Cherry (38 page)

Born six weeks after her father had had his leg blown off on the Somme, Angela had spent much of her childhood at her paternal grandparents’ home in Bentley, a village near the Suffolk–Essex border. At seventeen she had left school and studied domestic science in Ipswich for a year. At that time one of her friends was nursing at St Thomas’s in London, and the job appealed to Angela, who was sociable, patient and naturally sensitive to other people’s needs. Her mother had other ideas.

Clara Turner was a difficult character. Through a confused mixture of deluded grandeur and a naïve desire to keep her offspring at home, she put a stop to her daughter’s plans to nurse, and shortly before the cruise even broke up her romance with a local boy. Kenneth Turner, on the other hand, was a most agreeable character, and from the start Cherry enjoyed his company. They were about the same age, and both concealed an emotional centre under a calm, controlled surface. From solid Suffolk stock, Kenneth worked as a land agent and surveyor, and he and his family lived comfortably in a modest house, with a maid, on the edge of Ipswich. As for the Turners’ adored son Noël: he was immensely likeable. Fifteen months younger than his sibling, the pair were united victims of Clara’s volatile temperament, and they remained close all their lives. Noël lived in London during the week, training to be a land agent like his father at the College of Estate Management in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. He was a keen reader, and when he returned home to Ipswich at weekends he brought back the latest Penguins. Both he and Angela knew Cherry’s name, and they had seen the cricketing penguin posters pasted in tube stations all over and under London.

Cherry was soon sitting with the Turners at dinner and taking regular turns with Angela on deck. When the
Orion
steamed up to Bergen and docked at the inner harbour of Vågen, all five went for their first walk on shore (‘We always move in fours,’ Clara announced when someone suggested the family might split up). But Cherry and Angela did manage to shake the others off, and they strolled together past the narrow wooden warehouses squeezed onto the old Bryggen wharf, enjoying the salty, oily smell, the firm ground, and the very unfirm feelings that were creeping upon them both. When they stopped to sit on a bench near the Bergenhus, Cherry bent down to pick up a small piece of quartz and offer it to his new friend. Years later, when she had become an Antarctic expert, Angela discovered that the courtship ritual of the penguin centres around stone-giving, stones being a vital commodity for the construction of the nest.

Pausing later outside a bookshop on the harbour, Cherry was astonished to see displayed in the window a pair of handsome, cherry-red Penguin
Worst Journey
s with a Norwegian sticker in the corner of the covers. Fiddling in the pocket of his tweed jacket for some kroner, he went in and bought the volumes. Outside, he handed them to Angela, his second gift. How could any woman not fall in love with a man who did that?

After the cruise, Cherry wrote to Angela as soon as he arrived home. A fortnight later she visited Lamer, met at the station by Cherry, the Rolls and a picnic. For her twenty-first birthday a month later he took her for another picnic on the grass verge under the Welwyn Viaduct. Like his father, Cherry enjoyed watching trains, especially fast ones, and at Welwyn he loved to hear the blustery roar of the
Jubilee
and
Coronation
engines as they whistled towards the dark brick piers. The viaduct was a magnificent forty-arched creation over the valley of the Mimram, a characteristically brooding piece of Victorian civil engineering that reared a hundred feet above the river at the highest point. Sitting on a plaid blanket in the pearly autumn sunshine, Cherry spread out egg mayonnaise sandwiches, apples and a flask of coffee. For her birthday gift he produced a copy of the new one-volume Chatto hardback, continuing the theme he had begun on their first outing on land.

Cherry had built up an aversion to the institution of marriage. ‘It sometimes seems that there is not one completely happy home,’ he once wrote, going on to lament ‘the everlasting friction of it all’. It was an odd opinion for a man from an indubitably happy home. It was true that he had witnessed several bitter divorces (Granville Barker’s, for example). But his swaggering generalisations protected him from his own vulnerability. He was afraid of exposing his raw inner self (who isn’t?) and afraid that he too might fail. His father’s stiff, bulky figure, quite literally towering over the breakfast marmalade, still cast a long shadow.

