England to Me: A Memoir Read online

  England To Me

  A Memoir

  Emily Hahn

  1. HOME: ENGLAND

  It was August 2, 1946, when we arrived. The war was not so long over that we had shed every reminder of it, even in New York, and the Queen Mary was still fitted up as a troopship. Our cabin, the Major’s and mine, had six horrible lumpy cots in it but only ourselves for the six of them, and Carola with Margrethe the nurse were in another chamber once palatial, now made shabby. All over the vast edifice—for the Queen Mary never feels so much like a ship as like a fixed structure past which the ocean restlessly rolls—a few people walked the decks, looking lost and nervous. And well they might, for the loud-speaker never let up for very long; it kept chivvying the men in uniform and telling them to go here, there, and elsewhere. The rest of us couldn’t help straining our ears for our names every time. Aside from those luckless service people there were a few newspapermen, one early harbinger of spring in Paris in the person of a Baron Rothschild, and a surprisingly large array of British war brides now on their way home to Mother with the baby, having left their G.I. husbands to solitude and memories. The story usually was that the G.I. had promised a paradise of washing machines and plastic plumbing, but brought his wife home to a dreadful little shack out in Oklahoma or Georgia, without even so much as a cold-water tap.

  We landed in the late afternoon, ten years after the Major last saw his native land and more than twelve years since I left Europe for the Orient. One is always inclined to grow reminiscent at such moments, and the Major had to drag himself from a deep silence to struggle with the mechanics of getting us home to Dorset. Between us we had collected a good deal of portable property during the past year: more than a ton, by accurate measure, of clothes and household goods.

  “Anything to declare?” at last said a worried customs man.

  “Everything,” said the Major. “We were prisoners of war, and we outfitted again in New York. Every single article in those packing cases is new.”

  The customs man rubbed his chin and looked at the ton plus of luggage. “Oh, that’ll be all right, sir,” he said.

  We had missed the train, and after careful consultation decided to go home by taxi. Dusk was drawing in as we rode out through the suburbs of Southampton. Carola was drunk with excitement and weariness. “I didn’t know England would be like this,” she said shrilly. “I thought it would be nasty”

  Yet it didn’t look too good. The driver showed us where the bombs aimed at the docks had fallen, and until we were out in the country it all looked dismayingly unfamiliar. The countryside, however, was its usual lush green self, and until dark closed in on us, in the New Forest, Carola talked without stopping. Then she curled up and went to sleep. Shortly after that it began to rain.

  I sat in a corner seat, watching black nothingness outside and listening with wonder to the Major as we came nearer his village. “Now, turn here—a little farther along and you’re in the main street —now slow until you come to a gate …”

  Ten years abroad had not caused him to forget all the turnings, I mused. Then I began to wonder what the house, Conygar, would be like. It may seem strange, but I hadn’t even wondered until now. I had seen no photographs. The Major is bad at describing anything, unless he is first liberated by alcohol. He had only said, “The place must be in frightful shape—the Army’s had it six years.” I had seen letters from some agent in Dorchester about getting it derequisitioned—a wonderful wartime word, that. I had also exchanged a letter or two with Mrs. Clifton, wife of the caretaker.

  “Don’t the Cliftons live in the house?” I had asked.

  “No,” said the Major, “of course not. They’re in the Cottage,” just as if I knew what the Cottage was. “If the house isn’t ready, we’ll have to live in the Cottage too,” he added, “but the Cliftons won’t like that. They’ll be sure to have fixed up a room or two in the house for us to camp out in. You’re sure you won’t get fed up with life in England, queueing for food and all that? After America?”

  “After Hong Kong,” I corrected him. “After all! You can’t tell me anything about queues.”

  That was all we had said about Conygar, except for an occasional deprecatory remark on the Major’s part, aboard the Queen Mary. I don’t quite know how I got the impression that it was going to be perfectly horrible, but I did. Maybe it was the way he assured me that at any rate we wouldn’t have to stay long. “Long enough to get it into shape and let it,” he said, “and then we’ll be going off, I hope, on another job.”

