brother, Uncle Aubrey. Looking back now, I see that to have spent so much of my childhood at the Manor House and to have experienced that rarified, virtually unchanged Edwardian world was a particular privilege no longer attainable in modern society. To me, throughout the 1950s, it was Xanadu, a private kingdom all my own and everything a country child could hope for, even though at some point I became dimly aware that I was a tenuous and perhaps the final tendril emanating from a broader vine, the roots of which were planted elsewhere.

* * *

Properly, our family were Yorkshire folk. We had been in the West Riding since the reign of Edward III, whose heralds issued a grant of arms to ‘Johannes Cay of ye lands and manors of Wodesham’ in 1367, which, 150 years later, would emerge as the elegant, stone-built Elizabethan Woodsome Hall at Kirkburton, much as it stands today. As a confused schoolboy struggling to locate our place in history, I once asked my father what we were. ‘We are Plantagenets,’ he replied enigmatically.

I was always a lazy student of history, struggling with meaningless names and dates, but in early adulthood I began to understand that just as contemporary politics had severely impacted upon my immediate family, so down the centuries we had always been pawns in the grander machinations of power. To hang on to what we had, and even to survive, over the centuries we had been forced to duck and weave. As worthy (and opportunistic) Protestants we wisely ingratiated ourselves with Thomas Cromwell when Henry VIII set about dissolving the vastly wealthy Catholic monasteries. By some deeply devious political chicanery we came in for several thousand acres of rich glebe farms to add to our expanding Yorkshire estates. We leapt into Catholicism to avoid being burned at the stake by Bloody Mary, and bounced out again to appease her passionately Protestant half-sister, the virgin queen.

We were dashing Cavaliers in the court of Charles I – effusive supporters of the Royalist cause – and studiously kept in with Prince Rupert of the Rhine. One gallant ancestor, a knight called Sir John, was appointed Colonel of Horse to the king. He had helped raise 700 West Riding men to fight for the Royalists, for which he accepted a baronetcy in 1641. But in 1645 it all went horribly wrong when they were routed by Parliament’s New Model Army under Sir Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell at the Battle of Naseby, the turning point of the Civil War. Sir John galloped away unscathed but would later forfeit everything to Cromwell’s Republican parliament: titles, houses, estates and privileges – the lot. It was a sepulchral moment.

When by popular demand Charles II was restored to the throne in 166o, while the Republican signatories to his father’s execution were being summarily hanged, drawn and quartered, we somehow inveigled our way back into favour. Our titles were reinstated and we were allowed to buy all our lands back, both in Warwickshire and Yorkshire, for a painful payment of £50 to the newly formed Cavalier Parliament, a pecuniary affront we never forgave, far less forgot. We had learned a bitter lesson. From then on we kept our political heads down and got on with looking after our own interests.

By the eighteenth century we had stumbled across coal underlying our Yorkshire land just in time for the emerging colonial markets and the incipient Industrial Revolution. On the mining profits and only a few miles from Woodsome Hall, enthusiastically competing with the fashionable expansion of the times, we built Denby Grange, a second, much more stately mansion which would become our principal family home. Its grand Georgian façade was attached to the restored shell of a twelfth-century Cistercian abbey that had been sacked in the Reformation. It overlooked the lush Colne valley, and was where, when I was born in 1946, our close cousin, Sir Kenelm, still lived in arthritic bachelor grandeur. But my great-grandfather had been a second son, not in direct line of succession for the Yorkshire estates. Instead, in 1856 his father had awarded him the Warwickshire manor and its adjoining lands as a wedding present. My grandfather had been born just down the east passage from my bedroom, so had my father.

It was only after Clement Atlee’s 1948 socialist government nationalised our collieries, removing in one eviscerating Act the family business and capital holdings it had taken us 250 years to develop, that the deeply disillusioned Sir Kenelm debunked to Mullingar in Ireland to live out his days shooting snipe and raising racehorses, while the share-holding family elders took the tough but ultimately prudent decision to up sticks and abandon Yorkshire altogether. The titular heartland then shrank back to our medieval association with Warwickshire, where, on his share of coal profits, my great-grandfather had founded a cement works, later the Rugby Portland Cement Company.

