Cherry (3 page)

It might have been at the morning walk, or at a meet of Major Carpenter’s Harriers, or perhaps at one of the quarterly concerts of the Bedford Musical Society, that Apsley Cherry met Evelyn Sharpin. Dr Henry Wilson Sharpin, her father, was a well-known local figure, ministering to gouty colonels and febrile infants, and he was held in high regard.
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Born in India, where his father had served in the 4th Light Dragoons in Bombay, he had been shipped off to attend Great Yarmouth Grammar School, and at sixteen he began studying medicine at Bedford Infirmary. He finished his training at St Bartholomew’s in London, where he was a prize-winning student, and after qualifying returned to Bedford Infirmary as House Surgeon. Later he set up in private practice on the ground floor of his home at No. 1, St Paul’s Square, a prime site along from the Corn Exchange. Sharpin’s wife Edith, baby Apsley’s maternal grandmother, was the daughter of John Nicolle of St Helier’s, Jersey. She bore Henry six children, the eldest of whom was Evelyn Edith.

Slim and not unattractive, Evelyn wore her brown hair tightly pinned at the back and curled to a gentle froth at the front. Her features were even and well proportioned except for a slightly large mouth; she liked dancing; and she was moderate in all her habits. Her education had been typically sketchy, and she rarely read anything more substantial than
Punch
. She had seldom ventured beyond the south Midlands: her expectations began and ended with marriage and a family. Above all, she was docile and obedient, and her bedroom was hung with an array of biblical scenes that reflected a keenly felt piety.

The rituals of courtship proceeded smoothly, and in 1884 the old soldier determined to ask for Evelyn’s hand. She was twenty-five years his junior, but as far as her parents were concerned, it was a good match. The colonel had a solid reputation, and while he was a second son without a fortune, he had a small private income and the prospects of a decent enough military pension. Besides, three younger girls were queuing up behind her.

They were married in St Paul’s Church, the largest in Bedford, on 29 January 1885. A row of non-commissioned officers from the regiment formed a guard of honour at the west door and processed in after the bride, who wore a confection of ivory satin, pearls, ostrich feathers and lace with a diamond pendant and bracelet. She was attended by eight bridesmaids wearing, according to a fulsome account in the local paper, ‘dresses of braided cream, trimmed with cream Astrakhan, toques of Astrakhan with cream aigrettes, and muffs of silk and lace to match, with sprays of Neapolitan violets in their muffs and at their throats, and gold brooches with the initials “AE” fastened to their toques’. Alfred Welby, the friend who had been such a faithful correspondent during the groom’s long years at the wars, was best man, and one of Evelyn’s uncles officiated. The Sharpin progeny had the impressive total of three vicar uncles; the house in St Paul’s Square was teeming with churchmen and doctors (by the time Evelyn married, one of her brothers had already qualified as a doctor and the other was at medical school). Perhaps the abundance of ecclesiastical and medical men that crowded his childhood contributed to Apsley junior’s subsequent mistrust of both organised religion and the medical profession.

After a lively wedding breakfast the new Mrs Cherry changed into a grey cashmere travelling dress and sealskin jacket, and the couple left in a shower of rice for a night in Oxford on their way to honeymoon in Devon.

Brown-eyed baby Apsley was born at home eleven months later. From the start he was surrounded by loving relations. Large faces smiled in the glow of the crocus-shaped jet of the nursery gaslight, and the most regular of the visitors, Evelyn’s doting younger sisters Minnie, Maud and Nellie, became familiar to the infant Apsley as soon as he could focus. When he was six weeks old he was taken down to Denford in Berkshire to be cooed over by his Cherry aunts. On a glacial February morning the family processed into the chapel built on the estate by the baby’s long-dead paternal grandfather, and Apsley George Benet was baptised in the same font as his father before him. His Christian names were all plucked from the paternal family tree, and his surname was Cherry: the Garrard was some years ahead.

Like little Lord Fauntleroy,
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as a toddler Apsley was dressed for public outings in a black velvet suit with buttoned knickerbockers and a large lace collar; either that or a starched sailor suit. But his reign as little emperor was short. On 21 March 1887 his sister Ida was born in the house on Lansdowne Road. She was only fourteen-and-a-half months younger than her brother, and the pair were soon dubbed ‘Lassie’ and ‘Laddie’. The nicknames stuck for years.

