Chapter Nine ‘Long Journeys Between Our Parents’ Homes…’
Chapter Nine
‘Long journeys between our parents’ homes…’
As we looked up at this stranger, a tall man with a broad smile, our mother made the introduction to Peter that my father’s lawyers had, till this point, prohibited: ‘This is Peter,’ she said, ‘your stepfather.’
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Diana and I had grown used to shuttling between our parents’ homes since their separation.
My father won custody of us, not only because of our grandmother’s testimony, but also by citing my mother recently having spent six months with Peter in Australia, rather than being in England with us. This, my father successfully claimed, proved that he was the more reliable prime carer.
My mother tried to overturn this decision in a separate action a few years later.
But friends who lived round Park House, and staff who worked inside it, testified that my father was doing a first-rate job.
He was, they said, giving us a loving and stable childhood, and the family judge found that there was no need to change our parental arrangements.
During term time, by court order, we saw our mother just once a month, for a weekend in London. We two youngest in the family would be excused the end of our Friday afternoon lessons at Silfield School, so we could discreetly change out of our scarlet and gold uniforms into regular clothes.
Diana and I would then walk together down a pathway from the school to busy Gayton Road, where we would be collected for the short drive to King’s Lynn railway station.
Before getting on to the train with our nanny, we were allowed to buy comics to read on the two-and-a-half-hour journey, a stretch of time that seemed to be almost endless to us, as children.
We then headed off on the trek to London’s Liverpool Street station, eating supper – it always seemed to be fatty gammon with watery pineapple – in the train’s dining car.
The nanny handed us over to our mother on reaching London.
We would arrive at her and Peter’s flat in Cadogan Place after a cab ride from the station.
Supper, bath, bed, then up on Saturday morning, when we would always be taken to St James’s Park to feed the ducks, and pigeons, and marvel at the pelicans.
Outside our mother’s flat, we would spend hours in the gardens reserved for residents – on the seesaw, the swings and the green merry-go-round, or running around on the grass.
We knew it was nearly time to set off on our journey home when my mother called us in for Sunday lunch – always roast chicken – and the four-hour trek north-east to Park House would begin. My mother would take us to the station, from where our nanny would ferry us to our father.
The train journeys got longer, as our mother and Peter’s marriage progressed. While our term-time visits to her were limited to our occasional weekends in London, she and Peter always had a place in the countryside, which we would go to for the half of our school holidays that was allotted to her.
The first of these was Hilliers, in the countryside outside Reading.
Hilliers was a stop-gap rental, before they settled, from 1969 till 1972, in Appleshore, a plain modern house in Itchenor, on the Sussex coast. Appleshore had concrete mushrooms along the verge of its drive, and a box-like annexe where my older stepbrothers, Adam and Johnnie, slept.
It had the glamorous addition of a darkroom, for Adam’s photography.
The informal atmosphere at Appleshore was far removed from life at Park House. Peter and my mother preferred a more modern, racier lifestyle than my father’s rather upright existence. He never smoked, and very rarely drank.
My mother, by contrast, became a progressively heavier drinker from the time she set up home with Peter. Sherry and white wine were her frequent companions, while Peter was a big man with a taste for wine and whisky.
Equally, my mother had not been a smoker at Park House but now puffed through packets of Benson & Hedges and Rothmans with gusto.
Even my parents’ mode of transport diverged sharply after the divorce.
While my father always drove a Jaguar, feeling it his patriotic duty to ‘buy British’, my mother and Peter each had a high-spec BMW.
I suspect that this total rejection of her former life as a titled lady was quite exciting to my mother.
She even enjoyed travelling in her new life, getting away from England to an Australian sheep station she and Peter had bought in New South Wales for all of February each year, and visiting Italy frequently. They loved Capri, and open-air opera in Verona.
While at Park House she had had many staff, at Appleshore she employed one housekeeper – the same ‘Collie’ who had packed my mother’s things when she quit Park House, and who had moved with my mother into her new life.
With Collie came her husband Lesley, a heavy-set man beset by apparently constant poor health. Left with limited energy, the wheezing Mr Collison occasionally showed willing in Appleshore’s garden and kept its kidney-shaped swimming-pool clean and heated.