  Therefore in unrationed America I had shopped with Hong Kong or Japan in mind, buying plenty of wash dresses and white shoes for Carola and myself, and the Major had invested in a few Palm Beach suits and things. We needn’t worry about the clothes shortage in England, we told each other: we won’t be there long enough.

  I don’t know what Carola expected. Children don’t expect, I suppose; they either fear or anticipate with rapture, and Carola was not rapturous. One day on the Queen Mary she came in and sat on my lap and cried, and said, “I want to have my birthday in New York. I want Geraldine to play with. I want to go home.”

  Poor Carola, I mused in the dark: always traveling, always losing homes and friends.…

  “Slow up until you come to a gate,” the Major was saying. “Here it is. Now sharp, and straight along.”

  For a long time we drove, it seemed to me, after the gate. I saw trees on either side, and then a patch of thicker blackness where the taxi slowed up, but the Major said, “No, that’s the Cottage.… It’s pitch dark, Mickey; they must be up at the house. Carry on, sharp right.”

  The car rode over gravel that swished, and the headlights flashed on an array of glass surrounded by dark red brick. We came to a halt outside something that slowly took shape—a porch sort of place. There was no light anywhere except our own. The Major got out.

  “I’ll go down to the Cottage. Has someone a torch? Thanks.… You wait here.”

  Margrethe and I climbed out, stretching our legs and staring curiously at the front of the house. Carola stayed asleep, sprawling at full length in our places. The second car with the luggage drove up behind us, and the two drivers stood with us in the drizzle, looking. A row of windows next to the porch was closed and dusty, and through them we looked into a bare room of plank flooring and stained walls.

  “Looks haunted,” I said.

  “Just what I was about to remark,” said one of the drivers. “A big place it is. I’d say the rooms run into two figures, wouldn’t they, madam?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I said. Bushes grew up close on both sides, but one wing of the house could be seen stretching out into the dark.

  We heard gravel crunching, and an excited, high-pitched voice, then the Major appeared, smiling for the first time that day. Two shorter people were with him.

  “They’d gone to bed,” said the Major.

  “We’d given you up,” added one of the figures, the one with the woman’s voice. I made myself move forward.

  “Oh, Mrs. Clifton?” We all shook hands. She was very small and a trifle bent, but her face was not lined, and she moved fast and lightly. Clifton, whose age I made no attempt to guess, was taking bags out of the car. The Major had suddenly become efficient and practical, as he does only when he thinks it necessary.

  “That’ll be all right, Clifton; you go in and unlock the door while the men unload. Mrs. Clifton, could you make a cup of tea for the drivers? It’s a long way back. That’s right, now, then …”

  A light went on inside a big heavy door; Clifton came out from the open hall.

  “Now, then, if one of you will take the child,” said the Major. “She’s sleeping.”

  “Tired out,” said Mrs. Clifton,
beaming.

  “Come on then, little lady.” Clifton had lifted her over his shoulder and she was halfway up the stairs before she woke up. She stretched out her hands to me, puzzled and half-frightened: “Mummy!”

  “Mummy’s here. She won’t leave you,” said Clifton. “Up we go, then!”

  Carola smiled and fell asleep again before Margrethe had caught them up on the stairs.

  In the bare hall the Major and I looked at each other over the backs of the drivers as they carried bags in and put them down. He grinned broadly, and for the first time I knew he was awfully glad to be home.