When, many years later, I was old enough to look back down the drama of the centuries I found that we had somehow managed to produce a colourful, if never illustrious, array of dramatis personae: a few prominent courtiers; a mistress to James I; several swashbuckling soldiers; various undistinguished MPs; an adventurer who travelled the south seas with Captain Cook; a celebrated Lord Mayor of York who built the Mansion House and whose coat of arms still hangs on the Micklegate Bar; a chaplain to George II who became an outrageously greedy pluralist clergyman and Dean of Lincoln Cathedral; an ivory, then slave trader; one of Britain’s first female industrialists; an opium dealer; a bevvy of sporting parsons; several masters of foxhounds; a Groom-in-Waiting to Edward VII; another king’s mistress; a couple of naval captains; a fraudster and card sharp; several Lords Lieutenant; a pioneer Canadian cattle rancher; a successful racehorse breeder of classic winners; an eminent cricketer and a cement manufacturer. There was also quite a procession of probably dull but thoroughly worthy citizens, but, alas, no writers, nor any hint of a naturalist.

At six years old I knew none of the above. Small children are blissfully unaware of who they are or where they come from. To me the Manor House was a paradise enhanced by the strange, unstoppable passage of time. All I knew was that it was the home where I always felt we belonged, my sister Mary and I, or perhaps I should say where it never occurred to us that we didn’t belong. It was never clear to me whether something we had done meant by us, the living family, last week, or last year or even by my grandfather, who seemed to me to be as old as Noah, or whether it had been done centuries before. One spring, jackdaws blocked a tall chimney with twigs and debris, which proved particularly tricky to clear. Staring up at men struggling with rods and brushes on the roof I heard my grandfather say, ‘We didn’t think about jackdaws when we built it so tall.’ Later I discovered that we probably built it in about 1620.

We had become a generic collective, embracing more generations, more individuals, more loves, fears, hopes, dreams, tragedies and joys than we could ever know or count. Not even the graveyard could list them, except the very recent ones, such as my grandmother, Emily, cut down at sixty-five by a sudden heart attack in 1944. Tirelessly she had marshalled the ladies of the village to produce fruit and vegetables for the war effort while filling every available cranny of the house with hungry evacuees from the Blitz hells of Birmingham, Coventry and London. She had overstretched herself, people said, and the firebombing of the old Coventry cathedral had broken her heart. Her stark five-foot limestone cross now stood beside the low graveyard wall in the shade of a vast beech whose huge branches clutched at the sky.

Traumatic experiences he would never discuss had made my uncle Aubrey a shy and private man, turning quickly away if anyone mentioned the war. They had changed him and his life forever. He had served with the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry and was taken prisoner on Dunkirk beach in May 1940. The Nazis marched them 500 miles to the notorious Stalag VIIIB Lamsdorf POW camp in Poland. When their boots wore out, they were forced to continue barefoot through a cruel winter. Feet bound in rags, black, frostbitten toes rotted and fell off as they hobbled along. They were starving. They had to beg raw potatoes and turnips from peasants along the way. Many died en route. Although my grandmother sent him food parcels every week for three years, Aubrey never received one. In dire health he was finally released in a prisoner exchange in 1943. He returned with suppurating malnutrition ulcers all over his legs, ulcers that would never heal, although he would survive as a virtual recluse for another thirty years. I once barged into the bathroom and surprised him changing the dressings. I have never forgotten the sight of raw flesh.

* * *

In common with many very old houses, the Manor House possessed a distinctive personality, an aura weighted far more heavily with the past than the present, with mythology as much as with reality, with the ghosts and shadows of those long-forgotten souls in the graveyard more than the living family and retainers, all of whom lived and moved in constant obeisance to the inescapable echoes of an unrecorded history. I loved it with a passion bone-deep and in all its unruly ramifications: its hidden cupboards and alcoves, its dingy corridors, its chill, feet-polished flagstone passages and its staircases leading upwards into shadow and mystery. Charged with an over-active imagination, exploring them became a never-ending adventure, the stuff of boys’ comic annuals. To me the house exuded a happiness that was alluring, confident and ever present, and I rested upon it like a cushion.

There were rooms where instinctively I sensed that small boys were not supposed to be. Rooms I tiptoed through, furtively glancing over my shoulder in case the ghosts of the past stepped out from behind the door. Long stone-flagged passages where steps had been hollowed by centuries of bustling feet. It was a house into which small children could vanish for hours on end, exploring a seemingly endless succession of rooms leading into more rooms and more passages, up flights of steps, across landings, down again, through creaking doors revealing yet more rooms and corridors, ever more and more enticing.

In the front of the house the formal reception rooms were big, although my grandfather had taken my grandmother’s death badly and had cut himself off from the world, refusing to entertain. He had retreated up the long west passage to the child-forbidden sanctuary of his study, known as the smoking room, only emerging for afternoon tea in the kitchen or dinner in the sombre Jacobean dining room, oak-panelling as dark as chocolate, dimly lit with half-shade sconces around the walls and candles flickering in silver candelabra on the long mahogany table.

