The Dun Cow Rib. John Lister-Kaye
they were slipper bedpans.
Closing the cupboard doors shut off the past, trapping it back in the dark, no longer a real part of my life or the life of the house. The room returned to what it had been forced to become during the lean and wearisome years of the war, a dumping ground for duller stuff – two old wooden ironing boards and a wash-board, big cardboard boxes piled up, a canvas golf bag with a few wooden shafted clubs, two broken wicker carpet beaters, ancient black-initialled leather suitcases with ships’ labels and stickers from foreign parts, broken lampshades, gut-stringed tennis racquets in square wooden presses, a broken bagatelle board with the balls missing.
A cluster of tea chests was crowded into a corner, packed full of folded blackout sheets like satanic shrouds. Another contained the headphones, consoles and wall-mountings of several wireless sets dating from the early days of radio before the First World War. There were long-handled copper warming pans, an umbrella-stand full of walking sticks and feather dusters on long canes and, most perplexing of all, a rattan-backed mahogany commode in the form of an armchair. When I lifted the seat lid I found a gaping oval hole. I had never seen such a thing before and I peered into it, finding only a plain wooden shelf beneath. I struggled to comprehend why anybody would want to sit in a chair like that, so I spent fruitless hours balancing uncomfortably and hoping that by doing so its purpose might become clear. When I showed it to my sister, Mary, she said, ‘It’s a lavatory, silly. What did you think it was for?’ I spent the rest of the day wondering why anyone would seek to deposit their daily doings on a wooden shelf.
On one such exploration I found, tucked away in an old cabin trunk, several wartime gas masks, unused, still in their original cardboard boxes. There were two types: some were black rubber masks which fitted snugly over your face with a clear cellophane panel to see through, white webbing straps round the back of your head and a khaki canister of filtration crystals hanging immediately in front of your mouth. The others, called GS Respirators, were clearly superior: whole head masks with round glass eyepieces and a twenty-eight-inch-long expanding rubber tube like an elephant’s trunk leading from your nose and mouth to a separate canister carried in a khaki haversack at your side. These were much more sinister, with all the shock effect of an invader from outer space; it was impossible to tell who was inside.
Wearing one of these superior masks, I stalked the servants’ back corridors searching for victims. My first was Sally Franklin, swabbing the flagstones with a bucket and mop. I crept up behind her and stood still. She swabbed slowly backwards toward me until all I could see was her voluminous backside encased in a wrap-around floral pinafore. I reached forward and tapped her bottom. She spun round. A muffled ‘BOOO!’ issued from inside the mask. Sally shrieked and leapt away, kicking over her bucket and sending her mop flying. I ran and ran, back down the corridor and out into the stable yard. I hid the gas mask in a manger and sauntered back into the scullery as though it was nothing to do with me.
Sally was sitting at the kitchen table, tears streaming down her face, Nellie doing her best to console her with a cup of tea. ‘You’re in trouble, young Jack, you are,’ Nellie scolded. ‘Look what you done to poor Sally. You nearly gave ’er an ’art attack. You wait till I tell your father.’ But I knew she never would.
Nellie West was my friend. She was my grandfather’s housekeeper. Her father, economically known as West, had been his chauffeur and valet, and her mother, Elsie, had worked in the laundry. Both had died in service before I was born. Slowly growing mould, West’s dark green and gold braided livery still hung in a wardrobe in the old coach house. Nellie had started life as a chambermaid in her teens and gradually progressed to become a prominent member of the staff. After my grandmother’s sudden death she had found herself at the head of the much-reduced post-war household. She would rule the Manor House with absolute dedication and my grandfather would come to depend upon her for the rest of his life.
A smile twinkled permanently in her blue-grey eyes and about her bunched cheeks, lips ever ready with a facetious quip: ‘There’s no lunch today, young Jack, cos I’ve heard you’ve not bin good enough.’ Or ‘I’m thinkin’ of putting you under the pump cos I can see dirt behind your ears.’ Yet she often spoke with a sigh and an inner sadness, saying, ‘Do you really think so?’ as though she were unworthy of her own opinions. She had greyed early and grown more than a little plump beneath her habitual navy blue or grey tunic dresses, always adorned with a floral pinny, and she was not surprisingly single.
Born in the first few years of the century her timing couldn’t have been much worse. Turning fifteen at the end of the First World War, most of her potential seventeen- to twenty-year-old suitors, and many much older from her tiny rural community had failed to come home. They were the lost generation. In common with thousands of village girls the length and breadth of the country, Nellie’s life chances at marriage had perished ingloriously in the trench hells of Verdun, Arras, Passchendaele and the Somme. By the time I was seven she would have been approaching fifty and she had accepted her spinsterhood with grace and cheerful dignity.
To me, Nellie and the Manor House were synonymous. She had always been there, a steadfast bulwark of my earliest childhood memories. I could not have enunciated so ardent an emotion back then, but I loved her, second only to my mother. Without it ever being acknowledged by either of us, Nellie West had entered my inner consciousness as a fixture, an anchor point of deepest security, as much a pillar of my brief existence as the Manor House itself. Whenever we arrived to stay, while my father always set off in search of my grandfather in his smoking room or his workshop or one of his precious glasshouses, I ran to the kitchens to find Nellie.
Those gas masks sparked an endless burst of imagination. Better than any cowboy hat or cap gun, they were real and tapped into a constantly creative vein. I could be a Martian invader or a horrid German paratrooper prowling the woods and fields, or I could be the hero hunting them down. I could be a burglar raiding an imaginary bank or a highwayman like the Dick Turpin I had read about, leaping out from behind a tree to halt an imaginary carriage and pluck rings and necklaces from rich ladies’ necks and fingers.
Wooden swords in hand, I persuaded my sister to wear a mask too, so that together we could prowl the corridors seeking out a fearsome ogre whose den was known to be the game larder. We approached with extreme caution. Then, stepping boldly forward I kicked the door open and shouted, ‘Come out and fight, you ugly beast!’ Only to find that he was not in, but the stark, bloodied evidence of his fearsome power hung in rows from the beams – hares, pheasants, duck and partridges, all his victims impaled by their beaks or their feet on rusty hooks, blood dripping to the flagged floor. Once, old Bob was in the larder quietly plucking pheasants. When I burst in to accost the ogre, I got such a fright at finding someone there that I ran for my life, mask or no mask. I rushed to the kitchen to tell Nellie. ‘Now that serves you aright, young Jack.’
My father had installed a television for the Queen’s Coronation in June 1953 – small, a bit fuzzy, and black and white, of course. Although viewing was strictly controlled, I was allowed to watch Westerns, my favourite by far being Stagecoach – proper cowboys and indians – repeated every Christmas for years. I used to sit cross-legged on the floor, entranced, my face only a few inches from the tiny screen. As influences waxed and waned so I variously became Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, the dashing Wells Fargo agent Jim Hardie, and inevitably I was gripped by The Lone Ranger, but never the oh-so-smooth masked hero in his white Stetson, polished boots and creaseless britches, on his spotless white horse ‘Hi-Yo Silver!’ Oh no, it was Tonto I wanted to be: the moccasin’d indian with the tracking skills of a leopard who leapt onto his horse bareback and was usually the one who did all the dirty work (played by the brilliantly named Mohawk actor Jay Silverheels). I tied a dishcloth band round my head and wandered the woods muttering ‘Kemo sabe’, possessing not the first inkling that its translation was ‘trusty scout’ in Potawatomi. I longed for a sheath knife like Tonto’s.
It was not a sheath knife, but my grandfather gave me a shiny black clasp knife for my eighth birthday. It wasn’t new, it had been his, and that made it more precious still. It had two blades, one large and one small, a bottle opener and a hook for getting stones out of horses’ hooves. To me it was also like being awarded a latch key; a tacit acknowledgement that at last I was old enough to venture out, to whittle