Blue Remembered Hills

1

When anybody asks me where I was born, or when I am called on to provide that information in filling in a form, I admit with a distinct sense of apology that I was born in Surrey. Why the sense of apology I do not know. Surrey is quite as rich in history and, at least in parts, quite as beautiful in its own way as any other county in England. I can only think that it is because my father, like all the best sailors except Nelson, was Devon born and bred, and my mother was born in Dorset; and because of that, I grew up with the feeling that the West Country is the only right and proper place in which to have one’s beginnings.

I come of a dynasty of doctors on both sides, with a scattering of farmers and merchants — the latter mostly Quakers and, on my father’s side, one colourful character who began life in the Navy, was wounded at Waterloo, having changed over into the Army meanwhile, and ended up as governor of some West Indian colony. On my mother’s side the medical tradition ended with her father. All her brothers went to the Engineering College at Coopers Hill and thence to India; the old India of the Raj, almost of Kipling, to spend most of their working lives building railways and the like. My father’s brothers and two of his brothers-in-law were all doctors, and he always claimed that his original reason for going into the Navy like his predecessor of Waterloo fame was a strong objection to following through Epsom and St Thomas’s the footsteps of too many relations who had all done a good deal better there than he was likely to do himself. My father had no great opinion of his own mental abilities, and on the principle that the fool of the family goes to sea, departed seaward at the age of thirteen, entering the Navy via the Conway instead of Dartmouth, because his Latin was not up to the Dartmouth standard. However, as the Conway was primarily a training ship for the Merchant Service, and only a small proportion of its boys, John Masefield among them, ever made the Royal Navy, and as he did manage to pass out top of his term, with the King’s binoculars to show for it, he cannot have been so very dim, after all.

He was a lieutenant when he and my mother were married. They had first met when they were both fourteen, at a mixed hockey match, and he always claimed that the first word he ever heard her say was ‘Damn’, which I suppose, to judge from her vehemence in protesting that it was the first time she had ever said it, was quite a word in those days. My father’s invariable retort — oh, the lovely ritual changelessness of family jokes and traditions! — was that for a first time, she said it with remarkable fluency.

My father’s elder sister was married to a bank manager in Poole, where my mother’s father had his practice, and from the time of the hockey match he took to spending as much as possible of his leaves with her, between long absences at sea. In those days a naval officer was at sea as a midshipman by the age of sixteen, and from then on, single or married, was frequently away from his nearest and dearest for two solid years at a time, with no means of contact save by letter.

Three days after their wedding he went off to South Africa for three years, while she remained in England to look after her mother, who was an invalid suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, and by then a widow. He had not long been home again when the First World War broke out, so that was another four years before they got around to having a baby at all. Then came Penelope, who died when only a few months old, in the terrible post-war ’flu epidemic. A few more years, and I was born. My father was at the Admiralty at the time, and commuting daily between Whitehall and East Clandon, which is how just before Christmas 1920 I came to be born in Surrey.

For some years, I thought that I could remember being born. Later, I realised that I only remembered what I had been told about being born — by my mother, who was of the stuff that minstrels are made, but singularly unaware of the effect that her stories might have on a small daughter who believed implicitly in every word she uttered. So then, my birth-memory, via my mother, was of being brought by the stork in the middle of a desperate snowstorm. I was really intended for Mrs McPhee who lived next door, and who had, said my mother, made ready whole drawers full of baby-clothes including tiny kilts, and decided to call me Jeannie; but in the appalling snow he lost his way and came knocking on our door, begging to be taken in for the night, failing which he would have to go to the police, and I would be put in an orphanage. It was a very bad storm, and my teeth were chattering; so my mother took pity on us and let us come in and sit by the fire and gave us both hot cocoa, after which the stork departed, leaving me behind and promising to come back for me next day. He never came, and so there I still was, with Mummy and Daddy, two or three years later. I was a trusting child, or possibly just plain gullible. I never thought to wonder why, if the story were true, I had not merely been handed over the garden fence to my rightful owners next morning. Nor did it occur to me that at age zero, I would have been unlikely to have teeth to chatter.

