JANUARY 1978
'There are bears in your woods,' the little girl said with authority as she folded her arms, legs swinging over the edge of the warm leather car seat.
'No!' my brother and I gasped simultaneously. I clutched my new satchel to my chest. Becky should know, she grew up in our village and we had only arrived a couple of weeks ago. We were winding our way down the leafy September sunlit dappled lane towards the Exe Valley, and as we slowed behind a herd of cows crossing from the fields to the milk parlour, I saw Mum glance in the rear-view mirror, her eyes wide, obviously considering whether there were actually bears in Devon anymore. As the last heavy uddered cow swung into the yard, breath hanging in the air, she laughed, and turned up Terry Wogan on the radio as we drove on. It was the first day of term at our new school, and I remember my blazer was stiff, my shoes buffed to a shine like the conkers falling from the trees.
Ever since that day I eyed the dense woods surrounding our home with caution. Bears, it turned out, were the least of a six-year-old's worries. My new friends soon regaled me with all the local folklore - hairy hands that grabbed at steering wheels on the moor road, wild beasts that terrorised flocks of sheep, mysterious lights in the sky. Stoodleigh is an old, isolated village, the highest point between Exmoor and Dartmoor - anything seemed possible. The village is small, (beneath the 'please drive slowly through the village' sign, someone scrawled 'else you'll miss it'), but the views are heart-stopping here. A two mile long single track road was cut into the hillside when the big house - Stoodleigh Court, was built. Local legend has it that the house was built for a politician's paramour. She disliked the isolated spot so much that for many years the house lay empty, like an enchanted castle.
This village became my playground. My parents came here from the Midlands to make a better, safer life for our family. The community was small - everyone knew everyone and children were safe to run free. Looking back, these are the memories I carry with me - the sense of freedom and space, freewheeling down empty lanes, arms upstretched to the sky, swimming in rivers, cantering along frozen bridle paths.
On our first New Year's Eve, I lay curled snug in bed listening to my parent's party - piano music, one of the old ladies from the Church choir belting out Jerome Kern: 'Can't help loving that man of mine ...', and other voices, laughter. Then the sound of cars leaving in the early hours, crunching, swooshing through the snow. People cut off by snowdrifts further down the valley clambered into Land Rovers to be driven home. The morning house was quiet now, just the tick of the clock and my brother still sleeping beneath his purple eiderdown as I crept out to the kitchen piled high with glasses and plates from the night before, and pulled on wellies and an overcoat. I flicked the light switch - nothing. Another powercut. The dog did not stir, nor the cat, hard up against the woodburner for warmth. The winter light through the orange kitchen curtains promised fresh snow.
I opened the door to a dazzling ocean of white. Milk skies lay over virgin snow blanketing the countryside. I raced outside, threw armfuls of snow into the air, cheeks pinched and rosy with cold. The snow was often so deep you could walk on the brow of hedgerows in moonboots and snowshoes, the tops of signposts ankle high, pointing nowhere. It was an unfamiliar world without markers, and as I glanced at the dark woods I remembered Becky's words about the bears and gave them a wide berth. There had been an ice storm, and the trees bowed down to the iron ground, glassy twig fingers encased in smooth ice, tinkling in the breeze, sparkling in the weak winter sun. At the edge of our land a waterfall was suspended, perfect icicles glinting like a chandelier abandoned on a mossy bank.
The things that brought us here - a world of petrol crisis, three day weeks, terrorism and the Cold War threat meant nothing to me. It was simply a grand adventure to be in a place where you could play and explore for a whole day and never leave your family land. A place where rhododendrons grew so wild and large that their hollow hearts became dens and hideaways. The flaming cerise flowers were gone now, the glossy green leaves bowed down with snow but I could still crawl in to where I hid my treasures.
'Katie!' My mother's voice, and the clang of the old brass ship's bell Dad had hung by the back door that summoned us at mealtimes. I turned to run home. Beneath the tree where I loved to play I saw two slim brown legs sticking out of a drift. I cleared the snow with my wet woollen mitten, and pulled out my missing Sindy doll, peroxide hair frozen and stiff, her tutu dusted with snowflakes like diamonds.
