Freddie was a great Surrey supporter, while I was passionate about Middlesex and Compton and Edrich. But Freddie always thought he had trumped my ace when he turned, as he inevitably did, to Jack Hobbs. Freddie’s wife, the large, smiling Hilda Hunn, supervised the delicious cricket teas, and sometimes allowed me a second small cake in an exciting, coloured paper cup.
One of my favourite farmworkers was Lennie Hubbard, whom we all, including my father, called by his Christian name. I never discovered why or how such distinctions were made: why most of the workers on the farm were known by their surnames, while Freddie, Lennie and one or two others went by their Christian names. Lennie was tall, and had been born in the Alms Houses in Lower Street, the rather upmarket name for the lane that ran past these cottages down to the marshes. Once, a great many years earlier, that lane had been part of the main road from Norwich to Yarmouth, which had originally gone past the front of Hoveton House. During the Second World War Lennie had been taken prisoner by the Germans, but had managed to escape – perhaps it was his gallantry that had caused his Christian name to be used. Tom always enjoyed talking to Lennie, and regarded him as one of his best and most faithful employees. There was an irony in that, as Lennie told me much later, long after Tom had died, he and one or two others, for all their outward godliness, had been diehard poachers. He told me, with a broad smile, of an occasion when one day my father had suddenly appeared around the corner of a hedge and spoken to him for ten minutes. Under his greatcoat Lennie was hiding his four-ten shotgun and a recently killed cock pheasant. I dare say he never came closer to losing both his job and his Christian-name status.
Shooting was another highlight of my early life. I fired my first shot when I was nine, missing a sitting rabbit by some distance. I am afraid I was the bloodthirstiest of small boys, and I have loved the excitement and drama of shooting for as long as I can remember.
Tom used to arrange six or seven days’ shooting a year with never more than seven guns. They would kill between one and two hundred pheasants and partridges in a day. As a small boy I found these days hugely exciting. Then there was the early-morning duck flighting on the Great Broad. This was always a terrific adventure, getting up in the dark and eating bread and honey and drinking Horlicks in the kitchen before setting off by car for the Great Broad boathouse soon after five o’clock in the morning. There was also the evening flighting on the marshes, when each of us stood in a small butt made of dried reeds. This was also thrilling, and of course by the time we got home night had set in.
Carter was the first gamekeeper I remember. He was a small, rather gnarled man with a lovely Norfolk voice. Apart from looking after the game and trying to keep the vermin in check, his other job each morning was to brush and press the clothes my father had worn the day before. He did this on a folding wooden table on the verandah by the back door. When he had done this, if I asked politely and he was in an obliging mood, he would come out to the croquet lawn and bowl at me for a few minutes. I had to tread carefully with Carter. I think he was the first person ever to bowl overarm to me with a proper cricket ball. Sometimes I hit him into the neighbouring stinging nettles, which ended play for the day, for his charity did not extend to doing the fielding off his own bowling. Carter was the village umpire during the summer. I’m not sure about his grasp of the laws of the game, but you didn’t question his decisions – you merely moaned about them afterwards. When Carter retired he was succeeded by Watker, a brilliant clay-pigeon shot and, to me, a Biggles-like figure; and then by Godfrey, the nicest of them all. I would spend a huge amount of time with the keepers during the holidays. Once or twice I looked after Godfrey’s vermin traps when he had his holiday. Sadly, neither Watker nor Godfrey had a clue how to bowl, but Nanny, who was up for most things, would bowl to me on the croquet lawn. Her underarm offerings often ended up in the nettles, and being the trouper she was, she would dive in after them, and usually got nastily stung.
It was a fantastic world in which to be brought up. Looking back on it, it was quite right that I should have been taught how to use it and respect it. I can almost feel myself forgiving Tom for those cherries. In a way it was sad when my full-time enjoyment of Hoveton came to an end. But when I was seven and a half I was sent away to boarding school at Sunningdale, almost 150 miles away, which may now seem almost like wanton cruelty, but was par for the course in those days. When I was young, all I wanted to do was to grow older, and going away to school seemed a satisfactory step in the right direction.
I was not unduly alarmed at the prospect of being sent away to school. John had been to Sunningdale, and had survived, although of course as he was seven years older than me, we were never at school together. Grizel had been calling me ‘Blofeld’ for some while before I went, for she wanted to make sure that I would be used to being called by my surname when I got to the school. For some reason I was not made to call Tom ‘sir’, which was how I would have to address the masters. Ordering the school uniform and all the other clothes I would need had gone on for weeks, and Nanny had sewn smart red name-tapes onto all the shirts, pants and stockings, revealing to anyone who chose to look – but principally, I suspect, the laundry – that they belonged to H.C. Blofeld. I won’t say I jumped happily into the back of my father’s dark-green Armstrong Siddeley in early May 1947, but I was nothing like as homesick as I was to become over the next couple of years when going back to school at the end of the holidays. I think Nanny was the person who minded it all the most, and she was probably the closest to tears amid the frantic waving as we tootled off.
The journey went on for nearly five hours before we turned left into the school drive, with rhododendrons on either side. We went up a short hill to what then appeared to me to be a huge gravelled area in front of the house, where half a dozen cars were parked. It all seemed uncomfortably large, and I think I began to quiver. I was greeted with formal handshakes by Mr and Mrs Fox, the headmaster and his wife. Mr Fox’s black hair gleamed with oil, which made him smell of mildly austere flowers. He was wearing a rather severe three-piece suit, with fiercely polished black shoes, and gave me an exceedingly creased half-smile. By now I was beginning to think I had been sold an ungovernably fast one by Tom and Grizel when they had told me what a smashing place Sunningdale would be.
Tom was being pleasantly avuncular in the background while Grizel, with considerable gusto, was shooing me around the Foxes’ drawing room to shake hands with everyone in sight. Having been through it all with John, she knew the leaders of the pack well enough, and briskly brushed aside an under-matron and a junior master. False bonhomie was very much the order of the day. I think we were all given a cup of tea and, who knows, a cucumber sandwich. Mrs Fox, wearing glasses and with a good deal of grey hair, did not exactly clutch me to her bosom. Her efforts to be kind did nothing to steady my nerves.
Most of the staff were present, including Matron, Miss Cryer, who had been at the school for many years and had once met Nanny when John was there. Nanny had generally given her the OK, and she made friendly noises at this somewhat stilted gathering as she bustled around with tea and whatever while Grizel told me to be careful not to spill crumbs on the carpet. Mr Burrows, Mr Fox’s second-in-command, was there, tall, stiffly formal, with a greyish moustache and a smile which resembled one of Carter’s gin traps in repose. We were eventually to become quite good friends, but I would never have guessed it at our first meeting. Mr Tupholme, ‘Tuppy’ to one and all, was grinning cheerfully away and doing his best to bring a touch of jollity to the proceedings. Tuppy was an all-round good egg. Mr Sheepshanks, quite a bit younger, was also cheerful in a black-moustached, ‘What-fun-it-will-all-be-oh-my-goodness-me’ sort of way, and Miss Paterson put in a tight-lipped appearance just to make sure things did not get too jolly. Conversation, if it can be called that, hardly flowed. There were two or three other new boys there with their parents. I have forgotten their names although I think one was Laycock, but I well remember being introduced to one by Mrs Fox, who said in a formal