It was a quiet street. The loudest noises were the bell of the butcher’s boy’s tricycle and the muffled clatter of housemaids polishing brass door knockers. Laddie and Lassie were wheeled out by their nurses while their mother went visiting. But Evelyn was not a remote, matriarchal figure who ascended to the nursery occasionally in a cloud of perfume. She was an attentive and loving mother. She had a strong sense of what was right and proper, and naturally followed her military husband’s lead in matters of domestic discipline. Deeply conventional, like most women of her background, she rarely absorbed fresh ideas. Along with everyone she knew, she was a royalist and a Conservative. When there was a mix-up over a visiting political agent at a Cherry estate and it was erroneously implied that the family might support a Liberal candidate, the suggestion brought Evelyn out in a fit of the vapours.

On 12 June 1887 news was brought up from Denford that George Charles, Apsley senior’s elder brother, had died after a short illness. The Bedford Cherrys were shocked: George Charles had been an energetic man, and young for his sixty-five years. Evelyn swathed herself in black crêpe, and the whole family went into mourning. A bachelor without issue, George Charles had bequeathed everything bar a couple of small annuities to Apsley, his only brother. Overnight, the colonel and his expanding family acquired a small fortune, land, prestige and responsibility. One-year-old Apsley would never have to follow a profession or struggle to find a red-brick house of his own: he was to be a landed gentleman. Everything had changed.

The colonel decided to move his family to Berkshire. He no longer needed his army salary: he had a large estate, and rents from other land in Berkshire to keep him. The summer of 1887 was taken up with arrangements. On 1 September – his fifty-fifth birthday – Colonel Cherry retired from the regiment, a much-loved and much-admired old soldier with a distinguished campaign record. He was given the rank of honorary major-general.

As for Laddie: he had taken his first tottering steps in Bedford, but before he was two he was led to the carriage and entombed among the sheepskin rugs for the long journey to Denford.

The Cherrys traced their ancestry to the de Chéries of Picardy and Lombardy, lords of Beauval, Liguière and Villencourt. Thomas de Chérie and his son John had settled in Northamptonshire at the beginning of the fifteenth century, and were soon anglicised to Cherrys. By the end of the eighteenth century Cherry men were forging careers in India. George Frederick Cherry, great-grandfather of the subject of this book, joined the Bengal Civil Service in 1778 and was later appointed Resident at Benares on the Ganges, where he was subsequently murdered by the recently deposed Nabob of Oude. His widow took their small son George Henry back to England, and they settled in London. The boy was educated at Harrow and Oxford – he took a double first in Classics – and in 1819 he married Charlotte Drake Garrard of Lamer Park, Hertfordshire. The following year he became a member of parliament. The Cherrys made their home in Gloucester Place in London’s Marylebone, and there, in 1822 and 1823, George Charles Cherry and his sister Lucy were born.

At about that time George Henry – baby Apsley’s paternal grandfather – decided to put down roots in good English soil. From the back row of an auction at Garaway’s Coffee House in London’s Cornhill he purchased Denford, an 800-acre estate in the south-west corner of Berkshire, on a trouty part of the River Kennet. It was about two miles from Hungerford and sixty-three from London, roughly half-way between the capital and fashionable Bath. The Berkshire Downs unfurled to the north like a great green wave, and southwards, plainly visible from the bedrooms of the big house, were the north Hampshire Downs. Besides a sand-coloured late-Georgian manor house, the estate included stables, a park bristling with oak and beech, a watermill, two farms, a dozen cottages, plantations and meadows.

George Henry became a justice of the peace, and in 1829 served as High Sheriff of Berkshire. Mechanisation and industrialisation were creeping over the south-west of the county, but the stirrings of progress did not impinge significantly on daily life at Denford. A dozen servants lived in, and many others rented cottages on the estate. More daughters arrived at the big house and were baptised (one buried, too) in the Norman church at Avington, a hamlet on the River Kennet, and finally Charlotte had a second son, whom she called Apsley. He was the Antarctic explorer’s father. Besides extending the house, George Henry had commissioned a chapel 150 yards from his front door – it was a minor Gothic extravaganza among the beech trees – and Apsley was the first baby to be baptised in its font.