  2. CONYGAR OLD AND NEW

  In this country of old houses, where Tudor and Queen Anne buildings lie almost as thick as the villages they used to patronize, Conygar is an impertinent youngster. It was built in 1908, just at the time when houses seem to have set an inalterable fashion in dolls’ dwellings. The toy houses you see in English shops look exactly like Conygar. They, too, have red-brick walls, though Conygar’s, fortunately, have mellowed and darkened. They have the same slope to the roofs, and the abrupt square join of wing to body. The man who built Conygar was an impulsive fellow who changed his enthusiasms rapidly. He first intended to spend his life breeding mastiffs, and he lived in the Cottage while Conygar was being built, happily surrounded by excellent kennels, which we still have. Then, after he moved into the big house, he changed his passion and bred race horses—we still have the stables. After that he married, and went away, and sold the place to the Major’s grandmother, who wanted it because it is higher and drier than most old houses, yet is sheltered from the wind off the sea. Granny added a wing to the west end, which provides one really beautiful big room, the drawing room. She put in central heating of an antediluvian sort, and then settled down to grow old and to watch her children do likewise. People don’t die early in Dorset, even during wars. The Major’s mother was the only one of Granny’s children who married. She went to live on the Isle of Wight, when she wasn’t with her army husband in India or bringing the three children to Conygar for holidays.

  In Granny’s time the beehives were full of bees, pigeons occupied the dovecot, cows lived in the cowhouse and ducks down near the pond. Three or four gardeners kept the kitchen garden and the flowers, and must have watched every blade of grass on the forty-eight acres, which is after all not very much land. I still can’t see what they all did with their time. The English take their work seriously and slowly. But it must have been effective, whatever it was; the Major’s old friends, who keep coming to call, look around with their nostrils dilated disgustfully, and they say pityingly, “Ah, you should have seen it in the old days!”

  Never mind the old days. When we arrived, I venture to boast that we had by far the county’s best crop of nettles. We first saw it in all its plenitude the morning after arriving. A small area of lawn near the house, full of tough spreading grass, had been cleared by Clifton in our honor, and in that clearing I saw two rabbits under the window, happily nibbling as they had been doing for months past. When I opened the window they lolloped away at their leisure. Beyond the terraced lawn there was a large sunken patch of nettles and blackberries and thistles and things, and beyond that Conygar Hill, which shelters us from wind (also the winter sun when there is any), heavily overgrown with great spruce and pine trees.

  “I don’t remember so many trees,” said the Major in a puzzled voice. “Not nearly so many nor so big.”

  “Conifers grow fast,” I said, wondering if I were right.

  “It’s odd about the Army,” continued the Major. “When they requisitioned the place they specified they wanted to use the house itself—the walls and all that—but not the grounds. That’s why it’s all in such a shocking state out of doors.”

  “It looks to be in a pretty shocking state indoors too,” I said. “Not that this isn’t nicely fixed up, considering.”

  “That’s the Cliftons. They’ve done their best to put everything as it was.”

  Our room was painted white, but successive generations of billetees had managed to smear the walls and dent them. Even clean they must have looked rather like hospital walls. The floor had been worn into a strange gray fuzzy surface of splintered wood and grime. One of the windows was labeled with an old envelope gummed to the glass: “This window is broken. Do not open.” But over this desolation and destruction the Cliftons had spread cleanliness, at least, just as they had put Persian rugs on the floor and lace doilies on the big dressing table.

  A room had been done up for Carola and Margrethe next to ours, and that was all. Between our bedrooms and the kitchen where we had our meals stretched long corridors of trampled, splintered, stained parquet flooring. Every porcelain washbasin in the lavatories had been smashed, but we could still wash in the bathtubs, for they had resisted the Army, being metal.

  Some of the plumbing was broken, and a malodorous puddle under the outside pipe from the kitchen sink was evidently a fixture on the estate by this time. Old tin cans and broken crockery had been heaped up here and there, near the house but concealed by nettles. We went out to see everything, the three of us, Carola, the Major, and I. At first view I saw nothing wrong. It was all confusion to me, partly because English country seems staggeringly green and lush to Americans, and then, too, I didn’t know my directions, and was turned around, so that the house cropped up in an unexpected manner, in quite the wrong place, when we turned toward home. The Major showed us the vegetable garden, a long, thin acre of ground surrounded by a high wall, and we visited the orchard, where apples were nearly ripe, and we got within seeing distance of the duck pond, because the field near it had been let to a dairy farmer and was cropped close. Nevertheless Carola was whining about the nettle stings on her legs, and I had come to the conclusion that my American shoes were too thin before we came back.

