Chewing the Cud (12 page)

An abiding final memory is of a Sunday lunch where Grampy K-S was carving a chicken — for so many of us that he must have thought about the miracle of the loaves and fishes as he teased out every shred of meat from the carcass. Chickens, hens rather, were always known to Granny as “fowls.” A number lived in the orchard, and when they ceased to lay or simply became very old, they finished up on the dining table. On this particular Sunday, as Grampy handed out the final plate of meat to the final family member, leaving only himself unserved, Granny K-S called down the table in her gentle voice, “Potie dear, all the rest of the fowl is yours.” There was only the parson's nose left.

Mother's parents lived in Glamorgan, in a village called Dinas Powis. Her father's name was Arthur Boucher. Her mother was born Frances Claribel Heard, though Grampy B's pet name for her was Dodo. Granny B was in many ways the opposite of Granny K-S, being smaller, neat instead of cumbersome, her face not pink but brown, not bland but etched with laughter lines. She was more worldly, had a sharper sense of humor and of the ridiculous.

She was one of the ten children (five boys, five girls) of
William Esau Heard, who came from Appledore in Devon, settled in Newport, Monmouthshire, and after a long business career in shipping, died some months short of his 103rd birthday.

I have read the excellent speech he made at his 100th birthday party. “The Grand Old Man of Newport celebrates his centenary,” wrote the local newspaper, with a picture of Great-grandpa Heard in morning dress, gray top hat on his head, his expression still alert above the long, fine white beard.

Legend has it that he walked to his office until he was ninety, when my great-aunt Alice became alarmed for her father's safety because he crossed the roads without looking to left or to right. She rang up the chief constable. That evening the old man remarked upon the thoughtfulness of the police.

“Do you know, my dear,” he said, “there was a constable waiting at the roadside who stopped the traffic and escorted me across.”

This service continued until the walk became too arduous, when he caught the tramcar. The tramlines ran past Winchester House, and each morning Great-grandpa would appear at the top of the steps in full fig while Alice (his eldest) and Hilda (his youngest), clothes brushes in their hands, carefully groomed morning coat and top hat.
The tram waited until he had descended the steps in their care. At ninety-five he retired.

I have a splendid photograph of me (aged about four) and Mother and Granny B and Great-grandpa Heard, at a family wedding in 1926. (Now, in the twenty-first century, I have another, of my great-granddaughter Josie and my grandson Tom and my daughter Lizzie and me, at a family party.)

William Esau Heard kissed me once, that I remember, on top of my head, when I was about six. I can recall my face being buried in that soft silky beard that smelt of an aromatic liquid called “bay rum.”

One of the differences between Granny B and Granny K-S (both much of an age) lay in their mobility. Granny K-S was ponderous — moving about the croquet lawn, for instance, with slow, measured steps, that long skirt dragging. Granny B's skirts were calf-length, and her movements quick: more, she would walk with us, to the common, to the village, whereas the other only ever left her house to ride to church in a motorcar.

I don't think Grampy B ever learned to drive. Certainly the Bouchers never owned a car, so that when Tony and I stayed at Dinas Powis, we always went to the seaside by bus. Grampy B would go by train to his office in Cardiff, and Granny would take us on the bus to Barry Island to
play on the beach and build sand castles and bathe and eat sandy Marmite sandwiches and ice cream.

There was a boating lake there, where they had little child-sized boats, each with a steering wheel and an accelerator (I don't remember any way of braking). How those boats worked I don't know, but to pilot one of them, all on one's own, buzzing rather slowly round the lake like a waterborne dodgem, was magic.

We must always have gone to stay with the Boucher grandparents in the summer holidays, I think — I don't remember anything other than constant blue skies and sunshine on the beach at Barry Island, a very big beach, it seemed.

Fifty or so years later, I chanced to go back there. It was really a rather small beach, and it was raining buckets.

The thing about Granny B was that she was always such fun to be with. Not a bad epitaph.

Grampy B, who adored her, was a big man, running to fat when I first remember him, as retired athletes do, with a head of white hair and a fine white mustache. He had been one of the all-time greats of Welsh Rugby Union Football.

Like Grampy K-S, he also much liked poor jokes, and his idea of fun, when, say, they came to us for Christmas, was to secrete about the house such things as a banana that
squeaked, a doughnut that made rude noises as of one breaking wind, a fork that bent when you used it, and a realistic rubber dog mess. Grampy K-S might have laughed at these items from the joke shop. Granny K-S would not have. Nor would she have found a rude postcard funny, but mercifully when she did actually receive one, she didn't understand it.

It was sent'from Tenby, of course'by Father's brother, my uncle Joe (who had married Mother's younger sister, Rosemary). Joe would always send to Mother and Father one of Donald McGill's saucy postcards with pictures of fat ladies in bathing costumes and risqué captions. On one occasion my parents received a view of the North Beach and Goscar Rock.

“Surely this was meant for Motie?” they said. “She must have got ours!” And my little brother was hastily dispatched to Bitton Hill, to arrive there before the postman.

He was too late. Granny K-S was puzzling over a McGill postcard featuring, among other things, an octopus, and the joke line leaned heavily on a confusion between “tentacles” and “testicles.”

“Oh, boykie!” said Granny as Tony burst in. “Can you explain this to me?”

