Small moments of warmth

                                                                                   Cucumber sandwiches
 

 

 

Dear Reader,

This week I will be putting a small excerpt from my book "Half a Pair of People" from the first chapter.  I hope you enjoyed the piece I put in last week and hope too that one day you will want to buy the book.  We are trying to put it on Amazon but otherwise you can email me and I will send it to you by post.

 

Chapter 1 continued:   Previous extract here.

We had various members of staff in this house, a butler called Welfare, and a cook called Mrs. Mason.  Mrs. Mason had two children much the same age as my sister and I but we were not allowed to play with them my mother said when she was there.   And we had darling nanny.  Agnes Ellen Turner.  Nanny was really my mother.  I certainly think of her as such, she loved me and she was always safely there.  She wrote to me at school and sent me toffees and books by Geogette Heyer.  She was my first love.

I remember Welfare, the butler, who  polished  things all day. He seemed to live in a cupboard and wore a green beige apron which came right down to the floor..  There was always something to do, an abundance of silver ornaments for the dining room table and beautiful crystal glasses to be cleaned.   I think his day started about six o’clock in the morning and I never saw him leave the cupboard.

 I was sent to my first boarding school, Guildsborough Lodge, at the age of seven where I was very unhappy. Then I went to numerous other boarding schools including a convent in Paris.  The convent made Dothboys Hall from Jane Eyre seem luxurious.  I was in a dormitory of twenty six, a nun at each end of the row.  All these places were pretty horrific until I was sent to Heathfield School in Ascot.  This famous school was the Alma Mata of many well-known women including Princess Alexandra and Edwina Sandys, Sir Winston Churchill’s granddaughter.  She became a good friend of mine.  Most of the girls parents had titles, quite a few had titles of their own.   My Irish grandmother paid for me to go there so that I could meet  and make friends with girls from aristocratic homes.  Which I did.

In 1957 I became a debutante, and I write about that at some length later on in the story.  Suffice to say the whole procedure was  a failure, not because I had hated it, because I did,  but no one had proposed marriage to me.  I was, as it were, on the shelf.  At seventeen.

At twenty one I married a public school boy and went to live in a large manor house in the new Forest. And I lived a rich, grand and spoilt life.   I had a part-time cook and two dailies, plus a gardener.  My husband organized everything and I had little idea of how anything practical worked. I didn’t pay the bills or call any workman who might be needed. Nor did I know how the other half lived.  

My great friend, Fiona, Lady Montagu of Beaulieu, who lived at Palace House close to Ipley Manor where I lived,  and I, often talked of how good it would be to be free, to be single again.   I went to some incredible dinner parties in Palace House where I met many celebrities of the day. For instance, Tommy Steele, who was very nice and friendly and Diana Dors, plus her two lovers often visited.  She was very lively and great fun.   The butler brought round pot after dinner and I tried it once.  For me it made everything much brighter but I wouldn’t ever try it again. I smoked cigarettes, which, at that time, was what I liked.   Subsequently, of course,  I got lung cancer.

But with all the material things anyone could want I wasn’t happy.  I had a fast car, jewellery and a mink coat, and I should have been happy but I wasn’t.  I read somewhere that Princess Diana said she had everything and nothing which I totally relate to, because without the one thing that I think brings happiness is being loved and having someone to love.  My husband was away in London most of the week and I felt lonely and unloved.   My children went to boarding school and the house felt empty when they had gone.   

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Small Moments of Warmth

I remember a little warmth
Joey trotting the family through Norfolk lanes,
the small yellow trap swaying in the sunshine.

I remember picnics on Yarmouth beach
with enough blue sky "to make a sailor's trouser".
We ate cucumber sandwiches, Penguin biscuits.

I remember dark evenings,
the small warm flame from a Tilly lamp
lighting the kitchen, and sometimes for supper
we had chicken, chocolate mousse.

I remember a warm holiday in France
squeezed into the back of a car,
singing old thirties love songs.

But will these small moments of warmth,
at the end, be enough to hat and split
the heavy stones that circle the human heart,
allow salt tears to trickle through the cracks?.

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With very best wishes, Patricia