The Girl from Station X (48 page)

Bronco is going so well and looking so fit I do hope I shall be able to keep him after the war. Tell me all about what is happening at Knole and also all your doings – it really looks
as if the spring was coming dear, doesn’t it? I love darling G. more than ever and I should like to be with you and enjoy the spring together . . .

How is your birthday punt getting on? I hope you will be very very happy. R loves you so much.

Yr R.

My grandfather had just inherited Knole, his father having died that January. Aunt K, the daughter of the house, despite having been married for six years, was running it. My grandmother had not
yet moved in.

My grandmother was pregnant – the baby, if a boy, to be christened Raymond after his father –
Little R
. That April of 1915, my grandfather was granted a few days’
leave but then summoned back to France after only twenty-four hours. My grandmother, after seeing him off at Folkestone, expresses her distress. She was now living at Knole and was trying to get
used to it.

April 24th 1915.

. . . Darling, it was a sickening disappointment for my darling R having to go back . . . I think I love you more than ever, and I just live for the day when it is all over
and we can take up our glorious life again, happy beyond dreams in our love . . . I love you so, I’m going to be happy here I think dear, because it’s R’s and he loves it. I think
I shall love it all very soon . . .

Little Anne has been evil all day, but a great duck. She has an awful temper but K says my R was an awful child so there is hope for her. We’ll have our work cut out with her I think.
She got another tooth today, the 7th. Goodnight dearest in the world. G would have liked to come on that ship yesterday with her loved one.

Your own, G

She was right about ‘Little Anne’, but of course, as regards having their work cut out in bringing her up, there would be no ‘we’.

My grandfather’s letters back were intimate and loving but also practical. Instructions were given about matters such as the Knole drains and the installation of electric light. He also
gave his wife instructions about the care of his horses. His favourite mare, Dundancer, was in foal and he often asked how she was.

My grandmother missed their rented house near Salisbury Plain, where they had lived as newlyweds when my grandfather had been based at the Netheravon Cavalry School. But she wanted to please
him.

Knole, Frant, Sussex.

April 25th 1915.

. . .You must teach me the woods darling. I love them because we have been so happy there together. They seem to speak of my R. I went there one day after war began. It must
have been soon after you left for I was so weak and I could hardly get along and the others kept shouting for me and calling but I went on and on and never answered. I was so miserable darling, and
I seemed to be nearer to you there.

. . . Goodnight, love of my life. I shall exist (quite happily but only half alive) till you come again.

Your own, G.

She busied herself at Knole gardening –
I spent a long time this morning standing on my head in the seed bed
. She waited excitedly for her greenhouse to be delivered and wrote
about their little daughter:
She was such fun going to bed. She is in your old room as they are going to paint the greenus outside her nursery windows. She rolled about and tried to climb onto
the big bed and talked and laughed, you would have loved her. She uses her head to crawl with and looks too funny . . .

While she led a domestic life, he described some gruesome scenes from across the Channel.

April 30th 1915.

My darling Gladys,

Letter from you dated 27 and I’m so glad you are feeling better and able to garden. I went through YPRES today and there is little left of the town it is a mass of
debris, dead horses and broken vehicles – the cloth hall just exists. On the far side of YPRES shells come from every side and it is distinctly unhealthy.

My grandmother was being won over by his favourite place:

April 28th 1915.

Dear, how beautiful the woods are. I had no idea they were so big and empty and the walks so pretty. I went for miles this morning. Petie and Jill got away hunting and Nah
and I went to look for them. We found them very quickly, Petie with a wire snare on his leg which he scarcely noticed . . .

You and I, loved one, will go often thro’ the woods together, shall we. G. will adore that.

Knowing that they would hardly ever walk through the woods together again made me sad. However, I found my grandparents’ love letters inspiring. At least someone in my family had found
true love. My mother was the child of parents who had cared deeply for each other. And my grandfather, despite not seeing his daughter much, wrote tenderly about her:
I am so glad that Poods is
well and liked little Anne she really is a dear isn’t she?
He also sounds homesick.

May 2nd 1915.

Tell me are the bluebells out in the woods & have you heard a nightingale? Is it really summer there yet? Oh G I do want to spend a lazy summer with you in the sun
sometime.

Yr. own R.

Please send me out some CAPSTAN NAVY CUT MILD also tell the Cook to send a cake or something.

I found the boyish postscript about the cake disarming – my grandfather, like many men of that era, had had responsibilities thrust on him early. He had already fought in India and in the
Boer War while in his twenties and now in 1915 was only thirty-four. His writing style reminded me of his daughter’s diaries – both used dashes instead of full stops; he, like her,
wrote as if he was always on the run, full of energy.

May 10th.

I love the woods don’t you – they are so pretty & full of flowers – we will buy them some day when we are rich & make lovely big rides in them for
G to wander in & we will make a lovely view from the front of the house.

My grandfather had not owned the woods, I realised. It was after my grandmother’s marriage to Chow that the woodland was bought; with Chow she fulfilled my grandfather’s dream of
those
lovely big rides
and
a lovely view from the front of the house
. . .

Soon she too was beginning to love Knole.

Knole

May 10th 1915.

My darling,

Hurrah! Two letters from you, one by the mid-day and one by the evening post. Such darling ones . . . Our life together has been such wonderful & perfect happiness
dearest, I think heaven must be like that. It’s been nice today dear and R’s home is getting so pretty. I don’t wonder you love the woods dear. They are more beautiful every day.
K and I went into them today . . . We took the dogs . . . We came back by the little pond R wants to make a lake of. The whole wood was a carpet of blue & masses of primroses and violets. It
was perfect.

. . . I just worship you my beloved.