The nearby harbour town of Itchenor was well-to-do and popular with the sailing set. Peter, who, like both my parents, had no time for snobbery and elitism, shunned any such cliques, but he loved being on the water.
Peter had grown up painfully aware that his brother John was his father’s favoured son.
Then, in a barely imaginable tragedy, John died as a freshly qualified wartime RAF pilot while attempting to loop the loop in front of his family as they watched from the ground.
Peter kept a piece of twisted, charred metal as a paperweight on his desk.
This was his brother’s wristwatch, retrieved from the wreckage once the flames had died down.
When old enough to enlist, Peter joined the Navy and volunteered for midget submarines hoping this would lead to medals that would make his father proud. But the war ended before any opportunity for heroism arose.
Peter’s time in the Navy left him with a love for the sea. He tried to encourage his children and stepchildren to take up sailing in Itchenor, with limited success.
To access the marina there, we children would ride our bikes along a man-made sea wall. Halfway along, it had a pronounced bend in it, and the constant foot traffic, as well as the scuffing of bicycle wheels, had led to this point falling away sharply on one side.
There was a six- or seven-foot drop there, with thorny gorse bushes sprouting menacingly around the base. I once confided in Diana that my greatest fear was losing my balance at this spot and tumbling down into the gorse below.
I must have done something to annoy Diana one day, although I cannot remember what, because soon after my revealing this dread to her she called to me to stop on the dangerous corner.
Generally happy to obey my big sister, I drew up next to her on my bike.
It was then that Diana suddenly lurched forward, without warning, and shoved me hard over the edge.
My bike and I went flying and landed in a heap in the gorse below.
I cried as the shock, pain and sense of betrayal registered with me.
I reckon that this incident was the most let-down that I ever felt, as Diana’s younger brother. Perhaps that only goes to show how childhood wrongs can rankle, and also to prove that, in the final analysis, she never did me too much wrong.
Peter spoilt us. For an adult of that era, he was unusually fun – that he insisted on being called by his first name pointed to this, at a time when deference towards the older generation was expected and normal.
He scattered coins into Appleshore’s swimming-pool, so we could dive excitedly, and competitively, for them.
One of my earlier memories of Peter is of him hiding other coins in a field, during a picnic, before telling Diana and me we could keep any that we found.
We were thrilled to discover that he had hidden some of his loose change under dried cow pats.
When we excitedly reported this mischief back to our father, his lawyers wrote to my mother objecting to such unacceptable behaviour.
Peter always plied us generously with pocket money at the start of each school holidays.
He would come up to us while we were watching TV, and stuff a twenty-pound note into our hands or top pocket, saying, ‘I hope you have some fun spending this.’ This was an astonishing contrast to life at Park House, where money was rarely visible or enjoyed.
Our stepfather quickly became an important part of our lives.
Diana’s and my letters to my mother from boarding school nearly always sent love to Peter and enquired warmly after him.
He took a crunching blow from a swinging boom on a yacht during a cross-Channel voyage, luckily managing to get a hand in the way at the last second to save his skull.
His fingers on that hand were broken so badly that they remained crooked for the rest of his life.
Our letters asked how Peter was recovering from his accident for weeks afterwards.
Peter had an easy charm and a ready sense of humour. The only time I saw him lose his temper was at Appleshore, when I was perhaps six. Diana, being three years older, was still physically more powerful than me, being that much taller.
Occasional spats often resulted in Diana pinning me down, after which I would scrap hard for my freedom.
Once, during one of these tussles, Diana kicked me hard below the belt, and as I writhed and sobbed in agony, Peter rushed over and bellowed at Diana that she must never, ever hit me or any other male there again.
And she promised not to, wilting in the face of the fury that Peter let loose that day.
Day-to-day life under my mother’s roof was generally easy-going. She was a home body, who enjoyed cooking and entertaining a close-knit circle of friends. While she hated swimming, she let us use the pool for hours at a time. We bolstered the money that Peter gave us doing garden chores.