He told Angela that women frightened him, but she, with her gentle good nature, damped down his fears. Years before, he had said that a happy married life was impossible for him. Now he saw in Angela the ideal companion; the friend to fill the void; the figure from his fantasy life whom he had never dared dream might materialise. Although it was not outwardly obvious, Cherry’s sensibilities were deeply romantic. He was easily moved, especially by literature, and valued feeling and content above order and form despite his Victorian worship of Duty. He was practical, and a vocal pessimist, but he believed in the power of the imagination to lift the human spirit from its trough, and in the deeper levels of his consciousness he believed in human perfectibility.

The thirty years between them did not seem much to Angela. Besides being an engaging romantic, Cherry was handsome, had impeccable manners, and could be very amusing; altogether, she found him a deeply appealing mixture. But she didn’t tell her mother.

Cherry was too prudent to abandon his bachelor habits prematurely. He said nothing to Evelyn when he motored down to the West House on one of his filial visits. At Christmas, he disappeared on a cruise. His mail was forwarded to ports where the ship was to dock, and he kept up with his business as he went round, sneaking in cablegrams to Angela while he was about it. Much of his correspondence concerned
The Worst Journey
. Cherry’s complicated publishing arrangements reflected his tortuously obsessive nature. Somewhere in his psyche he was determined to occupy himself as fully as possible with administrative detail, and wherever he was – on board, in port, away visiting – he kept a sharp eye on Chatto and its accounts department. The firm had agreed to pay him quarterly, and if a cheque was not forthcoming a letter was soon despatched enquiring politely after its whereabouts.

Following the success of his Wilson book, the likeable George Seaver had been commissioned by John Murray to write a biography of Birdie Bowers. It was scheduled to appear in the autumn of 1938, and Cherry agreed to supply another introduction. He had written little in recent years, but his gift for the winning one-liner had not deserted him. When Lord Dulverton asked, on the Letters page of
The Times
, if any reader had ever observed the phenomenon of a ground rainbow, which he had just witnessed on Tadmarton Heath golf course, Cherry took up his pen. He had seen one of these on the Barrier almost exactly twenty-six years before, and had pointed it out to Bill, who painted it and named it the Garrard halo. ‘It is the only one I shall ever have,’ Cherry concluded his letter, ‘but it is most beautiful.’

The introduction was delayed by an attack of backache that struck soon after the winter cruise, and he finally tackled the job in the spring, producing another fine essay of crafted prose far superior to the limp biographical narrative that followed it. The piece spoke, inevitably, of its times. The next war, Cherry wrote parenthetically following a reference to the last one, which had settled nothing, ‘will settle everything – and everybody’. Appeasement had begun in earnest the previous November when Chamberlain sent the gaunt Lord Halifax to see Hitler, and Cherry took the opportunity to give it a sound kicking. ‘If the politicians get you into another war (in order to keep the peace) . . .’ he wrote, ‘pray to God to let you die or for a man like Birdie to lead you out.’ His light touch did not fail him. The barbed political comments were concealed within a sustained and lyrical appreciation of a man he had loved deeply. Birdie, ‘a tiger for work’, was an ugly little fellow all right, but, after all, ‘this civilisation is a funny business; the shop window is very different from the shop’. Cherry wanted to point out the universal appeal of a good, humble man who did not fail. ‘[His] story does not die . . . It is a spirit without boundaries . . . he and his companions have left something behind in men’s minds; it is shadowy and intangible and perhaps a little fanciful, but it is something greater than all the pyramids in the world, and much more important.’

He used the introduction to say something else that had been preoccupying him. The building boom of the thirties had altered the appearance of Hertfordshire, and to Cherry the countryside around Wheathampstead was becoming increasingly unrecognisable. There were more houses, more cinemas and more tarmacked roads as well as more light industry, the latter proliferating as heavy industry shrank elsewhere. ‘It has been my happiness,’ Cherry wrote, to see two of the most beautiful parts of the world. The one was England. [The other was the Antarctic.] In its domestic way pre-war England was perhaps the most beautiful thing the world has ever seen. It took at least fifteen hundred years of thought, and fighting and courage and love to make that beautiful thing; it has taken about twenty years to ruin a very large part of it. One hundred years hence men will do anything to get it back to what it was: and they will not be able.

