Conspiracy of Secrets. Bobbie Neate
Later in the day, on the spur of the moment, Mum and my new stepfather decided to take us up to the Royal Mall. Mum loaded up the back of the red-and-white Hillman Minx with pillows and bedding and made a bed for my brother and me. As we left Cambridge it was great fun pretending to go to sleep in the back of the vehicle.
It seemed no time at all before I was surrounded and squashed by tall excited adults. The crowd on that warm summer’s evening was in a jolly mood. Clinging to Mum’s hand, I was washed along with the happy throng, seeing only trousered buttocks, buxom hips in floral dresses and clasped hands.
As the royal couple emerged onto the balcony of the palace, everybody cheered at the same time. The noise was electrifying. The masses pushed forward and Stepfather picked me up and put me on his shoulders, but his hand moved up my legs. I waved my Union Flag with its balsawood stick, but the excitement was gone. The bed in the car was not so cosy on the way home. Stepfather frightened me.
When newly married, my stepfather imposed a more fundamental change to my mother’s life than tougher domestic duties, for she was to receive two uninvited guests who occupied the best rooms in her house for many future years. She had to wait another thirty years to get her suite of rooms back.
I was probably only six, so I don’t remember the details. I only know that one Christmas Stepfather’s mother and elder sister came to stay, and that during the visit the senior woman apparently fell ill. I could never quite work out why the two women stayed, because they had a flat of their own in Cambridge, but I hasten to add there was a kind of rumbling, from where I don’t remember, about how sick the older woman actually was. But Mum adapted and quickly changed our old nursery, a long tapering room that dominated the downstairs, into a flat for her new in-laws. As my siblings had been recently sent away to boarding school, my mother had looked forward to converting the newly available space, the best room in the house, into a sitting room. But her plan never came to fruition because Stepfather persuaded Mum that his two female relatives needed the downstairs washroom and pantry as well. My mother also lost her attractive Edwardian conservatory, as this provided the two women with their own front door.
I never heard her complain about the lack of rooms, but she found Auntie Mamie difficult to deal with. So did we all. She had no idea how to treat children. I soon learned to keep my distance. At the kitchen table my mother would occasionally lose her temper, telling Stepfather that it was his job to keep his relatives in order. Auntie Mamie told my mother tales that made Mum angry and occasionally she would declare she was a troublemaker. I never understood why. Now I suspect I can guess what the nature of the tales might have been, but even now I’m not sure. It was not until I was much older that I realised just how exasperating Auntie Mamie must have been.
My mother always encouraged her younger uninvited guest to take more care of herself. She was always giving her presents to cheer her up. On Sunday afternoons the two women walked across the hall from their side of the house to ours and joined us for afternoon tea. I don’t know what I called Stepfather’s mother. It may have been ‘Home Granny’, as she lived in our house, but, since she never became part of my life, I have few recollections of her. Conversation flowed easily between my mother and Home Granny but, as to her looks, I am hazier. I have no family snaps to remind me. Sadly, those were all thrown into a skip. But I get ahead of myself.
Little did I know then how important Home Granny and Auntie Mamie would become in my detective story. Just like Stepfather, they never talked about any relatives or their past lives. Home Granny never talked about her lost husband, nor did she ever mention the antics of Stepfather as a little boy. As far as I know neither she nor Auntie Mamie ever had any visitors. They just kept to their side of the house. The agreement struck between Stepfather and my mother was that, after Home Granny died, Mamie would move out. But of course she didn’t. Stepfather was a great persuader and Mamie acted up her incapacity by painting her face with white talcum powder. The trick worked, so our dining room continued to be our sitting room and Mum only ever had half of the ground floor of her house.
Each morning as I got ready to go down to breakfast, I asked myself if Stepfather would be nice or nasty. I was now living in an uncertain world and I had to learn quickly that he could turn in a flash from being agreeable to being unpleasantly cruel.
Throughout my childhood it was an important part of Stepfather’s morning ritual to walk across the yard to the letterbox, which was fixed to the inside of the blue gate. Eventually, when the weather turned foul, he let me retrieve the post for him, with strict instructions not to pry. Among the pile of letters often nestled a magazine or a journal in a strong brown cover, occasionally rolled like a newspaper. Each morning he balanced the hefty pile on his side plate. Then he poured ‘today’s’ milk (the rest of the family had yesterday’s offerings) over his Rice Krispies. He sorted the post into three heaps: one to be opened at breakfast, another to be taken upstairs, the third for my mother. She rarely showed interest. Her post was the bills.
I used to watch him slit open the envelopes from his breakfast pile, wrapping his thick fingers around the kitchen knife. He had huge hands. Occasionally I glanced at the back covers of the journals. Many of them had the word ‘Economist’ in their title, but the journals that caught my eye were the organs of The Royal Institute of International Affairs and the United Nations. There was another document with a bluish-grey cover that seemed to be about political affairs. I wondered why he had these journals, for they didn’t seem to fit in with his life as an author on golf.
There was always trouble with the postal delivery to the Old Mill House, or at least that is what we were led to believe. I can remember numerous times when accountants or relatives told us they had sent letters. It always seemed that it was the post for my mother that never arrived. Tickets would go astray; letters from my mother’s company would not arrive. Even those that had been sent by recorded delivery went missing. Louis’s tactic was always ruthlessly to blame others, and on these occasions it was the bemused postal workers.
When I was older I recognised the journal with the greyish-blue cover. It was Hansard. One day, even though I knew I was encroaching on dangerous territory, I could not resist asking, ‘Isn’t Hansard about what they say in the House of Commons?’
‘Yes,’ came the flat reply.
‘Why do you have Hansard?’ I nervously asked, but he must have been in a good mood that day because he smiled. ‘I just like collecting them,’ he joked; ‘I don’t read them.’
Years later I was to discover that hiding the post was one of his games, but again I am getting ahead of myself.
Stepfather and I had one common interest: sport. He told me he was a leading authority on golf and, as there were many books on this subject with his name blazoned on the cover as the author, this seemed likely to be true. Stepfather appeared to understand my childhood thrills of running faster and hitting a ball further and harder than anybody else. When he was new to our life at the Old Mill House he encouraged my mother to enter me for the ‘brothers and sisters’ race at my brother’s school. I won with ease. My prize was a huge powder-blue box of chocolates, with a matching ribbon and floppy bow. Later I was teased because, rather than share my prize, I went down to my den in the garage and ate the lot. However the box remained a treasured possession, which I hoped to show to my own children one day. Stepfather was proud of the action photograph he had taken of me as I rushed for the finishing tape. At the time I had no idea he had worked as a photographer. Sport gave us a certain affinity but it was a strange kinship. I didn’t trust his motives for getting close, and desperately hoped I wouldn’t find myself alone with him. If I did, I knew something horrid would happen.
Stepfather’s past remained a mystery even when I was older. When I started to talk of school exams he told me that he had achieved a double first in English at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. I never doubted that this was true, for in those early days he always