It was a grief to me that I did not truly belong to my parents, but presumably I was unable to make this known; and when I was nearly four, and somebody said to me, in my mother’s presence, ‘What’s your name, little girl?’ to which I replied in a voice quivering with emotion, ‘I’m really little Jeannie McPhee, but I’m living with Daddy and Mummy just now,’ my mother was the world’s most surprised and horrified woman. But she never learned.

Though that particular account of my birth was apocryphal, there seem to have been quite a few genuine dramas attached to the event. The doctor said I was due to arrive on Christmas Eve; my mother said I was coming on December 14th, and on the 14th I came. Having a kind of two-thirds belief in horoscopes, I have sometimes wondered what effect that has had on my life and on the kind of person I am. I was born in a blizzard, and we had run out of coal and my father had to go next door, presumably to the McPhees, to borrow some in a wheelbarrow; and when next day the coalman did arrive, his horse fell down under the bedroom window.

I don’t, then, actually remember being born; but I do have a genuine first memory that goes back to the time when I was eighteen months old. We were staying with my dear Uncle Harold, whose home, when he was not in India, was still at Poole in Dorset; and my mother had me out in my pram in Poole Park. We came trundling along a path between big dark evergreen bushes reaching to the sky. The path turned a corner, and the bushes fell back forming a small open space in which were wire-netting cages containing large birds which look in my memory like golden pheasants. I did not so much mind the pheasants, but there was another cage holding captive a restless revolving red squirrel, at sight of which all the woes of the world, all sins and sorrows, all injustice, all man’s inhumanity to man came crashing in one great engulfing wave over my eighteen-month-old head, which was not yet ready to cope with it. I took one look, and broke into a roar of grief and fury which nothing would console or quieten, until I had been smartly trundled out of the gardens.

Afterwards we both forgot about the whole thing until after I was grown up, when something, I have no idea what, triggered the old memory, and back came the pictures. I described the incident to my mother. Had it ever happened, or was I inventing it? My mother thought — and remembered also; all too vividly. It had been dreadful, she said. I had gone on and on, and she hadn’t even been able to slap me because she had actually agreed with me entirely, and her mother, my grandmother, had hated things in cages so much that she had vowed to vote for any government that would abolish menageries and travelling circuses; and my face had been purple, and it had taken the gift of a green balloon to silence me at last; and I knew how much she disapproved of bribery. She added that I couldn’t have been more than eighteen months old because after that we were never in Poole Park again until I was seven.

Which is how I know that, unlike the stork saga, it was a genuine memory.

It is, in fact, my only memory of the time before I contracted juvenile arthritis. Because my next memory, which must date from a year later, is of being ill in bed with pains in my joints, and being visited by an aged relative, who, so far as I know, I never saw before or after, called Auntie Katie. This memory is connected with biscuits and doll’s furniture. Either I was eating biscuits and she brought me a present of doll’s furniture, or I was playing with doll’s furniture and she brought me biscuits.

The other thing I remember about the earlier and more active stages of my illness is having a black panther under my bed. After a while it was discovered that I was simply hallucinating as the result of too much arsenic in the medicine I was being given; but at the time it must have been even more terrifying for my parents than it was for me. Always at night it came on; first the black panther under my bed, then wolves crowding in the shadowy corners of the room out of range of the nightlight, then snakes climbing up the walls. And my mother, finding that nothing else would reassure me, would spend large parts of each night carrying me wrapped in a shawl round and round the room and into all the corners, making me pat the walls to show myself that there was nothing there.

The strange thing was that I had of course never seen a black panther, nor a wolf, nor a snake; and yet, remembering what I saw, they were wolves skulking in the corners, not fantasy creatures. And years later when I met Kipling’s Jungle Books, I recognised them; and strangest of all, recognised them not with fear, but with love. Bagheera, the black panther with a voice as soft as wild honey dripping from a tree, was one of the deepest loves of my childhood, and to this day very few fictional characters have ever come as near to my heart. So why was I frightened at our first meeting? Maybe I caught my poor mother’s fear. I do not know. It is all very odd.