It was true that the countryside had taken a battering. The cressy shallows of the Lea where the General and Evelyn had held their crayfishing parties had been polluted by the advent of both industrial and domestic ribbon development, and the crayfish had disappeared. A rural way of life that had taken hundreds of years to evolve was vanishing, apparently in a matter of decades. And the urbanisation of Hertfordshire was about to speed up. In 1946, the year the New Towns Act was passed, E. M. Forster broadcast an impassioned talk in defence of a county and district he still believed was the loveliest in England. He had learned that Stevenage New Town, a satellite for 60,000 inhabitants, was to be built near his old home. ‘The people now living and working there are doomed,’ Forster prophesied. ‘It is death in life for them and they move in a nightmare.’ Like the counties on the other sides of London, Hertfordshire was beginning to melt into the capital. To Cherry, the bleak rows of factories and the aeroplanes droning overhead were tangible symbols of the progress that threatened to overwhelm him.

Many things were changing along with the pastoral landscape of Cherry’s youth. The position of the gentry was being eroded by the newly rich who moved into the manor houses previously occupied by generations of the same family. Harpenden to the north-east of Wheathampstead had been attracting new money ever since absentee landlords had sold off land to allow the railway to develop in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Now there was new money everywhere, and the working people of Wheathampstead didn’t like it. ‘There was a wrong spirit in the new rich,’ an elderly villager recalled in the 1960s, ‘something quite different. With the old gentry you could talk to them man to man, but you couldn’t with these others.’ Cherry may not have been universally popular, but at least he was bona fide gentry. Everyone felt happy with that; they fretted when the village hierarchy was disrupted. A newcomer living in one of the manors Cherry had sold was definitely not sufficiently aristocratic: ‘She
dinks
into church,’ it was whispered, ‘and sits in the Lamer chapel!’ People filed into St Helen’s to worship the established social order as much as God. As for the Brockets at Brocket Hall near Shaw’s village at Ayot St Lawrence, why, they were
northern brewers
.
⁵⁵

As 1938 advanced, Cherry grew familiar with the seventy-mile drive up through north-east Essex and into Suffolk to collect Angela in the yellow peril (she was faintly embarrassed by the crests). From Ipswich they would set off for the windy Suffolk coast with a picnic provided by Clara. Angela introduced Cherry to the salt and freshwater marshes, to Southwold and Aldeburgh and, nearer home, the Stour valley and the watermills around Flatford and Dedham commemorated by Constable. Cherry loved it all, especially the wading birds in the estuaries that curled inland from the North Sea. In between his visits they met at the Berkeley for lunch followed by an exhibition and tea at the Savoy. Sometimes Angela went to stay at Lamer. Clara didn’t approve, but her daughter was determined not to allow her to break up another friendship. Ensconced in Hertfordshire, Cherry and Angela fell into a comfortable, easy rhythm. When he went shooting, she went with him, not wielding a gun but walking in the line holding the cartridges, and when the weather was bad they took the train to London to see a film and catch up with the newsreels. The housekeeper was frenzied with excitement at the faint prospect that there might at last be a lady at Lamer, and she and the three Swiss maids kept everyone in the village informed.

Pussy Harker, Cherry’s old girlfriend, and her amiable husband Jasper, who worked for the government intelligence services,
⁵⁶
were regular house guests at Lamer in the late thirties, and so was Cherry’s niece Susan, Lassie’s daughter. All got on famously with Angela. As for GBS and Charlotte, they both adored her, and she in turn became immensely fond of them. While Charlotte was a mother figure, with GBS, a man sixty years her senior, Angela shared a girlish sense of humour. When she revealed how much she admired Wells, she and Cherry were immediately invited to a luncheon party at Whitehall Court, the Shaws’ London flat, at which the great man was to be present. Wells was writing
All Aboard for Ararat
, the protagonist of which, Noah Lammock, is a modern incarnation of his Old Testament namesake. Over lunch Angela was teased for failing to answer some biblical questions. Taking the ribbing in the spirit in which it was intended, she rounded on Wells. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘What kind of wood was the ark made of ?’ He didn’t know – but she did. (It was gopher wood.)