The spacious drawing room with its finely carved cornice and chimney breast, where the iron fire basket stood four square like a bulldog in the empty grate, was temporarily closed down. Dark portraits of unsmiling ancestors glared loftily from the walls. Dustsheets covered the furniture and the blinds of wide French windows leading out onto the south lawn were permanently drawn, lending the whole room the air of long sleep, as though a spell had been cast upon it – time not just standing still, but altogether banished.

From the broad Jacobean hallway paved in large black and white marble chess-board squares, the elegantly curving main stairs bordered by high semi-circular alcoves, each one housing a large Imari bowl of rose petal potpourri, led up to more passages and bedrooms named after former occupants, mostly long dead. Great Aunt Amelia’s room, at the end of the longest corridor with the squeaky floorboards, was also shut down and locked, but with the heavy key left in the lock. I had to use both hands. The door squeaked open into a pallid gloom, sun-faded blinds drawn tight so that, tiptoeing cautiously in, it took a while for my eyes to adjust.

No dustsheets here; a room intact as if the old lady had just walked out, as no doubt she had before collapsing into a border of heavily scented damasks and mosses in the rose garden a few years before I was born. They said she was dead before she hit the ground; sun hat, scissors, trug and cut roses theatrically arrayed around her like the pre-Raphaelite J.E. Millais’ painting of Ophelia, and, when they found her, Bif, her little Yorkshire terrier, loyally sitting among her billowing skirts.

Her big brass bed still had a floral quilt counterpane and an eiderdown neatly spread over case-less pillows of blue and white ticking, and square folded blankets ready to be made up as though she was expected back any day. The glazed chintz curtains were part drawn; on the sills small tortoiseshell and peacock butterflies lay dead, brittle wings closed in a rigid clinch.

Her ivory-backed, family-crest-engraved hairbrushes still held strands of her platinum hair, tortoiseshell comb and silver-topped pots and trays for kirby grips, powders and creams laid out on her dressing table, and ornate flasks, too tempting to ignore. I eased the glass stopper from one little phial and recoiled, quickly replacing it. The perfume, rich and luscious, powered over me. It was as though some deeply personal element of her inner being had come back to life and escaped into the stillness of the room, the genie out of the bottle. Flushed by guilt, I felt that I had rudely invaded her privacy, made more poignant by the engaging stare from the silver-framed, fading sepia photograph of her handsome young officer husband killed in the Battle of Gallipoli in 1915. I quickly retreated, quietly locking the door behind me.

But it was the labyrinthine service areas of the house that I really loved: the separate world of kitchens, sculleries, dank slate-shelved larders, the old servants’ hall, game-larder, laundry and sewing room all ruled by Nellie West, the housekeeper, whose ‘I got my eye on you, young Jack’ made me wonder why she didn’t use both eyes. And where the almost completely toothless cook, Mrs Barnwell, with pouting lips like a goldfish and hair in a net, and Sally Franklin the scullery maid, with a backside like a shire horse and who daily threatened, ‘If you don’t look out I’ll skin thee alive’ together with deaf Ada in the laundry, whose surname I never knew, and old Bob Bryson, a retired gamekeeper then working on as a gardener, with sunken eyes swimming in bloodshot pools and whose pipe protruded through a double gap in his lower teeth, as well as a few other daily worthies, all lived out the merry backstairs pageant of everyday life. To my child’s feasting eyes everyone seemed happy and content; they all got on with their various tasks, gaily teasing each other as though they were all members of the same family.

Uncle Aubrey was often to be found there too, bandaged legs always in black wellington boots, his proximity revealed by a perpetual acrid fog from chain-smoking his filter-tipped Kensitas cigarettes, only removed from his lips to replace with another. As the staff numbers had dwindled during the war years and never been replaced, so Aubrey, once rehabilitated, had taken over the management of Moloch, the vast anthracite boiler in the outer scullery, where he also boiled up the daily bouillabaisse of bran mash, kitchen left-overs and vegetable peelings for the chickens in the paddock. For the rest of the day a rich aroma of barley meal edged with the sharper, earthy essence of hot bran and potato peelings pursued him through the house.

To me the front of the house seemed lifeless, most of its occupants dead and gone, enhancing the daunting possibility of ghosts and the lurking fear that accompanied territory forbidden to us children, as though there must have been something sinister there to hide. The adults who did pass through, including our parents, always seemed to live in a bubble of orgulous best behaviour, a strictly observed correctness that vanished once through the green baize door, where the servants’ rooms and corridors bustled with life and ribald laughter.