2

When I was not much past three years old, my father was ordered to join the Benbow of the Mediterranean Fleet, and it was decided that heat might be good for whatever it was that was wrong with me — not even Dr Still, whose special study it was, seemed to know much about juvenile arthritis in those days, save that it was a form of acute arthritis that attacked children, bringing with it waves of acute pain and fever with joint inflammation, that came and went with periods of remission in between for an indefinite number of years, and eventually, if it did not kill one first, burned itself out, leaving havoc behind it. They still weren’t even sure if that was what I had. And so my mother and I went out to Malta, where the Fleet was based, and naval wives and families congregated.

To this day the name ‘Malta’ means bells to me. Bells ringing, not as the church bells ring in this country, but clashing all together, tossing and falling and fountaining above the roof-tops and through the narrow streets, And I see the blue of a night sky through a mosquito net; and somehow superimposed on that, the top of an orange-tree triumphant with flaming golden fruit peering at me over the broken coping of a sunlit wall.

It isn’t, I suppose, surprising that my memories of Malta should be only a series of small unconnected pictures, because I was still only somewhere between four and five when we came home again. Perhaps ‘unconnected’ is not quite the right word, for the pictures do form a kind of pattern in my mind; a mosaic made up of small brilliantly-coloured pieces laced together with the bright filigree of the bells.

At the centre of it all was our house in Sliema, rented furnished from two very great and gracious ladies, who refused, at the end of our time there, to have the inventory checked, saying that they should not dream of so insulting my mother. The outside of the house is gone from me, but the inside was grey; a greenish underwater grey filled with shadows and coolness; with quiet, tall, immensely dignified rooms whose stone floors were washed daily with paraffin in the water to discourage the ants and other creepy-crawlies. They were washed by our maid Lucille Azzipadi, who I remember for one dramatic pronouncement, made with flashing eyes and hands on hips, in some time of strife at home: ‘My fader, he debbil man!’

The walls of our house were lined with portraits of cardinals and archbishops, all relatives of the two great ladies through many generations. Their eyes used to follow us through the day; eyes out of dark subtle faces under cardinals’ hats, resting on us wherever we went, whatever we did, until my mother turned them all round with their faces to the walls, and we lived quite happily thereafter with their brownish canvas backs.

Unfortunately it was not possible to turn round in the same way the windows of our dining-room, which looked directly into the street, and through which, consequently, the street looked directly into our dining-room. When too many Maltese urchin noses became glued to the glass, the grown-ups within cried, ‘Impshi!’ with no appreciable result. When the concentration of noses became unbearable, the grown-ups cried ‘Impshi Gehenna!’ which got instant results, but had such a blighting effect, scattering the urchin noses as from actual danger, that neither my mother nor my father had the heart to use it unless and until driven to frenzy.

I remember our garden, so tiny and so high-walled that it was like a room roofed with blue sky, a garden paved for the most part, and with three steps leading down into it. I am sure that there were three, because I remember sitting exactly halfway down, with one step behind me and one step still to go, watching the spread-fingered lizards darting among the cracks in the warm stones. And just space in it for a well, a frangipani climbing over one wall and a lemon tree.

In the mornings our garden was cool in shadow, and Mrs Paterson from across the street, who I was told expected the stork to bring her a baby quite soon, would bring her needlework and come and sit with us on the steps, while the strip of shade grew slowly narrower, and the sunshine crept towards us like a bright blasting curtain. In the afternoon, when our garden had become an oven in which the heat danced like a swarm of midges, and the shade had all gone across the street, we went across the street too, and sat on the steps in Mrs Paterson’s garden. But I do not remember whether she had a well or a frangipani or a lemon tree.

There is the centre of the mosaic, and the rest falls into place around it.

I remember a road clouded with dust, which I thought led right across the island in one ruled line, and which seemed to me, though I do not think this can really have been so, just as I do not think I can really have seen respectable Presbyterian Mrs Paterson sitting up in bed in a black satin nightdress, to be bordered as far as the eye could see, therefore all the way, with stone jars of some blue flower with a hairy