Wendy Maitland - Rambles on the Edge

‘I don’t know why you’re so down on him,’ Muz replied defensively. ‘He has a very loving nature. He is the only person who has ever helped me with Andrew, driving me to and from the hospital, taking an interest.’

‘Sidney is very concerned about Andrew too, and wants to help. He has contacts that could get him released from hospital into sheltered accommodation, with support to lead a much more normal life.’

‘Yes, I know about that, but I doubt Andrew would qualify. Sidney has all kinds of contacts in the health and education world. He is one of the governors of Christ’s Hospital school and provides bursaries from his own money. He’s a very generous man and a good friend, but Andy is the man of my heart since your father has gone.’

It seemed there was nothing more to be said now that Sidney was written off along with war hero Len (a previous suitor), and we were left with lumpy Andy. The looming prospect of a more formal partnership between him and Muz provoked me to increasingly desperate attempts at confronting her with the realities of such a scrounger becoming a permanent attachment. ‘How can you put up with Andy being so lazy that he refuses to walk anywhere? He never does more than amble a few steps from his car to the nearest armchair. We are a walking family, it’s in our DNA. It’s what we do at every opportunity. We never sit about. You used to despise people like that.’

‘It’s because of his accident years ago. He never completely recovered his energy.’

‘It’s nothing to do with any accident,’ I said scornfully. ‘You said yourself he used to sit on his mother’s lap even as a young man, just sitting there, lolling about.’

‘Well, it was charming at the time, and now he likes me to sit on his lap, which is charming too. But not in front of you, of course, since you are so disapproving of our lovemaking.’

That observation put an end to any further conversation on the subject as any mention of lovemaking in association with Andy was too much to bear.

East Grinstead was in an area of glorious walking country that included Ashdown Forest where we took the children on mellow afternoons, Peter in a pushchair while Louise and Simon ran ahead. If Andy came too he would drive us there and then sit in the car reading a book while we walked. Ros likes to tell the story about one of these walks when I was wheeling Peter in the pushchair, deep in conversation with Muz, while Ros and Spindle walked behind. Peter stood up in the chair, pointing to a bird he had spotted, trying to draw my attention to it, but lost his balance and fell out of the chair onto the path in front. ‘You never even noticed,’ Ros reminds me on those occasions when family misdeeds are being revisited. ‘You just ran him over with the empty pushchair and carried on completely oblivious, yakking away to Muz. When you eventually noticed, and stopped to pick him up, he didn’t even whimper or make any fuss at all, obviously used to that kind of negligence.’

It was just as well that none of us were soft-centred when we went to stay with Adam’s aunts at Howleigh and the children were introduced to their legendary beach picnics. These carried on all year regardless of weather, so that in winter we would be crouched on the shingle like survivors from a shipwreck, huddled together with wet dogs, lashed by an arctic wind. None of this deterred the aunts who rallied us with forced cheerfulness and sandy sandwiches that the dogs snatched from our hands. ‘Here, have a b-boiled egg instead, the d-dogs don’t like those,’ Aunt Diana would stammer through frozen lips. ‘It’s slightly b-bracing today.’

Back at their house, keeping warm offered a different set of problems in the absence of central heating or provision for such unaccustomed requirements as drying nappies. ‘Granny mustn’t catch sight of them,’ the aunts warned me, ‘so you’ll have to hang them on the rail above the Aga after she’s gone to bed.’ Granny had never been exposed to the sight of a nappy. There had always been nannies and nursemaids to deal with such things for her own children and she would find it offensive to observe, even accidentally, any such article on display now at this stage of her life. Regardless of these and other eccentric prohibitions, we all loved being at Howleigh where the aunts fondly prepared such a varied programme of events for us that it was impossible to be bored or unhappy.

On other visits, in summer it would be long hot days at the county show or village fetes, in between picnics in meadows where we lounged on tartan rugs, buzzed by wasps. Evenings were spent in a twitter playing cards or getting out the sherry glasses for neighbours coming round; the glasses sticky with lip and finger marks from the previous time used, with only a dip-wash afterwards by the aunts before being put away ready for the next round. Howleigh’s tiny scullery did not allow for hygienic washing up in a stone sink at knee-height designed for dainty Victorian kitchen maids, and now visited as briefly as possible by the aunts.

‘We can’t seem to get village girls to come up the hill and oblige any more,’ Granny complained, unable to comprehend that those village girls who used to slave in the kitchen for a pittance were long gone. Somerset village girls now went to university or took the bus to Taunton where they worked in smart offices or shops, while Howleigh stayed mothballed in a time-zone where innovations such as a washing machine or electric kettle were thought by Granny to be dangerously modern.

Muz however had a marvellous invention called a twin-tub that was wheeled out on washdays when hoses were attached to the sink to provide a water supply and draining outlet. One tub did the washing while the other was a spin dryer, working together in a combined operation that I found captivating despite the close supervision required. There was a tendency for the machine to lose control at maximum revs when the wash-tub went into rock-and-roll mode, slopping soapy water onto the linoleum floor, while the spin-tub tottered and lurched to a roar of increasing vibrations. At this point there would be a shout from Louise in the sitting room next door where she and the others were watching Magic Roundabout on TV: ‘We can’t hear anything, Mummy. You’re making too much noise.’

We were settling into a contented routine at Forest Lodge and I wanted to enjoy it for as long as possible but the children were starting to ask: ‘When are we going home? When are we going to see Daddy?’, making it clear they were missing him. The time away was having a different effect on me as the energising environment of southern England began to evoke a sense of belonging and continuity. In the early mornings I opened my bedroom window as wide as it would go and leaned out to take big breaths of air that were stingingly fresh and cool, making me feel supremely alive. The break from Africa was giving me a sense of renewal, re-connecting with Englishness and the reassurance of a shared history and heritage that I had not fully comprehended or appreciated before. I didn’t want the children to be unaware of this identity themselves, and was conscious of an increasing unease about the situation in Rhodesia as the children imbibed the spirit of Ian Smith and all that he stood for. Adam went along with the ideology for the sake of good relations with others we had to live with, and his vision of our future was whole-heartedly Rhodesian. Whatever my own feelings, I had to go back there and make the future work for all of us.

I was standing at the open window one morning when Muz called me. ‘There’s a telegram for you.’ I thought it might be Adam asking about a return date. But it wasn’t. It was from Agadir in Morocco with just one sentence pasted on the paper form: