Conspiracy of Secrets. Bobbie Neate
Coldfield’s Cemetery Road. I saw myself huddled in the back seat of the Morris Oxford estate car, with its distinctive yellow slats of wood dividing the doors and windows from the pale-green chassis. It was a large vehicle for the 1950s but it soon became too small for four children and a poodle, dachshund and terrier as our growing legs took up more of the available space under the back seat of the car.
Mum would, of course, be driving. Stepfather never drove. In my recollections, my three older siblings had left for boarding school and I, as the only child left at home, was alone on the back seat. Beside me sat the handsome wreath that Mum had organised. On each anniversary of the death of her mother, father and younger brother I accompanied her on her pilgrimage to the family grave. It was my job at the age of seven or eight to stop the wreath falling to the floor if she braked hard. Woe betide me if my stepfather spotted I had failed in my duties and it had slipped from its position!
The previous day she had been on the phone, sitting in her usual position: leaning on her left elbow, the phone pressed to her ear while she allowed the pen in her right hand to doodle on the notepad. She knew all about the florist’s home life, just as she knew all the triumphs and disappointments of her favourite shopkeepers. As with everything else to do with her family, she gave the floral arrangement a great deal of care and attention. The end result was always an unusual but fitting tribute.
As we approached the cemetery Stepfather put on his supportive-husband act: deferential, courteous and speaking in quiet tones. Mum would reply with subdued remarks about her dearly departed family. She would recall vivid memories of her graceful mother and her talented dad. He was an engineer who built a thriving company that supplied car parts to the motor industry and died when my mother was only 17. He passed away so young that he achieved hero status within family folklore. Whatever time of year, the churchyard custodian stood waiting to greet us beside the lychgate, brush or fork in hand, ready to sweep leaves or to pull out any brave weed that dared to encroach on one of his paths.
But on this disturbing day, over fifty years later, I was the adult and I was the griever. I knew that the burial service would be harrowing, not just because we were burying my darling mother, but because of how we were to deal with our manipulative stepfather. I had been pulled through an emotional mangle and I longed for some peace. But the biggest shock of all was still to come.
It was on a cold Sunday in December 2000, 18 months before my mother’s burial, that my life fell apart. I was in my early fifties and a divorcee myself, in sole charge of three teenage children. Tom, my elder son, had been visiting home for the first time since starting university. We had spent the weekend doing all the old things that we used to do when he lived at home. While we were out, Stepfather had left an unclear message in his low resonant voice.
‘Mum has had a mild stroke,’ he relayed in his haughty voice. ‘It’s nothing to worry about.’
What? Mum’s suffered a stroke? Mum was nearly ninety but she was invincible. I was in deep shock. I tried to ring him back but the phone was engaged. The dull bleeps reminded me of all those years ago, when the phone at my family home, the Old Mill House, was constantly in use. Thoughts flooded into my brain. Did I have to admit to myself that I hardly knew this man? Was the pretence over? He was the secretive man who had married my mother when I was young, and in those early days he did not go out to work but lingered at home writing in his upstairs study. The same puzzling man later became famed in the world of motor racing when I was entering my teens.
It was Tom hollering from his bedroom that evening that jerked me from my anguished thinking: deep concern for my mother tempered with fear of having to deal with Louis Stanley without her steadying influence. While my elder son crammed his tatty clothes into a holdall I shouted housekeeping instructions to Rupert, who was studying for his A-levels, and the lively Hannah, who was 14. I called to Tom to jump in the car and we left so quickly I didn’t have time to wave goodbye. Little did I know as we set off that this would be the first of many stressful drives to Cambridge.
My mother had been inspired to look for a larger house in Cambridge when I, her youngest, arrived. She immediately fell in love with the old miller’s house that stood on the corner of a main road leading into the city. She would sit at the kitchen table, staring at the heavily netted kitchen window, searching for a glimpse of her delightful courtyard, and recall buying the place.
A small part of the house dated back to the sixteenth century, but Victorian additions made the building an attractive if chaotic structure. However, this did not stop my mother’s love for the old miller’s abode. It was she who arranged for the gate to be painted blue. Later she bought a brass bell with an arched clanger and had it fixed so that, when the blue gate opened and exposed the enclosed courtyard, it merrily jangled.
‘Do you know, I paid ten thousand pounds for the house?’ she would say.
We did. It was one of those oft-repeated family stories, one of the few she was allowed to retell that predated the arrival of Stepfather.
The kitchen was the hub of the household, welcomingly warm with steamy windows, the air filled with scrumptious smells. The aromas permeated through the thick heavy door and out into the cold passage beyond. Even on the coldest windswept Cambridgeshire days, the coke-burning boiler generated a cosy background heat. It sometimes produced pungent odours, overcoming the bouquets of roast dinner, apple pie and steamed greens, but, even if the acrid vapours hurt my lungs, it made the Mill House home.
In those early days, if I had fallen down the greenhouse grating, been hit on the head with a rounders bat, argued or just could not do my homework, I would expect to find her in the kitchen, with an attractive apron strategically placed over her fashionable clothes. She might have kicked her high heeled shoes to one side and be in stockinged feet, but she would be there. The radio would be tuned to the BBC Light Programme (the network that became Radio 2), Housewives’ Choice would be blaring out, and there would be remnants of flour on her hands.
Years of dedicated and loving culinary work had made the surface of the old oak table irregular. It was similar, in many ways, to a butcher’s slab with its ups and downs of wear and tear with the pitted wood revealing the many chops and gouges of various cutting implements over the years. But the kitchen table was not just the place to chop meat, peel endless potatoes, and roll out pie after pie. It was the place to do your painting by numbers, to play the latest board game and the floor was always the best surface for any car game.
Car toys were always popular with me. In the winter I set up a permanent Scalextric track in the playroom and I would play for hours putting oil on the back tyres of the model cars to make the steering harder.
Then on warmer days there was the garden to practise my cycling. I pretended I was driving a BRM and I had to get the fastest lap. The washing line had been moved to above the asparagus patch, and if I reached up from the saddle I could fix my stopwatch with a peg so that it dangled from a height. Grabbing it and clipping the button as I skidded in to beat my previous best lap time was all part of the fun. The garden had a maze of paths, so there were lots of corners to be taken at speed and many were lined with low box hedges or hidden flat bricks.
In those early days when I got home from school on summer days my mother would fling open the front door so that the flagstones of the veranda became an extension to the oddly shaped hall. The Victorian ironwork pillars that held the slanting glass roof made a superb backdrop to where Mum had organised a gigantic arrangement of tall blooms in one of her massive vases. The white tray tables would be in use again. We would carry them from the kitchen loaded with bread and cakes. Then, when we got into the right position, perhaps over Stepfather’s knees, we would press the handles carefully, so that our fingers would not be trapped in the mechanisms that lowered the legs. A teatime treat might be strawberries from Mrs Hacker’s farm, collected on the way home from school. Then we would sit in deck chairs eating and watching the birds peck at the flowerbeds.
As we ate, my mother might allow herself to recount how she loved sorting Baxter Prints with her adored father on Sunday afternoons. Then she might recall the stories of the punt her parents kept on their moat and how she paddled them around among the reeds. On happier days she did not hear Stepfather’s heavy huffing and puffing, which indicated