The kitchen was warm and busy now, Zondar our black Labrador and Simba the colourpoint cat circling the table hopefully as Mum served breakfast from the stove, dishing up on Midwinter 'Spanish Garden' plates. The smell of bacon, eggs, toast, the local news on the radio talking of ice cased powerlines cracking, hissing, sparking, falling. Sometimes the powercuts lasted days and it was impossible to get down to the main road even in Dad's Jeep.
I scrambled up onto a chair next to my three year old brother.
'Happy New Year,' Mum said, placing a steaming plate of food in front of me. On a day like today, everything seemed new.
After breakfast Dad pulled on his huge, heavy sheepskin coat and steel toe-capped boots, and went out to the workshop, Zondar padding across the snow behind him. The huge saws were silent today, but he worked by hand cutting timber joists. It was like a small version of the timber mill he owned in town, the floor ankle deep in sawdust and wood shavings, the smell of grease and oil mingling on the air with Radio 4. At the mill I loved tapping the huge metal saws when they were hung to be sharpened, the metallic 'boing' of the metal loops with their vicious razor sharp teeth. On our land Dad was building a new home for us at the side of the old thirties bungalow. The foundations were full of snow, and the timber frame for the rooms sprung clear, the skeleton of our home like a drawing conjured into three dimensions. The fireplaces had been built, and he laid a fire in one, the orange flames luminous against the snowy background, suspended in air it seemed. My brother and I played a balancing game, walking the timber joists on the ground floor. At lunch as we drank soup, warming our hands by the fire, I imagined the house taking shape around us, looking up to the open sky where my bedroom would be one day.
The house would be called Penbrae, just like the modern dream house my mother had reluctantly left behind in the Midlands. My mother's family is Welsh, my father's Scottish. Mamgu, my Welsh grandmother is related to Lloyd George and her family had wool mills in Pembrokeshire. She first saw my grandfather fly fishing in a stream - it was love at first sight because he reminded her of Clark Gable. The Scottish Lords were builders, and the two sides of the family came together in Meriden during World War II, the geographic centre of Britain, and most of the family still lives there. When I think back to that first house, I remember shag pile carpets and purple walls, and the baby grand in a split level drawing room with a huge beaten copper chimney. In the orchard every summer, Dad would harvest the hay and build us a playhouse made of bales (I’ll huff and I’ll puff …). That is my earliest memory, sitting beneath the old oak tree in the orchard aged two or three, with red Mary-Jane shoes on, reading a book, feeling perfectly happy looking back at the little straw house. But this was a time when government leaflets advised households what to do in the event of a nuclear war. I remember the brown booklet lying around in Mum’s immaculate kitchen. As the Midlands had taken such a beating during the last war, Dad decided to make a different life for us. We had family links in Devon. My aunt traced her family back to the De Courteney’s of Tiverton castle, and my uncle’s family goes back to Uncle Tom Cobbley of the famous Devon song about Widdecombe. We often spent summers on the coast at Saunton in a hotel with a cat called Humphrey and a Newfoundland called Bogart, or in the beach houses near the boardwalk leading down to the wide flat sands, so when Dad was looking for somewhere to make a good life, it was the obvious choice.
In 1977 just after we waved plastic Union Jacks at the Queen as she drove through Meriden on the way to some Silver Jubilee celebration, we loaded all our possessions into a huge lorry and headed south. I think it may as well have been Timbuktu as far as Mum was concerned. From a comfortable life among the people she had grown up with, she arrived at an isolated bungalow with two small children. We shared a party line with Mrs Kingdom in the cottage across the road, and often you’d pick up the phone to find her in full flow. She became a good friend of Mum’s and her neighbour Fred helped with our garden. He and Mum had an ongoing battle – she would plant flowers, he would dig them up as weeds. He worked tirelessly on the vegetable garden, his trousers held up by twine, always in a striped shirt with a tweed cap on his head. Fred’s accent was so broad he was almost unintelligible. I remember handing him a cup of tea. He pushed his cap back, said something ending with ‘… ah proper job.’ When looking for a spade or dibber he would cry ‘Yer tiz!’ when he found it.
