Snippets of childhood, part 1.

When I was a small girl I used to make up imaginary children and register them with an imaginary doctor. There were always about 10 (mostly because I had so many names I liked) and I was always a mother who let these children roam around large fields, climb trees and have picnics under enormous oak trees. They all loved and helped each other. They played musical instruments and sang, and at Christmas we would gather around a large Christmas tree, the fire crackling, to play games and tell stories. I had a wildly active imagination.

I grew up on a farm in rural Buckinghamshire where many a new lamb graced the kitchen in the morning, warmed by the open doors of the humble Bosky, as it wobbled, bleating around the floor. A young friend of my sisters came for tea after school and asked why we didn’t “kill it first” before subjecting it to the heat of the oven!

My parents both came from family farmers – my mother’s father was a pig farmer around Leighton Buzzard, and my father’s father, an arable farmer in Thornborough with a good few (hundred) sheep. (He took fondly to both cattle and chickens once too – and one year, my mother’s idea of ‘a few hens’ to collect eggs with the children in the morning, resulting in the biggest coop you’ve ever seen and about 50 hens sporting enough eggs to start a small business.) One of my earliest memories is watching my grandpa plucking feathers in a side shed. Masses of fluffy white feathers floating around him and catching in his beard where he’d puff them away with a swift, whiskery breath. The door was slightly ajar and I’d watch as he made quick work of removing the feathers; his hands swift and agile. He’d catch me watching, but he’d not look up. Instead, his face would soften and he’d slow slightly.

**An earlier memory still is being wrapped in my mother’s arms as she stood on the doorstep of their cottage in Askrigg (between Leyburn and Hawes and where All Creatures Great and Small was filmed), Yorkshire. My dad was bashing a frozen pipe and the crisp wintry air settled around us. It is a memory with sound; the clank of the hammer to pipe, with stillness; stood in the cool morning air, and with warmth, calm and safety; swaddled close to my mother.**

My first home was a caravan on the site of my parent’s first house – they built a bungalow at the entrance to the family farmyard. I am sure my bohemian tendencies stem from these early days spent in a carriage pram, bathing outside in plastic water tubs. When the Gypsy travellers came to the village, I would linger near them, captivated by their beautifully painted caravans. A lone traveller came one summer and stayed on the village green under the large oak tree. His black and white horse with its feathered feet and mane drank from the river. I sat with him as he ate, his kettle warming on the tiny stove. As the late afternoon sun dropped behind the trees, his beautifully painted caravan shone; every colour crisp and clear. Even he, with his waistcoat and neckerchief, was part of a place I felt I wanted to be, even as a young girl. A free and simple sort of a place. I have the same feeling for the colourful Narrow Boats and their quiet, calm, slow pace of life. 

I can only have been about 5 or 6 years old, but after his visit, we saw less and less of the travellers. They would move through the village, but not stop. 

My sister was born once we lived in the bungalow, not quite 2 years behind me. There were many cold, cold winters with snow falling heavily on the once green fields. One year, my father attached a sled to his truck and towed the village residents around the largest field gaining great speeds as the sled swung into large snowdrifts. Men would come off the sledges with their eyelashes glistening with ice and their glasses packed full of snow. A slower truck pulled a whole string of sleds for the children, and we would go round and round the field, the sky blue and the trees as magical as a scene from Narnia. My hands got so cold that day my mother warmed them under her armpits.

Our two older cousins would come to the farm, and we’d watch them smoke secretly. We were at our naughtiest with them. We’d use the markers used for the sheep to paint the trees in the paddock; whole lines of trees coloured blue and red and green. This would make our grandfather cross, but not as much as using his old saucepans to make imaginary food concoctions did. Using sheep pellets mixed with water, we’d throw in a few blades of grass and leaves, and stir it up over a pretend fire. We’d sit in our colourful, tree-painted, den until it was time for them to go home. When he found the saucepans he’d bring them in and shout at us for using his important things. He was a bit of a scary, red-faced farmer, but his face was magical when he laughed, and one Christmas he even let my sister and I paint his hair with hair mascara; those pink and purple strips lasted far longer than he would have liked in his brilliant white hair. I thought he looked like Christopher Plummer, and he was silly. He laughed and danced and sang, and for a few years my sister and I would join him and our father on stage in the Village Review, performing old Monty Python sketches, and singing Leaning On The Lamppost accompanied by a Ukulele Banjo.

During harvest, my mother would take picnics into the cornfields and we’d watch our father drive the combine harvester up and down, side to side, across the vast landscape of yellow. The stubble made for great stamping games - our feet aching on the soles - and for horse riding too. 

I had many a fall in such a field, rolling heavily onto the cut spikes of corn. They poked sharply into my neck and bare arms as I tumbled to stillness. I lay looking up at the sky, convinced I was now dead, and this was heaven; until my pony came into view; a hot, snorting head shadowed against the sun. 

The ground moved with a thunder of hooves as my instructor rode past shouting, “Get up! Get back on!”. 

When I was 6 I got an old pony called George. George stayed with us for only a year as he developed a growth in his throat and as he was such an old pony, our vet decided that to put him to sleep was the kindest option. One evening I said my goodbyes through cloudy eyes and left my father and the vet with him in a large barn. My dad told me he would hold him. Once at home I heard the gunshot; something my parents had not accounted for. I think I would have been better witnessing the whole thing rather than just hearing a noise and making up the details inside my head. Before this point in my life, I had not known what it was like to lose something you loved. I had seen dead sheep, dead lambs, dead birds we buried in the flower beds, even dead dogs and cats, but this was different. That gunshot wounded my heart and left a mark that I can still feel to this day. I had so many questions; “did he feel anything?”, “did he make a noise?”, “why was there blood on the driveway?”, “did you cry daddy?”, “did you tell him it would be ok?”, “do you think he knew?”. 