May 14th. Knole.

My darling, Yes, G is very happy here, I knew you loved it, dearest and I used to want to like it awfully. This is just the cream of the year and the woods are so lovely
tho’ yesterday rain has knocked the primroses about a bit. The garden is so pretty with the lilacs out & the Japanese maple is just perfect. The coal-tit is still sitting.

When I read about
the little pond R wants to make a lake of . . .
I was excited. I had assumed that it had been Chow’s idea to make the water gardens, because I had seen his
designs. But it had been my grandfather who had wanted to make that lake in the woods, so in a way the water gardens (despite Chow’s big part in their execution) were a memorial to my
grandfather. All those walks that my grandmother had done for nearly seventy years, into her late eighties, often in bad weather and over rough ground, she had begun to please him. He had loved
those woods and now I, his granddaughter, nearly a hundred years later, was still able to walk in them.

Chow had worked hard running Knowle and Katherine had told me he was popular with those under him, as he was fair. He had been a good husband to my grandmother. But she had once confided to me
that she hoped he had never realised that it was my grandfather whom she had loved best.

After reading my grandparents’ love letters I went again to the woods to see if anything could be done about their overgrown state, and about the now almost wild water
garden. An expert on woodlands accompanied me.

The brambles and bracken were as thick as they’d been on the day I’d come that first time after a break of many years. As we walked through the trees – it had started drizzling
– I was very conscious now that Knowle, and the woods, had been loved by my grandfather. By the lake I saw the remains of a flat little wooden boat, and wondered if it was the birthday punt
of February 1915, his present to my grandmother. The expert said that most of the older trees had been planted about 150–200 years earlier and that, long before that, the whole area was
forest. As we approached the bigger lake, where, in 1940, an Italian plane had dropped a bomb, below the village where so many of my family were buried, I remembered how one Christmas at Knowle, my
brother Nicky and I had walked to that big frozen lake in the snow.

During the next few years I returned to Knowle often, even entering the house itself – I made friends with two of the women who lived there. One, who owned the old part, where I had often
sat with my grandmother, made a short film of me talking about Knowle and its past. Despite the tragedies that had taken place there I realised that Knowle had been a source of pleasure and
stability for many of those involved with it, such as Frank, Mr Tash, Katherine and even Frank’s granddaughter, with her memories of the bluebell woods. I found myself turning back to my
mother’s diary, to find more of her own memories of Knowle.

June 14th 1944. Knowle.

The more one stays in the country the more fascinating it becomes as one watches flowers and birds. There is a Turtle Dove which I see every day flying about the
garden and Piney Walk. He sits cooing that harsh frog-like note all day. There is a Water Wagtail which bathes in the pool each day and feeds 2 young ones and today I watched a Goldfinch hovering
about alone in dandelions almost like a humming bird and feeding a young Goldfinch which was chirping and flapping its wings on the path beside it.

This is what one does whilst other people are fighting for their lives (& ours) on the other side of the Channel.

This was seven days after the D-Day landings, the Allied invasion of France. My mother was on leave then from Bomber Command, where she soon would meet Millie. How different was that wartime
Knowle from the one I knew. And yet in many aspects it was similar. When I saw the phrase ‘Piney Walk’, a wave of nostalgia came over me. My grandmother would name parts of her garden,
and other loved objects such as ‘The Funny Gates’ (the kissing gates beyond the ha-ha) and the ‘Litter Pigs’ (the newborn piglets at the Glebe).

June 16th 1944. Knowle.

Warnings all night. The window in the hall blown out . . . just after lunch, we heard the noise of an a/c, the engine making a rather loud and tinny sound. Terence,
Jean and I went out to look and saw the most queer shaped looking a/c approaching v. noisily. It looked about the size of a fighter, but was nothing like one in shape, having a v. long nose (a
single engine) it appeared to be flying at a high speed and was quite low. What one particularly noticed was its long thin nose and the tinny rather raucous sound of its engine, also the speed, it
passed over between here and Manor Farm in the direction of Tunbridge Wells. I didn’t know what it was, except that it was quite unlike any other a/c I have ever seen, but Gig says it was
like the pilotless one that went over this morning.

The ‘pilotless’ plane was the V-1, first used by the Germans in southern England on 13 June 1944. A few days later, Anne and Jean were in the Lost Field when they heard another
V-1.

In those accounts, despite the precarious wartime circumstances, I still got that sense of safety and continuity which I had always loved about Knowle. Although she was often away in the WAAF,
my mother remained part of that.

Now I wanted it to continue and I realised how important to me were the woods which my grandmother had left me. A Yorkshireman who had helped my son when in his late teens worked with a
volunteer group to clear the water gardens and mark the old paths. Later, I managed to get the lake cleaned and the water gardens cut back to show their original design, and I had more
rhododendrons and azaleas planted. Many times a year now I walk in the woods, particularly in spring, the season that my grandmother in that love letter to my grandfather had called ‘the
cream of the year’. And, as my daughter points out, I have unconsciously imitated my grandmother in walking in those woods with a little white dog. I had thought he was a Jack Russell but my
dog turns out to be part West Highland, the breed that my grandmother had all her life. I often go around Armistice Day into those woods where my grandmother had so looked forward to walking, until
old age, with my grandfather. The smell of the acorns makes me feel I am coming home.

I now have Okie the terrapin, who must be nearly a hundred, in my small greenhouse in Sussex. I take my three-year-old grandson regularly to look at him in his tank, as my grandmother used to
take me at the same age at Knowle. My grandson pushes Captain up and down my garden. My mother kept him all that time. I even found photographs of Captain in Madrid, wearing a smart saddle and
bridle; now his hair is worn and his mane missing.