My four grandparents would meet, perhaps once a year, at Bitton Hill at one of those huge Sunday teas, at which,
in summer, there would be peaches from the walled garden and, in winter, crumpets oozing butter and sometimes a particular cake made to the recipe of a distant never-seen-by-me cousin and always bearing her name. Thus, “Now who will have a piece of Nellie Green?”

Yet neither pair of grandparents ever relaxed the formality of their address, one to the other. No Christian name was ever used, nor such nicknames as Motie and Potie. Granny K-S might say to Granny B, “Another cup of tea, Mrs. Boucher?” And the Bitton grandfather might ask the Dinas Powis grandfather, “Another sandwich, Mr. Boucher?” And vice versa.

It did not imply coldness, much less dislike, that “Arthur,” “Clare,” “Alice,” and “Charles” were never used. For each couple respected and approved of the other, despite differences of character and outlook. Quite simply, they were Victorians.

A
s well as the cattle, the pigs, the goats, the hens, the ducks, Woodlands Farm was home to a variety of other animals. There were rabbits, a spotted variety called English, which I bred in various colors — black, blue, chocolate — supposedly for show, though I never showed one. The pinnacle of my success was to sell one really well marked buck for twenty-five pounds, but at least the deep freeze was kept well stocked. There were
guinea pigs: I did show one of these — it won third prize (in a class of three) — and Betsy had two much loved mice called Fairy Snow and Ogre Daz. There were also guinea fowl, foolish birds that sometimes drowned while drinking at a cattle trough. There were lots of dogs always, mostly Myrle's dachshunds and twice we had a Great Dane, and masses of cats to earn their livings in barn and cowshed.

One memorable tortoiseshell-and-white queen called Dulcie Maude had, in all, 104 kittens. One litter was born and reared in an old doll carriage stashed away in a loft, the babies nestling comfortably on a doll's pink blanket. I fixed a kind of box on the wall outside the kitchen door, in which we put scraps for cats. It was called the Mogamatic Fullpuss.

As well as my collection of domestic animals, there were, of course, wild ones too. The woodlands were a paradise for wildlife. There were seven acres that had been the site of nineteenth-century opencast coal workings, a jumble of high hillocks and deep bowl-shaped hollows. Three of these acres, uninspiringly called the Wood, were thickly covered with trees, principally ash and scrub oak. The remaining four, known as the Brake, were more open and consisted of patches of rough grass and of dozens of huge blackberry bushes.

Under the great armored bushes lived rabbits.
Myxomatosis, a highly infectious viral disease, was still a few years away, and these stub rabbits (an old name for those that live in aboveground cover) used the giant briars as protection from their natural enemies.

Judging by the number of times we saw them strolling up our drive and cocking their legs on the bordering shrubs, there were plenty of foxes too.

Our relationship with our foxes contained an illogical blend of love and hate. “A wise fox will never rob his neighbor's hen roost” is an adage of some truth, and we liked to think that the occasional slaughter, as on the day after Betsy's birth, was the work of an outsider. And generally the losses were small. The odd duck might go missing, and now and again a hen would “steal” a nest — lay and sit a clutch of eggs in the bottom of a hedgerow — and chance her luck, which then ran out.

On the whole, we took good care to shut the poultry up at night and didn't grumble too much. Later we converted the loft over the old stables into a deep-litter house where 300 or 400 birds lived in complete safety. But, before that happened, we were treated to a prime example of the kind of fox behavior that leaves the farmer fuming.

I can remember the scene vividly, Before and After.

Before — a bunch of a couple of dozen cockerels foraging in spring sunshine on a patch of ground behind the
cowshed. They were White Wyandottes, brilliant against the new grass, each wattled head capped with a rose comb of brightest red. They're fit to kill, I thought as I went indoors to breakfast. They were.

After — a tremendous noise and kerfuffle had me dashing back out again with my mouth full. One of the many dachshunds that we then had was a chicken chaser — It's Mandy, I thought. As I came round the corner of the cow-shed, I could see, dotted over perhaps half an acre of land, snowy-white bodies, still or still twitching, while the gaping survivors lurched about, shocked into shaking aimlessness. counted. Sixteen dead. The raider had not been hungry, just having a bit of fun, for when I collected up the corpses, only one rose-combed head had been taken away, as a memento.

Woodlands Farm was on the outermost edge of a famous foxhunting country, a land ruled by a great duke and his duchess. Twice only did we have the doubtful pleasure of the hunt's uninvited presence.

On one occasion a section of the field galloped through a number of electric-fenced paddocks, leaving a tangle of broken wire and uprooted posts. If they were shocked, they did not show it.

And on another memorable morning the duchess herself came clattering up the drive flanked by a couple of
outriders and galloped into the yard, where a number of small children, our own and some of friends, were wandering about. “Alas, regardless of thei doom, the little victims play!” Luckily she missed them.

Oh, but only think of all the time when one fails to make a proper response. Remember those moments of inertia while the mind searches feverishly for the right riposte, witty or withering.

“Have ye seen hounds?” shouted the duchess with a sidelong glance from her sidesaddle, but answer came there none. Openmouthed the peasants stood while the riders pressed on and away, past our Dutch barn and across our pastures. As they disappeared beyond the horizon, we heard a splintering crash. One of our five-barred gates had been broken, as a memento.