As Dad worked at the timber mill and on the construction site, Mum threw herself into village life with aplomb. Because she was a talented pianist, she soon became village organist, sharing the job with an elegant old lady known locally as the Queen Mother. Church every Sunday became non-negotiable in our family. Even the village atheist attended because it was the one social point of the week. During term times, the pews were filled with little boys from Ravenswood, the prep school that had taken over Stoodleigh Court. Some of the boys boarded from the age of four. I remember them shivering, their knees pink and purple as the smallest boys wore grey tweed shorts even in the snow. The church was always freezing, hot air wheezing ineffectually up from the metal grilles in the aisle. It was always a relief to get home to a steamy warm kitchen, full of the aromas of the Sunday roast. Ravenswood was a last outpost for the retired military men who made up the staff, and the children of servicemen. One parents’ evening, Mum and Dad tapped on the classroom door of a teacher. Seeing them, his face flooded with relief. ‘Come in, thank god it’s you,’ he said as he pulled a bottle of scotch from behind a model ship in a glass case. ‘Bloody parents.’ He took a swig. ‘Present company excepted.’
This New Year’s Day there was no school, church, no one to play with besides my little brother and no television. No Flash Gordon and sparking RKO mast, no Banana Gang or Blue Peter. In the bedroom I dug out my battery operated tape player and as Elvis crooned I flicked through my fanzines. At six, we used to play Mum and Dad’s old records on the huge wooden record player Dad had been given for his 21st. I loved piling up the 45s and watching them drop one by one. We listened to the Beatles and the Beach Boys, Buddy Holly and Duane Eddy, but my adoration of the King was such that it took my parents several months to tell me he had died last summer. My favourite photo was the wedding picture of Priscilla – immaculate dark hair, kohl rimmed eyes. I inspected myself in the dressing table mirror: fair bobbed hair, thick glasses, puppy fat and tartan bellbottoms. ‘One day,’ I thought, ‘I shall be like you.’ I had little concept of the permanence of death. For me Elvis lived on. Over twenty years later visiting Graceland, it was curious to see birthday wishes from adoring fans – it seems some people still failed to believe he had truly gone. All I knew as a little girl was that if Priscilla was the woman Elvis had chosen to marry, evidently she was the paradigm of womanhood and worth emulating.
America seemed gloriously exotic. The adverts in the DC Comics I had on order each week in the local newsagents for Twinkies and Sea Monkeys, X-Ray Specs and invisible ink pens were as fascinating as the Adventures of Wonder Woman. Seeing ‘Grease’ later in ’78 at the Tivoli only confirmed the glamour of the USA. Cigarette smoke hung in the air of the cinema, billowing down from the courting seats in the back row. We went with my father’s younger brother and his wife and I recognised John Travolta from their copy of ‘Saturday Night Fever’. Olivia Newton John joined Priscilla Presley in the pantheon of womanhood, due mainly to her incredible black satin trousers.
Thanks to the ‘Three Investigators’ and the ‘Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew’, at his age I wanted to be a detective. There were few mysteries to solve in Stoodleigh it seemed. Village life revolved around the Church, WI and the men’s Club. There was no post office or pub for gossip, no playground for the few children. I loved the beauty and freedom of the place, but through books my imagination was set free. I remember reading by firelight, adults talking, playing Scrabble by candlelight. Winter nights with the smell of woodsmoke in my hair, long shadows on the way to bed, deep velvet black starless skies full of snow.
In winter, schools often closed early, Kingdoms coaches ferrying thrilled children home through swirling snowstorms along the Exe Valley, the coloured interior lights pink, neon, blue, more like a disco than a school bus. The distant lights of farmhouses were like pinpricks on the side of hills, dark and undulating like the sides of sleeping giants. One winter I remember everyone in the village saw dancing lights in the night skies for days on end. It was the hot topic of conversation at church and in the Club. We stood one January night at the brow of our hill watching a dazzling orb bounce along the hillside like a dot indicating the words of a song on a cartoon.
‘Is it a UFO?’ I asked Dad.
‘Who knows,’ he said.
Because the village was so high up, RAF jets on training missions often clipped the tops of our trees it seemed. I remember huge aircraft carriers lumbering overhead shaking snow from the branches. It could have been an aircraft, but the speed the light moved, the way it hovered then leapt in a graceful arc was unlike anything I had ever seen. This was a magical place. Anything seemed possible.