Riding horses had swiftly become a passion of mine and my mother would take me to Stowe for lessons, and I’d spend my summers at pony camps. I loved every part of it; the smell of freshly cleaned tack, the early mornings walking across crisp, cold grass to catch ponies, the schooling and lunging, the long hacks into woods that opened into vast fields where we’d gallop, faster and faster, eyes watering and wide smiles forming across red-flushed cheeks. I would continue to ride; jumping higher, galloping faster, perfecting acrobatics in the saddle, and working at dressage techniques until we moved to Cornwall when I was 16.

There I found new people to ride with; a college friend’s mother owned two ponies and I pleaded with her to let me ride them every weekend. She obliged, and I spent Sundays with her, riding through the very different landscapes of Cornwall – the bare, barren, windswept mining fields abundant with Gorse, the woods full of old mine shafts, past derelict, water-filled quarries and along cliff tops. A hot cup of milky Earl Grey tea takes me straight back to those Sundays even now. At 25, when I had my first son, I watched him sleeping beside me in the maternity ward of Lincoln’s Royal Hospital; his perfect features, soft and still, I remember thinking “I will never ride again.” My reasons for this were because I rode hard and fast, and I pushed myself to dangerous limits; jumping higher, and faster. How could I possibly dream of doing something so dangerous now I was entrusted with caring for the most perfect small person I had ever seen? I never got back in another saddle. Now I’ve had all my children, I’ve thought about riding again; besides, 9 years without horses is far too long. 

My sister and I shared a bedroom and my mother, who was extraordinarily gifted at sewing, having worked as a fashion designer before having children, had created a wonderful combination for her two very different daughters. The stencil bows stippled in blues, greens and pinks, covered walls and wardrobes and the colours extended to our matching bedspreads. There were just the right amount of frills. My sister and I would wear matching outfits – a pair of dungarees for me, and a pinafore dress for Maggie - catering for my sister’s more girly desires. We wore white ribbons in our hair; half a ponytail, perhaps with a plait. My sister’s hair was finer than mine and lighter in colour, but curled in ringlets, whereas mine was thick and brown, slightly wild and unruly.

My mother would listen to Madonna in the kitchen as she baked, a half-dead plant on the window sill in the sunshine. She was an adventurous cook, cutting out recipes from magazines and pasting them into large scrapbooks. The recipes were always for dinner parties; wonderful masterchef’esq creations that excited her imagination, and we were always opening the fridge to tiny glasses of chocolate mousses or the freezer to a new ice cream or sorbet. Years later, when she went through her Thai food stage, I would pop in for a cup of tea to find some very strange creation and a very hungry brother who was now on day 5 of Thai cuisine and hadn’t liked any of it one bit. I cooked my brother an 11-year-old worthy meal and told my mother off for involving him in her random cooking sprees. She laughed and assured me he was fine and that her latest venture contained vast quantities of spirulina - which she promised she would not inflict on him. 

She would spend long hours on the telephone, the tightly curled cable wrapped about her fingers. She would doodle on a pad and write down the odd word here and there. I’d use that telephone once to ring my aunt when I couldn’t find her. The fear that she’d leave me haunted me to my core. Ironic that at 22 I would lose her altogether.

I was 9 years old when my brother was born. He was delivered at home in my mother’s bedroom. After reading her ‘Fuzzy-Peg goes to School’ whilst she sat in the bath, she moved to birth him on the floor. She was amazing. The only time she spoke was to say “I can’t do it”, just at that transition period between labour and actual birth; the time when you feel like you might just float away into death because the pain is so overwhelming and all-consuming. But then, in just moments, there was his head, turning on its own as the books I read so many of told me it would, his eyes open and looking at me. My first love. I was so in love, and so relieved that my mother had actually done it, and not given up in a flourish of, “sorry folks, I can’t do this, it’s way too hard, far too painful and I’m much too tired. I know you were so looking forward to a baby, but look, let’s get a puppy instead”, which is what I gaged her “I can’t do it” to mean as I responded, “but you HAVE to?!”. Read my full account of it here.

The hours that followed his birth were a little more unknown as he had been born with a unilateral cleft lip and palate. He spent his first night at home, watched by my grandmother. Thank goodness she spent that entire night gazing upon him, as at about 4am, he stopped breathing and turned blue. She ran along the corridor in her nighty, my brother hanging upside down by his feet, to my mother and father’s room. By the time she got there, he had started breathing again. My mother on the other hand had cramp in her leg, and my father had cricked his neck. He went to hospital the next day, and when he was 4 days old, his lip was mended, and he returned home to us a few days later with whiskers made from steri-strips.

**When he returned from theatre, my mother was warned not to worry about the red marks on his face; Mrs Desi, the wife of surgeon Mr Desi, was the anaesthetist, and wore bright red lipstick. She would watch the tiny babies as her husband carried out his delicate work, their little heads in her hands, and she would talk to them, and kiss them, leaving red lipstick marks.** 

My mother asked her mother to do all the crying for her. She must have felt so overcome with the shock of watching such a small chap undergo surgery. So my grandma cried, continuously, whilst my mother quietly focused on the job in hand. 

We moved many times during my childhood, seven times in fact until my parents divorced when I was 15, and then we moved 5 more times after that, the last 3 being in Cornwall – a huge move my mother made to start a fresh new life away from a world she had grown out of; perhaps she ran away from it, perhaps she was searching for something better? The answer to that, we will never truly know. 

There is a part two, and three and four, to all of this, but this is the beginning. 

Big love,

Lizzie x