Mrs Connop told us to sit down, so we huddled together on her big comfortable sofa, three sets of skinny thighs poking out of grey shorts all lined up on her lovely soft cushions. She told us that her husband, Mr Connop, and her youngest son James were outside working on the farm that adjoined the house and that they’d be back for dinner later. She explained that her two eldest sons, Michael and John, were in the Air Force, and that her daughter, Olga, was in the Forces as well. We were to address her and her husband as ‘Ma’am’ and ‘Sir’, and the boys as ‘Master’, but I can’t remember what we were supposed to call Olga. Maybe she didn’t mention that.
She said there was a lodger, a distant relative of hers, who lived in a room off the main hall, and she told us that the maid who’d ushered us in earlier would be the person who looked after us.
Then there was a list of rules we had to remember: we were only to use the back stairs, not the grand ones we’d seen outside in the hall; we would eat our meals in the kitchen, not the main dining room, which was just for family members; and she said that Dennis and I would be starting school just as soon as she could get us enrolled. That all sounded fair enough. She said it in a kind way, smiling at us, and when she’d finished she picked up a little bell on the table beside her and rang it to summon the maid to come and show us to our rooms.
The maid was a girl in her early twenties with a mass of bright red hair, so it wasn’t long before Dennis and I started calling her Ginger, which she didn’t seem to mind. She was a laughing, friendly type who was always generous to us, making sure we had plenty to eat and telling us gossip about the local area. She was more like a friend than someone in charge of us, and we all adored her from the word go.
We ate our meals with Ginger, sitting at the big kitchen table, and when she heard the bell ring she would dash through to the dining room to collect the dishes that the family had been eating from. That first evening there was rice pudding, one of my favourite foods of all time. When Ginger brought through the family’s empty pudding dishes, I noticed that they had left the skin on the sides of their plates, which to me was crazy because I thought that was the best bit.
‘Can I scrape the plates?’ I begged Ginger.
‘No, can I?’ pleaded Dennis, his eyes spotting what mine had already noticed.
When she realized what we wanted, Ginger solved the dispute by scraping the plates herself and dividing the delicious baked skin between the three of us.
After dinner, we were taken in to the sitting room to meet Mr Connop. We stood in a row with our heads bowed, hands behind our backs, not sure what to expect.
‘Come over here, Freddie,’ he said. ‘Do you want a sweet?’ He held out his two closed fists. ‘Which hand do you think the sweet is in?’
Freddie pointed to one of his hands and he opened it to show a boiled sweet in its cellophane wrapper. Freddie swiftly unwrapped the sweet and popped it in his mouth, so his little cheek bulged out to the side.
‘You next! Terence, is it?’
I picked one of his fists and took the sweet inside it, then Dennis did the same. But what a shock I got when I opened the cellophane wrapper and popped the sweet in my mouth!
‘Pah!’ I spat it out into my hand. ‘Yuck!’ Instead of the sugary taste I’d been waiting for, my mouth was filled with the taste of soap.
Mr Connop roared with laughter. ‘You got the trick one, Terence. Weren’t expecting that, were you?’
I stood, crestfallen, until he pulled another sweet, a real one, out of his pocket and handed it to me.
‘Be on your guard in future,’ he said. ‘You never know when someone might be having a joke with you.’ He winked, knowingly.
The next day Mr Connop played another joke on us. He led us into the dining room, where his radio set was playing some music, and told us to sit down and not move a muscle. We all sat as we’d been instructed and he left the room, closing the door behind him. We waited and waited and then there was a loud knock on the door. The three of us looked at each other.
‘Should we answer it?’ I asked.
Dennis shrugged and we waited, but then the knocking came again. I decided it might be someone needing a hand with something, so I got up and opened the door to find Mr Connop standing outside.
‘Hah!’ he pointed. ‘You’d never make it in the army if you can’t obey a simple order! I said to sit still and not move a muscle.’ Then he burst out laughing at his own trick.
He was always the joker in the house. In the morning we’d quite often hear him walking along the corridor outside our room, letting out what we thought were loud farts with every step. How could anyone fart that much? I was amazed that such a posh person could be so rude. It was only when I peeked out the door one day I realized he wasn’t breaking wind at all. They were armpit farts, which are caused by placing the palm of your hand over your armpit and moving it up and down to create suction. He giggled like a schoolboy when I caught him out. I thought it was such a good trick that I practised and practised myself until I had mastered the art of armpit farts.
Mrs Connop was much stricter, telling us off for making too much noise as we ran down the hall, or tramping mud into the house, or splashing water in the bathroom, but she was always fair. When she told me off I always knew she had good reason to, and that was far better than the system at Stow Hill where punishments had been arbitrary and unexpected.
About a week after we arrived at the Connops, it was time for Dennis and me to start school, and because Newport Education Authority had said that we were to be brought up as Roman Catholics, we were enrolled at the Sisters of Charity School at nearby Croft Castle. Well, I say ‘nearby’ but in fact it was about four miles away from the Connops’ house. Every morning we had to set out through the village to the lodge gates and then up a long school driveway lined with huge beech trees that creaked and swayed in the wind. I didn’t mind the morning walk so much, although it meant getting up at the crack of dawn so we’d be there on time. What I hated was the walk home after dark in those winter days, listening to the wind whistling through the branches. The moon shining through the bare trees cast strange shadows on the ground and we could hear the sounds of dogs howling and owls hooting, which made our imaginations work overtime.
‘There’s a bogeyman lives in these woods,’ Dennis told me. ‘He eats young boys for breakfast and spits out their bones.’
I was quite a cocky six-year-old and didn’t scare easily, but these walks would frighten the life out of me. I’d run as fast as I could to get past the eery stretch of trees, through the lodge gates and out into the open, and Dennis would come running after me laughing but, if truth be told, more than a little scared himself. The following year, after Freddie started school, I’d do the same thing to him, telling him stories about the bloodthirsty bogeyman until he was almost hysterical with fear.
In spring and summer it was a different matter and we really enjoyed our walks to school. It was beautiful countryside, carpeted with bluebells in spring, and we passed by a small lake where watercress grew round the edges in summer. Dennis and I often picked bunches of watercress and took them home, where Ginger would make us delicious watercress sandwiches for tea. It tasted lovely in white crusty bread fresh from the oven. Mrs Connop made her own bread every week, using a long pole with a flat bit on the end to push the tins of dough into fiery bread ovens, then pulling them out again when the bread was baked. We loved watching her doing it, partly because the smell was so fantastic.
There was one downside of summer on that farm, though, which I discovered to my horror at tea one night. Up above the kitchen table, haunches of pig were covered in salt and suspended on wooden racks to cure and become bacon. I was sitting right beneath one with a bowl of vegetable soup that Ginger had just handed me. Suddenly there was a plopping sound as something fell into my soup. At first I thought Dennis had thrown something at me and I looked up suspiciously but he was busy with his own soup. What could it be?