I remember the Isle of Wight as the place where I first sat in the side-car of a motor cycle, at Easter 1923, but much more I remember it as being the Place Where God Lived, although this was later, some time in the summer or autumn of 1925. It must have been during one of those interpolated holidays my mother was so adept at arranging at an instant’s notice if my father had to go abroad without her, on the grounds that a change of air would do me good. He often used to go to Holland to sell enormous coats and costumes to the Dutch. With her she took her sister, my Auntie May, who loved travel, however banal.
On one occasion we made an excursion to a place near the middle of the island and some time in the afternoon of what I remember as a very hot day we arrived at our destination, a village of thatched houses that were clustered about the foot of a green hill, on the summit of which stood what seemed a very small church.* From where we stood it was silhouetted against the now declining sun, the rays of which shone through its windows, producing an unearthly effect.
There was no time to climb the hill to the church and have tea as well. If there had been, I am sure that my mother and my aunt, both of whom were interested in ‘old things’, would have done so. Instead, we had the tea, in the garden of one of the cottages, and while we were having it I heard my mother and my aunt talking about the place and how nice it was, which they called Godshill.
I was very excited. Godshill. If this was Godshill then God must live on it. God to me at this time and for long years to come was a very old, but very fit, version of Jesus and much less meek-looking. He had a long white beard, was dressed in a white sheet and was all shiny, as if he was on fire. He also had a seat in the front row of the dress circle, as it were, so that he could see immediately if one was doing wrong. This was the God to whom I prayed each night, either with my mother’s help or with whoever was looking after me.
‘Does he live on it?’ I asked my mother.
‘Yes,’ said my mother, ‘that’s where he lives, darling, on top of the hill.’
I was filled with an immense feeling of happiness that this radiant being, whom I had never actually seen but who was always either just around the corner or else hovering directly overhead but always invisible, should live in such a shining, beautiful place; and I asked if we could climb the hill and see him. Unfortunately, the train was due and we had to hurry to the station. I cried all the way to it and most of the way back to Bembridge. I never went back to Godshill and I never will.
I can remember, in July 1923, being carried high on my father’s head through the bracken in the combes that led down to the beaches on Sark, and once having reached them I can remember falling down constantly on the rocks and hurting myself, I considered, badly. And it was on Sark that I had my first remembered nightmare, in the annexe to Stock’s Hotel, a charming, ivy-clad, farmlike building. I awoke screaming in what was still broad daylight with the sun shining outside my first-floor room in which the blinds were drawn, to think myself abandoned to a dreadful fate by my parents who were dining only a few feet away in the hotel, certain that I had ‘gone off’ to sleep. It was a nightmare of peculiar horror, because it was founded on fact; so horrible and at the same time so difficult to explain to anyone that for years I dared not confide the details to anyone, and to my parents I never did, although it recurred throughout my childhood, together with an almost equally awful one about falling down an endless shaft.
WESTWARD HO!
In 1925, when I was five and a half, we embarked on what, so far as I was concerned, was the most ambitious holiday I had ever had. In summer my father took a cottage at Branscombe, at that time a very rural and comparatively unvisited village in South Devon, between Seaton and Sidmouth. It promised to be a particularly exciting time as my father had decided that we should travel there from Barnes by motor. This meant that most of our luggage had to be sent in advance by train from Waterloo to Honiton, a market town on the main line to Exeter; at Honiton it was picked up by a carrier and transported the ten miles or so to Branscombe by horse and cart. Others taking part in this holiday, although they did not travel with us, being already foregathered there, were my Auntie May (the aunt who had accompanied my mother and me on the memorable visit to Godshill) and her husband, Uncle Reg. Before the war Uncle Reg had worked as a journalist in Dover on the local paper and in this capacity had been present in 1909 when Blériot landed on the cliffs, having flown the Channel. During the war he had been in the navy in some department connected with propaganda. Later he became editor of the Gaumont British Film News. He was very urbane and elegant. He was later on good terms with the Prince of Wales for whom he used to arrange film shows at Fort Belvedere, and for the Royal Family at Balmoral. For these services he was presented with cufflinks and cigarette cases from Plantin, the court jeweller, as well as other mementoes. He preferred to be called Reginald rather than Reg, but no one ever did so. They put up in the village pub where we, too, were to take our meals.
The third party was made up of three fashion buyers for London stores, Beryl, Mercia and Mimi Bamford, all of whom were friends of my mother, particularly Mimi, and their mother. All three were unimaginably elegant, often almost identically dressed in long, clinging jerseys and strings of amber beads, and they were surrounded by what seemed to be hordes of extremely grumpy Pekingese who did not take kindly to the country. Their mother, who did not take kindly to the country either, was even more formidable. She owned a Boston Bulldog called Bogey, which had had its ears clipped, a practice by then declared illegal. Like her daughters she was immensely tall, and must at one time have been as personable as her daughters, but even I could recognize that she was incredibly tough, if not common.
‘She didn’t ought to ’ave ’ad ’im,’ was the comment she made about me, by now a boisterous, active little boy, to my Auntie May while we were at Branscombe, ‘she’ being my mother; an anecdote that my aunt eventually told me, which she did with an excellent imitation of the old lady’s gravelly voice, having put off doing so until only a few years before her own death in 1974 in order, as she put it, to spare my feelings.
Neither Beryl nor Mercia nor their mother ever went to the beach, or even set eyes on the sea, the whole time they were at Branscombe. For Beryl and Mercia the seaside was Deauville. What Branscombe was to them is difficult to imagine, or they to the inhabitants. Only Mimi relished the simple life. The journey to Branscombe, a stately progression, took two days.
At Branscombe, behind the Mason’s Arms, the pub which stood next door to the cottage my father had taken for the summer and of which it formed a part, there was a yard surrounded by various dilapidated outbuildings and a piece of ground overgrown with grass and nettles which concealed various interesting pieces of rusted, outmoded machinery, the most important of which was an old motor car smelling of decaying rubber and dirty engine oil. The stuffing of what was left of its buttoned leather upholstery was a home for a large family of mice. This yard was to be the scene of some of the more memorable games I played with my best friend in the village, Peter Hutchings, whose mother kept a grocery, confectionery and hardware shop on the corner opposite Mr Hayman, the butcher’s. It was from Peter Hutchings, who was killed while serving as a soldier in the Second World War, and whose name is inscribed with the names of fourteen other village boys who died in the two great wars on the war memorial at the entrance to Branscombe churchyard, that I learned the broad local dialect which was so broad that by the end of that first summer at Branscombe no one except a local inhabitant could understand what I was saying. ‘Sweatin’ like a bull ’er be,’ was how Peter Hutchings described to me one day the state of his sister, Betty, confined to bed with a temperature, and it was in this form that I passed on this important piece of news to my parents.
There in the inn yard, in the long summer evenings, we used to sit in the old motor car, either myself or Peter at the wheel, taking it in turn, the driver making BRRR-ing noises, the one sitting next to him in the front making honking