  It seems funny now that I thought the house so dismayingly large and empty. I had a lot of sympathy to spare for Carola, who refused to go up or down stairs without somebody holding her hand; I think it was two months before she ventured to the third floor where the servants’ rooms are. Of course spaces shrink when you put furniture in them, and for many weeks we didn’t put any more into any of the rooms than we could help. This was due to the agent, who advised us to wait, motionless, until the Army had investigated our claim for damages, which had not yet been formulated.

  “Leave everything looking as desolate as you can,” he told the Major. “Don’t do a thing until you’re sure they’ll pay you for what they’ve damaged. Even a bed, even a chair in a room dresses it up in a way that would surprise you. I’ll send my men around tomorrow for the estimate.”

  Of course he didn’t; they didn’t come around for a week, and then they went away for several days before they continued, and so on and so on. In the meantime we grew accustomed to living in the furry-floored barnlike building, Mrs. Clifton doing the cooking except on Sundays. The Major’s granny had never allowed hot food on the Lord’s Day, not as a means of abstinence for the family, but to spare the servants any unnecessary sin. There wasn’t much housework to do as yet. One waited for the army assessment and let the dust collect. Margrethe and Carola were out of doors as often as the sun shone, which in the summer of 1946 was not very often, and Carola’s timidity was projected to the great world outside. She tiptoed even in the short grass, and looked longingly at the occasional rose or other flower which still survived the smothering love of nettle and blackberry. She had been inhibited by Central Park. “Are we allowed to pick the flowers?” she kept asking.

  “She’s a sissy,” said the Major, “a big-city girl. She’s hopeless.”

  After waiting six weeks for the agent’s languid efforts to bear fruit, we became reckless and fitted up a sitting room. After that, little by little, the fever took hold of us, or anyway it took hold of the Major. He developed the most surprising passion for putting things straight. He knew in a large way where things should go, and he kept chipping away at the furniture dump in the drawi
ng room, pulling out this armchair and that bookcase, with the seventy-year- old Mrs. Clifton helping the men carry the pieces upstairs or across the hall or up from the storehouse near the Cottage. Soon we had almost forgotten the Army; another two bedrooms were rough and ready, and there was furniture in the library.

  During all this activity I wasn’t much help. I came along and held things up when I was called, but otherwise I mooned about in lazy fashion. I didn’t defend myself when the Major scolded me, but I didn’t feel guilty about it really. It was no use my making a noise like the mistress of the house unless I didn’t mind looking silly, but I do mind that very much. None of the rooms nor the furniture seemed to know me, and I didn’t know them. I didn’t know where such and such a chair belonged, or where we ought to put Granny’s favorite black cushion. The Major knew in a sort of way; the Cliftons knew very definitely. Between the Cliftons and the many photographs of “the old people”—Aunt Alice, Granny, Aunt Florrie, and Uncle Myles—there was an understanding which I wouldn’t have dared pry into, or to defy. They knew where everything belonged. They looked with scorn on my ideas, or would have done had I produced any. I didn’t. I knew my place, and I kept it.

  The Major, however, walked brashly about and had his own way, undeterred by the Cliftons and the old people. Undeterred? Rather, let us say, he was egged on by them. He really enjoyed being a rebel against the old people, dead or alive, just as he must have done when he was a boy. I remembered a story he had told me of what happened at Conygar when the last of the old people (not counting the Cliftons) had died. It was Uncle Myles: he had blown out his brains because he was lonely. This left the three young Boxers heirs to Conygar and whatever was within the redbrick walls. The Major spoke up for the house itself, which the others didn’t want; the furniture, it was decided, must be divided three ways. The young ones, Myles and Beryl and Charles, who had played around the house in their childhood, met to decide what they were to do with all the stuff.