From time to time our table warfare would be joined by my first cousin Peter – destined one day to lead many a sandpit war for both ITN and the BBC. Peter was ten years older than I, and in a better position to take Tom on. His father was a serving Brigadier, and Peter himself possessed more than a streak of the old General, our mutual grandfather, in his make-up. His main contribution to the table tensions was at critical moments to reach for, and upset, the overfull and highly unstable sugarbowl, scattering the stuff across the entire battlefield. Whereupon, of course, hostilities had to be suspended while Nanny was summoned to clear it all up.
Throughout the First World War General Tom, like so many of his time, had resisted mechanisation, believing in the value of the horse long after the tank had come to stay. I was perhaps six years old when my father recounted how his father had gone to Khartoum in 1885, after the failed attempt to break the siege in which General Gordon had been surrounded for ten months by the Mahdi. Tom had arrived too late to prevent Gordon’s shooting on the steps of his residence, but soon enough to acquire a chunk of the step upon which he’d died and to cart it home. It was to languish in his home at 3 Kensington Gate in London until the Blitz struck the house in 1940 and the ‘Gordon step’ was rendered indistinguishable from the rest of the rubble.
As far as I could divine as a child, General Tom had been knighted twice, at least once for leading a retreat. Commanding the Fourth Division during the First World War, it seems his actions in sorting out the retreat from Mons in 1915 saved many lives. My brother Tom of course preferred to dwell on the lives the great man had caused to be lost, and of these there must indeed have been very many. General Tom was a large and austere man who ended his days in a hand-operated invalid carriage. His horse had been shot from beneath him in 1917, smashing his pelvis. He was probably one of the last British generals ever to ride a horse into battle.
Further round the dining-room walls from my grandfather the General hung the family black sheep. He was a yet earlier Tom, who had made a killing of a somewhat different kind from the South Sea Bubble in 1720. He had presided over Snow’s Bank, which stood on the street named after him to this day, Snow Hill on the edge of the City of London. Of this Tom little was said – so little indeed that at one point I thought he was such a black sheep that he was in fact black. Either it was a very dirty painting, or he appeared to be of an unusually dark complexion, with black curly hair.
There was no representation of my mother’s family anywhere in the house. Like everything else about her, her forebears stayed obscurely in the background. The most interesting thing about her father, my maternal grandfather, Henry Way, was that he had been born in 1837 and sired her at the age of seventy-three. He was an estate agent in Newport, on the Isle of Wight. My mother was the last of nine children born to Henry’s three wives, two of whom died in childbirth. Her eldest half-brother was fifty years older than she was.
Beneath the daunting images in the dining room, our family gathered for prayers at the start of every day. Adamson the butler, his wife the cook – always known as ‘Addy’ and ‘Mrs Ad’ – and Nanny Rose would join us three boys, my mother and the eternal conductor of this solemn moment, my father. We would stand in line in order of importance. Mrs Ad always saw to it that her husband came at the end of the line. She was a formidable woman who regarded herself and Nanny Rose as at least as good as those they served. Poor Mrs Box, who did the cleaning, and Mr Webster – ‘Webby’ – the gardener, didn’t get a look-in. They were so far below stairs they never even got to glimpse the dining-room floor until it came to cleaning it or bringing in the logs.
‘Our Father, which art in heaven …’ intoned my father. This formal, ordered start to the day, which included the collect and a brief reading from the Bible, was part of the absolute security and order amid which I grew up. From the moment I could stand, I was in that line for prayers at eight in the morning, prompt. Then, while my mother and father and Tom took to the large oval dining table, my brother Nick and I, always referred to as ‘the little ones’, would go to the folding square table in the corner. My father would erect a home-made newspaper stand and settle to reading The Times. Tom would sneer at some upside-down headline that he’d caught from his vantage point, and the first salvoes would be exchanged. Sometimes, on a really good day, my mother would burst into tears, pleading with Tom to stop. ‘Your father is right, Tom, he’s not to be upset,’ she would cry. Sometimes the fusillades would be so frightening that Nick and I would cry too, and then the proceedings would have to be halted as we were ushered from the room for making too much noise.
Happy days were those when some preacher or family friend had come to stay. This invariably stilled the warfare. Tom would be on his most charming behaviour. There was Aunt Rhoda, my father’s sister, who’d married and then been immediately widowed by Alec Begg, a hugely rich New Zealander thirty years her senior whom she’d met on a cruise. She would talk of war, and how safe New Zealand would have been to live in had her husband not died. She was over six feet tall, thin as a birch sapling and mad as a March hare. She lived on her beloved Alec’s money in a series of rambling hotels along the south coast. When she came to stay, we ragged her rotten.
My father had another sister, Mary. Confusingly she was called Sister Mary, and looked like a seriously overgrown penguin. At some stage the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, conferred an MA on her, allowing her to enjoy the title ‘Church of England’s top nun’. She must surely have been the tallest. Over six foot like her siblings, she visited only rarely, and then eternally adorned in her white head-dress and black habit. Deeply austere, she would talk of high-flown ecclesiastical matters with my father, and of little else to any of the rest of us.
Among the many preachers who came to stay were people like the Bishop of Bradford, Donald Coggan, one day to become Archbishop of Canterbury. Dad was an excellent Bishop-spotter. He always seemed to know who was on the up. This mattered because, as was often discussed at the table, my parents assumed that he would sooner or later be ‘preferred’ and elevated to some bishopric or deanery before his time as headmaster came to a close. Because Ardingly College was part of a religious foundation of schools, he was required to be both teacher and ordained churchman. Even as a child, the ‘Church’ felt to me like something of a war machine. The Church militant seemed to have an officer class – plenty of generals, with suitable quantities of gold braid – and my father was somehow, one day, bound to take his place in their ranks.
Among the big-shot visitors who came to stay were people of genuine humility. Standing out from all others was Father Trevor Huddleston, who was at the forefront of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. His Church seemed to be the total opposite to my father’s, although of course it was the very same Anglican. Father Trevor wore a habit with a rope around the middle. His sandals were open, and I clearly remember his knobbly toes peering at me from beneath the dining-room table. My father was taken with his simplicity and holiness. I cannot imagine that he had a clue about Father Trevor’s politics. Certainly he never raised with us the suffering of Africa or anywhere else. It was through Trevor Huddleston, sitting at his knee at the age of six, that I first learned about Africa, and about an unequal world very far from the one implied by Tom Snow’s portrait above the mantel. ‘One day, my boy, you must come to South Africa,’ he said. ‘You’d be amazed by the people, by the villages, the animals. You could come with me on my rounds.’ I was to know Trevor on and off from my earliest childhood until his death in 1998.
These visits, when the outside world would come to call, were sadly all too rare. For the most part we were oblivious to what lay beyond the long trains that snaked across the viaduct in the far distance of our Ardingly world. If we did go to Haywards Heath we were barred from entering Woolworth’s: ‘You may catch something,’ my mother would warn. Likewise the cinema – I didn’t see a film until I was thirteen, a double bill of Genevieve and Doctor in the House.
My father listened to the BBC Home Service on the ‘wireless’ in his study, or to the BBC Third Programme in the drawing room. He was captivated by electronics. As a master at Eton College