George Henry died on 6 January 1848. His elder son George Charles, a young barrister, was soon ready to take on his father’s mantle. Eight hundred acres did not put him among the top thirty landowners in the county, but his was a respectable holding, and in addition to Denford he owned a large chunk of land his father had bought at the other end of Berkshire. George Charles became a county magistrate and held a range of important judicial positions. Like his father before him, he was High Sheriff for a year. He laid foundation stones, served on a vast number of committees, presented prizes, commanded the 3rd Berks Rifle Corps and contributed handsomely to the Church of England. Strong-featured and infinitely wholesome, he was described in a contemporary memoir as ‘one of those men who form the backbone of English provincial life’. He never married. Various sisters had found husbands, and their offspring kept the house young. Emily, the fifth of the Cherry siblings, had wed a barrister called John Smith in 1853, and they frequently sent their children to Denford during school holidays. Reginald Smith, their brilliant second son, was baptised in the estate chapel. He was to play a crucial role in the life of his polar cousin.

The agricultural depression that dragged on from the 1870s to the 1890s bit deeply in south-west Berkshire, and the landscape grew greener as grass replaced tillage. Newbury and Hungerford swelled with desperate workers, farms were left untenanted and so many thousands of acres were switched to dairy pasture that the Great Western Railway was known as the Milky Way. But the Cherrys had plenty of capital. The limitless self-confidence, the moral seriousness, the social vigour: both George Henry and George Charles basked all their lives in the glow of paternalistic Toryism.

When General Cherry moved his family to Berkshire more than seventy people lived on the Denford estate, either working for the Cherrys or subsisting as labourers or small tenant farmers. While the estate was not exactly prospering, the Cherrys were comfortable, and the General had inherited much goodwill in the county. As for Laddie, he toddled fearlessly around the new house pursued by his nurse, pausing to help the cook shell peas or play with his wooden soldiers in the spacious drawing room while Father rustled his newspaper. Occasionally the General received top-hatted visitors from Newbury or London and Laddie was permitted to remain downstairs while Lassie was corralled in the day nursery. The women of the house were almost permanently taken up with babies, and father and son formed a unit of manly isolation. They were often together. The General was a keen trainspotter, and if a new engine was running in the valley or a branch line had been opened, he would take Laddie off in the carriage to have a look. The two Apsleys made a fine sight, one a rotund old soldier pushing sixty with a curling moustache and a thick suit that smelt of cigar smoke, the other a small boy with long hair and a sailor suit.

The General told stories of his Indian and African adventures which thrilled the small boy, especially if they involved one of the exotic souvenirs brought back from those far-off lands. In the upstairs hall at Denford there was a pair of Zulu shields, and Laddie liked to sweep the day nursery with the yak-tail brush stowed in the military chest with the striped cover.

The Denford Cherrys kept in touch with more distant branches of the family, and if news came in that a relation had died, or married, or produced offspring, the fact was recorded in the pages of the family bible. Well-known stories of especially colourful ancestors were aired. And yet, or perhaps because of all this, the grown-up Laddie took no interest in his dead relations, and little more in those who were still alive. He was proud of his distinguished ancestry, but not a man of genealogical piety. His was a theoretical appreciation. In the course of his long life he broke with many traditions, sold the seat and wilfully elected to let the name die.

The arrival of more girls – Elsie in September 1889, and Mildred in May 1891 – meant that Evelyn was permanently preoccupied. When the General was absent, Laddie spent much of his time with the servants. He had his baths by firelight in tepid water ferried in cans by the young nurserymaid, and went to sleep to the small sound of coal falling in the night nursery grate or the orchestrated plumbing in the bathroom. As he grew more independent, the estate gamekeepers and woodmen became his companions. His earliest memories were of the shallows of the spring in Goose Acre Coppice and the cushiony moss of Flaggy Mead. His life followed the rhythm of the seasons, from the millpond freeze to the eruption of the daffodils in the park. He was given rides in the gardener’s handcart, and later he was sometimes allowed to play with the estate workers’ children, many of whom were baptised in the Denford chapel like the young master.