The Dun Cow Rib. John Lister-Kaye
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